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.
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