My mother didn't have much growing up. Like all immigrants back then, her dad wanted to come to America for a better life--whatever that meant. He was a craftsman, a skilled tailor with dreams of becoming a dress designer.
Even in his old age, he continues to hem all of my jeans and jacket sleeves. I say to my mom, "I can't believe how good Grandpa is at this," to which she replies, "Joanna, he's worked his whole life to be a master at what he does." She doesn't look at me when she says this. She looks to the side.
She does this a lot whenever she thinks about the past. I think she's trying to look back, but like most first-generation Korean children, she can't find anything there. Childhood was a luxury they couldn't afford. So instead, they look sideways, leaving an empty space where memories of bedtime stories, tag on the playground, popsicle-stained tongues, and family movie nights should be but aren't.
"It's sad that he never got to make dresses. I think he would have been really good at it," I say. I try to follow her gaze, but I can never see where she's looking.
He owned a dry cleaning store. It was one of many small businesses located in a tired, grimy strip mall in one of the armpit towns of New Jersey. My mom worked in the store during the summer months when she started middle school. Her older sister went to a college that was ten minutes away and came home every weekend to help out. Now that I think about it, that store was as much as hers and her sister's as it was my grandpa's.
"I didn't have many friends growing up, so I didn't mind working," my mom explained. "The only hard part was the heat. We had no AC, and the machines would release so much hot air that I couldn't breathe. I remember complaining about it to Grandpa once and he got so mad at me. I don't remember what he said, but he yelled at me so bad, and I never complained again." She lets out a small laugh when she tells me this. She can do that now. But I'm not laughing. Instead, I think about all the times I cried about not being able to get ice cream from McDonald's and all the times I complained the whole way down to our beach house in Wildwood because the car was too hot.
My mom came to the United States when she was six-years-old and picked up English quickly. She had no choice: someone had to know the language well enough to read through the mail, answer phone calls, and translate whenever my grandparents had comprehend more than "hello, how are you?" and "can I get these shirts pressed?" At fifteen years old, she was paying bills, speaking with people from PSEG, making deposits and withdrawals from the bank, and filing through important documents from the government.
One night, a few years ago, I remember screaming at her real bad. "I just feel like I've taken on so much responsibility. I feel like I had to grow up so fast."
"No. I had to grow up fast," she screamed back. Her voice was firm but cracked with bitter resentment and tempered sadness. She stared at me for a while until I realized she wasn't looking at me but into her own eyes in the reflection of mine--not looking sideways but back. For the first time in my life, she had taken off the hardened exterior of motherhood right in front of me, revealing the tired, lonely, and sad little girl that never left her.
These days, I find myself wanting to protect that little girl. I sit through the stories she forgets she has already told me a million times before because I want her to feel like someone is listening. I quietly accept her tangential advice because I want her to feel like she's being helpful, even if it makes me feel worse in the end. I stay out of trouble because I don't want her to feel burdened by my mistakes. I try to make her proud so that she can feel like she did a good job raising me--so she can feel like she's a good mother.
It didn't seem right at first. But the way I see it, my mom is just a child who grew up to be a woman, who married and became a wife, who then bore children and became a mother. She will always carry the shadow of that bruised little girl, bent by her experiences. And perhaps that alone is enough to convince me that the gap between our relationship as mother and child isn't so wide after all.
