In the last couple of weeks, I’ve had a few strangers notice my wedding ring and tell me that I look too young to be married -- and, as I add silently in my head as a likely corollary, too young to have had a child, and lost her.
I am 30. I realize in retrospect that through my twenties and even into my pregnancy, I generally self-identified as a girl. And I guess I don’t look much older -- I haven’t sprouted many new grays, or carved any new wrinkles. But since Mila’s death and birth, I feel much older, and I self-identify, without question, as a woman. To hear anyone tell me I look too young for
anything feels strangely belittling.
I feel that identity, Woman, and all the baggage that comes with it, much more keenly that I ever did before. Although I always believed in gender equality, so-called “women’s” issues always felt a bit distant from my own experience, and only marginally relevant to me personally. But last weekend, I listened to
Anne-Marie Slaughter’s commencement address at my sister’s graduation -- an event that D and I had long envisioned attending with Mila in tow, as a smiley four- or five-month old -- and it felt so viscerally relevant that I teared up.
The experience of carrying her, losing her, and birthing her is doing more than any other single thing has ever done to force me to grow up. Although I would never wish this experience on myself or anyone else, I do think it’s sparked some positive changes in me. I know myself a little better, what I can weather and what is and isn’t important to me; I try to be more empathetic with other people; I feel less afraid to tell difficult truths; I respect my own body more; I love my loved ones more.
But positively or not, I am changed, and I don’t feel apologetic about it. While that seems to have deepened some of my relationships, it seems to have made others more difficult -- especially, I sense, with my parents. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, and really struggling with it.
Part of it is our transition from being parent and child, to being parent and adult child. I’ve passed through many milestones of adulthood in the last ten years: college graduation, becoming financially independent, moving out of the house, moving in with a boyfriend (
prior to engagement or marriage -
that was some drama), getting married, and having my own child. And of course, D and I have lost our baby, a nightmare scenario that even our most well-adjusted peers struggle to fathom. For my parents, this means there is now something hard and dark in life that I have seen more of than they have. The older I get, both physically and emotionally, the more I feel my parents' confusion (trepidation?) about how to relate to me in this stage of life.
I think a lot of it is cultural, too. As isolating and marginalizing grief in general and stillbirth in particular are in American culture, it is even more so in immigrant Asian-American culture. My parents both grew up in Thailand, lived with their parents until they were married at 29, had me at 30, and moved to the United States on a whim of my grandmother’s when they were 31.
They were taught to value the family unit, education, and respect for authority. They were also taught that showing or acknowledging emotion (especially negative) is embarrassing, to save face, that children should heed their parents unquestioningly, and that providing care to others means meeting their physical needs above all, not so much their emotional needs.
Meanwhile, my sister and I are largely products of American culture. We’ve been encouraged to question, to be individuals, to be independent, and to express ourselves -- loudly. And in the aftermath of Mila’s death, as evidenced by this blog, I’ve embraced that even more.
While my parents have been shaped by their 30 years in the States, they are of course still products of Thai-Chinese culture. Shortly after Mila died, my mom advised me -- in the style of a good Asian parent -- not to think about it too much, to forget it, to “let her go”. She likened it to how she herself had had to let
me go when I moved out of the house. (There are a lot of disturbing ways I could unpack that analogy, but I tried to take it in the most positive light that I could.)
She is not alone in approaching it that way. My friend S, who also grew up in a Chinese-American household, told me she had planned to wish me a happy Mother’s Day this month, until her own mom emphatically warned her against it, and advised her
never to speak of the matter to me again. (It wasn’t until later that S reconsidered, and decided to wish me a belated happy Mother’s Day after all.)
My dad has still not acknowledged what happened, and my mom has stopped acknowledging it. Although I knew enough not to expect to hear anything about it from my mom on Mother’s Day, it was still hard. That day, it just felt like I was left with neither daughter nor mother to celebrate it. A blank, blank day.
Now that my sister has graduated college and is headed to Seattle to start her own adult life, it seems likely that my parents will want to return to Thailand for their retirement, and I have mixed feelings about it. On one hand, I suspect they will be much happier there than they have been in the States. My aunts, uncles, grandmothers, and cousins are there, and given that my parents don't have a network here, being near them will probably be more important for their well-being than sticking around here for me or my sister or their still-theoretical grandchildren.
On the other hand, I’m sad about it. It’s hard to maintain a real connection with someone on the other side of the world, with several time zones, a partial language barrier, and failing hearing in the way. And there is something unsettling about the thought that my entire life to date is some weird, unconsidered, temporary detour abroad in my parents’ lives before their return back to their original lives, leaving my sister and me metaphorically orphaned by culture, distance, and national borders. I wonder, when they picked up and left home at 31, if they ever thought of the long term ramifications of moving to a new country, raising two kids to adulthood there who would inevitably be a product of that society, and then leaving?
So. The passage of time on top of culture on top of tragedy all combine to create this very confusing dynamic. Sometimes I think my own mother doesn’t know what to do with me. Does she look at me and wonder how she produced this stranger? Does she see a smiling baby of her own body who sprouted up into a fully-formed, incomprehensible monster who tells her how to do things and doesn’t need her anymore? Is it inevitable that I too will someday feel the same way about my own kids?
And the ironic thing is, whether she understands this or not, I still do need her. Especially after Mila. I need her in a different way than I did when I was a kid or a teenager, but I still do. Don’t we all need or want our parents, just in evolving ways, all our lives?
