Notes on my Fist-Fighting Mother, aka, A Difficult Woman

Mothers Day, 2020

It’s hard for me to write about my mother because how do I describe a difficult, demanding woman in polite terms? Here’s my diplomatic best: intense, insecure, impatient. When her contradictions collide, my mother’s temper explodes like the charged guts of a pipe bomb. When this happens, it’s best to run for shelter and stay away for a while. The dust settles very slowly. 

My mother looks for slights, and starts fist-fights. It’s especially frustrating on this day, because the popular narrative is to celebrate mothers along the Hallmark lexicon. But my mother is not a Hallmark person and we do not have a Hallmark relationship: all saccharine and sentimental, bounded with pink ribbons and bows. And since we don’t have that sort of relationship, I don’t have the language to write warmly about my mother. Even as I write this, I stumble and scrape sentences together, I can’t get the tone right. The mood is off. It’s easier to write about my father. He has a  gentler, easier, softer personality. I can easily conflate his virtues, and forgive his shortcomings--and my father has many shortcomings, he is a son of patriarchy, after all. It’s just easier to write about nice people. And it’s not like I haven’t tried--numerous times--to write about my mother for Mother’s Day, if only because the expected narrative says good and proper daughters are beholden to their mothers, especially if their mothers are brown and immigrant. 

Harder still to write about is our fights. We fight, my mother and I. Not all the time, but most of the time. Our relationship is defined by our bitter, bitter fights: cautious at its best, savage at its worst. We’ve gone years not talking to each other, except for the obligatory birthday and holiday greetings--and even then the exchange is tense, discreet:

Me: Happy Mother’s Day.

Mother: Thank you. 

(pause)

Mother: So. What’s new?

Me: Nothing. I said what I had to say. Bye.

There’s no such thing as a simple, civil, disagreement, or a handshake agreeing to disagree between my mother and I. It’s always a furious, gloves-off, bare knuckle, roosters-with-razor-blades kind of fight. A we-don’t-even-bother-to-take-off-our-hoop-earrings kind of fight. She screams, I scream back. She swears at me, I swear back. “Like twins,” my father said to my brothers, bug-eyed and disturbed by our brawl. “They’re like twins fighting each other,” he whispered, edging himself and my brothers out of the kitchen. Every battle is royale, with my mother always the victor--even though I maintain she’s wrong half of the time. My mother and I can’t help it. She fought with her mother this way, she fights with her sisters this way. It’s tradition. Over the last few years, we’ve come to the conclusion that we should keep our distance, she on one side of the country, me on the other. Correction: I find it’s best to keep our distance. My mother doesn’t understand boundaries.

My mother can make rocks pee is what I often say whenever people ask what my mother is like. They chuckle, I smile. It’s a weird, but appropriate summation of my mother’s bionic determinism, boldness, and shamelessness. Like that time in mid-1970’s Montreal, when my mother, feeling fancy, entered Marks and Spencer, and was immediately spotted and followed by an overzealous and suspicious salesperson. From the shoe department to the handbags, from outerwear to the jewellery counter, the salesperson made it clear she was on to my mother. Finally at the lingerie department, my mother turned around and screamed, “I’M NOT STEALING YOUR UGLY PANTIES! STOP FOLLOWING ME!” Or that time in the early 1990’s while back to school shopping at our local Zellers, my mother didn’t hesitate to yell at the white, plain clothes security guard who’d followed us around the departement store from the moment we walked in: my mother, me, and my then-baby brother, farting and drooling in the shopping cart. Or, last summer, when a white woman refused to apologize after almost running over my mother in a supermarket parking lot, my 69-year old mother screamed “racist!” and demanded the white woman apologize to her NOW. People turned to look at the white woman quickly running red-faced into the supermarket, and turned to stare at my mother, jaw clenched, raised fists, with eyes of a rooster, ready to strike. Yes, my mother is that type of woman. 

The type of woman who, although the second youngest of six children, was the first in her family to successfully enter and graduate college. The first in her family to leave home. The type of woman who, at 21 years old, flew 7000 miles to Germany to begin her long, and at times, embattled nursing career. I look through pictures of my mother’s European period, the era where she developed her workaholism, the era where she learned to mince her pay cheque four ways: money to send to her family in the Philippines (she was helping to pay for her all of siblings’ education); money for rent and expenses; a bit for savings, and lesser still for a vacation. After a while she saves enough money to holiday all over Germany, Austria, Belgium, Switzerland, England. She befriends other Filipino nurses, has picnics on sunny days, and takes German language classes in the evenings. She dreams of making Switzerland her forever home. She and her nurse friends party at the disco, and shop for the latest European fashion. My mother is young, popular, and happy. Life is grand. Life is peachy.

Two years ago, while visiting Vancouver, my mother was interviewed by yet another nervous PhD student whose dissertation was (again) on foreign trained nurses. As I was leaving the apartment, I heard my mother say, “When I first arrived in Germany, I was scared.” 

I stop. I eavesdrop. 

“I didn’t know anyone, I didn’t know German,” my mother said in a small voice. 

“If I needed help, I didn’t know where to go. I was really scared.”

***

May 2001

I sit super straight in my seat. My hands are hot and they begin to sweat and shake a little, so I fold them tightly over my lap. My runaway heart punches through my chest cavity, the loud thuds ring into my ear and I have to concentrate overtime on what is being read onstage. Soon, I hear clapping. I clap as well, the swishing air between my fingers cool my palms. 

I squint as the hot, bright rays of the spotlight blind me for a second, obstructing my view. When my eyes adjust, I look over at stage right, at my new boyfriend smiling and giving me a thumbs up. The MC introduces me, bungles up my last name, and fumbles through my slim bio. As I stabilize myself at the podium I look up, fourth row, centre. I grip onto the edge of the podium and start reading. My grip tightens. It’s the only way I can steady my voice. Every few seconds I look up, fourth row centre. At the end of my reading, I loosen my hands off the podium and exhale. I can now feel the sweat along my hairline and upper lip. Had I been sweating the entire time? As the audience claps, I look up again at the fourth row, at the centre seats. I see my father, standing up, clapping. My mother is at his left, she doesn’t clap. She stays in her seat, slouching. I squint harder and I see my mother wiping her face, first with the palm of her hand, and then quickly with the back of her hand.   

In the theatre lobby, as the audience and the readers mingle, my father smiles excitedly, gives me a bear hug, and kisses the top of my head. I look over at my mom, her soft puffy eyes darting from me, at the ceiling, and back to me. I ask if she likes the poem. 

My mother blinks a few times, and says nothing. Finally she says, it’s good. 

And, it’s nice.

(pause)

And, Thank you.

Slowly, we hug in our usual cautious, suspicious way, always weary of each other, always uncertain. Except this time, we don’t pull away so quickly. Not yet. This time, stay still for just a few seconds longer.