(Originally posted in May 2016.)
I must have been about six years old when I had this nightmare: My mother was leaving us, going “back East,” and we were going to see her off. Perhaps we were at the airport. She was dressed for traveling, wearing a hat, and we had her suitcases.
To this day, I don’t know where that dream came from. I just remember the awful feeling of desolation it left inside me. In reality, my father often went away on business, and I recall real scenes at the airport where we went screaming down the walkway after him, heartbroken by his leaving. (This was the reason why he would later sneak out of the house early in the morning before we woke up, when leaving on a business trip.) But my mother was always there.
We probably took her for granted as children. Meals were always ready, laundry always done. I never arrived home to find her gone. Perhaps I only appreciated her through contrast with others: mothers who constantly found fault with their daughters and compared them to their friends; mothers who never baked brownies or attended PTA meetings, perhaps because they didn’t speak English or cook “American” food. Mothers who pushed their kids to be something they had neither the desire nor the talent to be. Absent mothers.
As the years went by and we grew up and left home, friends would be shaken by a mother’s remarriage, or other manifestations of sudden independence. Childhood rooms would be remodeled, possessions given away, history erased. I always had a room to go back to; a desk with journals and stories from elementary through high school days. Old letters. Cherished stuffed animals brought back by my father from business trips to Japan.
Once when I visited while on a business trip from Japan, I was busy and only stayed a week. “You haven’t even had time to look through your desk,” my mother said. I was touched, not only because she had noticed and seemed to understand this need I had to maintain a connection with past selves, but because the desk drawers were still there, their contents, precious only to me, preserved by my mother’s watchful eye. My mother, whose mementos of her own childhood had been swept away by the internment, preserved ours so that we would always have a place to come back to. We would always know who we were.
Images: “Tower in the mist“ by John Loo. Licensed under cc by 2.0. “The desk.” © R. A. Sasaki. All rights reser
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