Miyasan’s Daughter

She died that night.

I was angry with her for years. But since then, I’ve been humbled by my own mistakes, by the things I have done that I now realize made my children feel unloved, neglected, perhaps unwanted at times, and I know – I know without a doubt how much I loved them, always, and how much they meant to me.

And I believe my mother loved me, too. This isn’t wishful thinking. It’s remembering all the things that she did lovingly, that I was too mad to remember before. It’s reclaiming what rightfully belongs to me, now.

It was she who would carve time out for herself in the dead of the night to paint. It’s this image of seeing her hunched over the kitchen table painting her beautiful Asian women that is the seed for my creative inspiration. It was she who cleaned other people’s houses, to save money and buy our first and second piano. It was she who taught me how to read notes, and who let me play for hours, never complaining or telling me to stop that noise.

And now when I perform, I often wear her beautiful lace or silk kimono-like wraps and throw-overs that she sewed for me by hand, because she knew, someday, I would need them, when I “made it”.

Everything was stacked against us to ever be close. And in life, we never really were. Cultural wounds, family wounds, dynamics that arise out of abuse, sexual, emotional and psychological stood in the way.

But some things are so strong, that they persist in making themselves known, even when life passes. One of them is the bond of mother and daughter. I don’t care that ours was imperfect or even down right warped at times.

This bond, what we shared, not only as mother and daughter but as women, is mine, and somehow through letting myself claim that, I am made stronger.

My mother and I had an ambivalent relationship. She had always stated she wanted her children to be close to their father, as she had never been. I believe her. But she had no concept of boundaries, no idea what a healthy relationship was. And the child in her was so needy she could not help but see me, and often treat me, as competition.

I don’t remember her being outwardly mean to me growing up. She “just” chose my sister over me. Just what this favoritism meant and how deep it was rooted in resentment did not fully reveal itself until we started dealing with the incest.

One time, I remember telling my mom what was surfacing up for me, a memory concerning my uncle and father. As I spoke, I got a sudden rush of nausea and went to the sink to throw up. As the realization of what happened to her daughters sunk in, my mother said, her voice full of emotion, “Oh, poor Vernice.” That was my sister.

When she saw the look on my face, she said, “Oh, you too.”

Another time, my mother stated, “Well, at least you had him.”

She wasn’t a monster, though at times, she could act like one. I’m not making excuses for her. It’s just that as I get older, I am becoming more understanding and more compassionate towards the great burden she carried within her soul, the stone she wore around her neck and with much fewer resources or opportunities to heal from them, as we have today.

My mom died angry at me. She died when I was pregnant with my third child. In a discussion, I had let her down…again. I could tell she felt betrayed. She got “that look” on her face. Laying in bed in the nursing home, she turned her back to me before I left. I can still see the side of her face; that pained, upturned look that said she probably wouldn’t speak to me for a few days.

During this time, I walked my own healing path. I had contact with Mom. I took care of her. I always felt it was my responsibility.

I knew how much my mother had given up to marry my father – she made sure she told me – her career as a model, the country she grew up in, the freedom to communicate in her native language, the ability to take care of herself and her son.

In Japan, her son was treated like gold. He was a boy, cherished and honored. He was smart and had many possibilities before him. When he came to the U.S., he was a “Jap”, despised and greeted with bigotry, especially my father’s family. When my mother was in the hospital giving birth to me, my father’s younger adolescent siblings tortured him.

My mother never told me this in an accusatory tone of voice. She just would list a litany of misfortune that happened ever since she married my father – which, presumably, was because of me, even though now I realize that was the excuse, not the reason. Even though I didn’t learn about the threatened abortion part, until I was a teenager, I still always felt like somehow it was my fault, that my arrival, my very existence had brought suffering. Somehow I needed to do something that would make me worth it; that would somehow justify the suffering, the loss and sacrifice.

So I took care of mom. Partly because of that, and partly because I just loved her and felt her vulnerability and need…but I also, resented her, because she was a weight no child should ever have to carry.

I was an accident – at least on my father’s part. I’m not so sure on my mother’s. She wanted him more than anything. My father was in the Navy and was getting transferred back to the United States.

My mother told me I was “this close” to getting aborted. The last time they were to be together, she informed him she was pregnant and intended to get an abortion, because, as she said, my father was Catholic and she wanted him to feel bad.

He married her.

He adored me. I was Daddy’s girl. He was a pedophile. I saw a picture of my mother’s stepfather. He looked amazingly a lot like my dad.

Things were really twisted in my family. There were three siblings, my younger sister and I, and an older brother, who had a Chinese father from my mother’s previous marriage.

My father played us against one another, and of course, no one spoke of things we couldn’t even acknowledge. It wasn’t until I was thirty-one, and my sister, twenty-seven, that the two of us started to tell ourselves the truth.

My sister was so overwhelmed by her memories that she chose to cut off all contact with her biological family for a number of years. I just kept plugging along, doing my spiritual studies, taking greater and greater care of my mother, while negotiating a failing marriage and facing the reality of being a single mother of two very young children.

My mother was born in China in 1926, where she spent the first two years of her life, before she was sold to a Japanese couple. They took her to Japan, where she was raised.

My mother suffered considerable abuse from her stepfather. Her first stepmother provided a sort of buffer, but when she died, her stepfather remarried. The second wife instigated her husband to beat my mother more severely and frequently.

Mom said she had two older brothers in China. She remembered them and a Chinese mother who never hugged her or held her close. She often told me the story of her first stepmother coming to take her, the exchange of a gold coin and the strange streets she memorized, as she left the familiar ones she and her brothers played in.

Somehow she managed to get away. Running back to her mom, expecting to be embraced with joyous relief, she was greeted with shock from her mother, and then the stone cold words to the woman, who came to retrieve her, “Close the door. She will follow.”

She remembered the sound of the closing door…and the balcony, the balcony she stood on, looking out into the sunset over the Yangtze River, waiting for her brothers, especially her oldest one, to rescue her. He never came. Though she traveled thousands of miles from China to Japan and eventually to the United States, a part of her never left, never stopped waiting. And like before, the one who was supposed to rescue her never came or appeared in any of the other men she looked for him.