Link to initial Human Cow entry
You know how new mothers are. You read something about how to take care of the child and you follow it. You also end up with too many rules!!Don’t drink coffee or tea as it might pass through the milk and the child wont sleep. You know, I didn’t drink coffee or tea and he didn’t sleep or stay awake when I wanted him to, so I am taking that cup of tea because that makes mommy sane enough to deal with the not sleeping and not waking.
Don’t eat cabbage or other gassy vegetable coz it would give the child gas. I didn’t and he still grunted and groan as if he was a trying to lay an ostrich egg or grandpa trying to bomb Tokyo.( Son, this is what grandpa would say when he was going to use the facilities, perform his morning ambulation, doing #2..you get the picture) So I am eating that stew because it can be cooked in the croak pot and is a complete meal in a bowl!!
I want to give you the courage to pursue your dreams
I want to be brave enough to let you make your own mistakes.
I want to be supportive and positive in all your endeavors.
I want to be able to let, as many people love you as possible**
I want to be that voice inside your head that say you can do it & go for it.
I want you to one day ask yourself “what would mum do in a situation like this”:
I want you to always be able to come to me.
I want you to say "Mommy did that, I can do this" when faced with challenges.
These “ I wants” were written in the first few days of his life, as I sat alone in the room with him, tired and taking in all that had happened. I wanted it written down because I know, like many promises we make in life, sometimes we forget them. I slip up on promises sometimes(oh come on! Don’t tell me you never did!) Especially those made to myself.
Now, here it is son, you can one day remind me about these when I slip up.
Hands in prayer I didn’t think I would face this question till maybe sonny boy was starting to believe that there was no Santa. Here I am with it. My husband wants to take our son to the temple this weekend. I am a Christian and my husband is a. …Buddhist? Taoist?
I had thanked Jesus for my child and presented him to Christ in a prayer. I had planned to read him children’s bible stories. It is not that my husband and I didn’t discuss religion; we had kind of agreed that he had to find his own way after being exposed and making and educated decision. However, my husband’s decision to take him to the “Temple” provoked a sense of possessiveness in me that yelled “ NOOO! He belongs to Christ!!”
See how easy it is to face promises we make and be so tempted to break them!
I was taken to Church as a child by my sister and it kinda stuck. My mother is a free thinker and my dad….ahh my dad….
“ Son, Grandpa could recite passages from the bible better then I could and he wasn’t a Christian. He read the Quran and other books…. there was the one with the guy with the third eye…whoever that was…Grandpa bought me my Children’s bible…..
I pray that Christ will come into your heart and that you will ask that he come dwell in yours but I will not force it no matter how I would want to. Faith will come to you and you must freely choose because ultimately our creator had made us with free will.”
I am strong for the love of Christ and I believe a very much happier person. Much about the rule of Christianity demand that I should have married a Christian(I didn't) and that I should bring my son up as one. This is a tough one for a mother but I still believe that faith is a choice made with a free will.
Ok...what is an appropriate baby outfit for a visit to a temple?
One experience I shared with my dad is his “word of the day” thing. Almost everyday, (“ almost” because grandpa was intense but not exactly disciplined.), he would make a conversational statement with a hard word and then ask if I knew what it meant and if I didn’t he would either tell me or off to the dictionary I go. I remember one such statement clearly. “Life is ephemeral”. “Ephemeral” meaning brief… evanescent… fleeting….
So lately when reading books out loud to my newborn son and I find myself concern with the true meaning of words. Come on! Admit it, you have read book and come across words which mean was either foggy to you or you just took a leap of understanding.
It’s a discipline I must cultivate back, I guess.
So the word of last night’s book is “ exsanguination” Go try use that in a game of scrabble why don’t you!
By the way, “exsanguination” means to drain of blood; make bloodless. I have to stop reading murder mysteries to my son. Where is that copy of Winds of the Willow?
Anyway, about my dad, my son’s grandpa… I love that man. I refer to him in the present tense ( I did say I haven’t dealt with it right?) I hear his voice in my head. I tell stories about what he did and his trickster’s ways. All my sister’s children got “grandpa time”. They have a memory of him and secretly think they are his special grandchild.That was grandpa's way. My son has nothing. I feel this great loss for him. I moved to the states and couldn’t take much with me of my father. I took with me his Robinson Crusoe ( his won this as a prize for English) and his Shakespeare Collective works. I took the keys to his old Mercedes.No, I did not do it in spite so that no one could drive it. He had sold it years ago. I do not know why the keys are still with us. I took with me the old brass keys to doors in the house he bought, renovated, cluttered, planted into a secondary forest and renovated again and in which I grew up and lived for more then 30 years of my life.
My Son…
Grandpa is a character …err was a character ( there I go again). I want you to get to know him and use his stories in your journey in life. Not just what he did that was inspiring, but his mistakes as well but most of all his humor and his interest in life of which there were many. Grandpa had "flavour of the month" and often they were consuming passions. He didn’t just have a interest in birds when he was interest in birds he had 38 birds of all manner and exoticness.( guess who had to clean and feed the birds??) He didn’t have a fish bowl or an aquarium when he was interested in fish but turned our house into an almost moat with three 30 feet long pools...not counting those we started of with to begin with( and friends who have visited can attest to this).He and grandma once decided to dis-invite -your mother to a trip to a nursery because she would take up “plant space” in the car. ( its does humble a person) He believed you could learn almost anything in a book and you will hear me say that repeated. He and grandma thought of me as the personal pack mule, doing their heavy lifting of pots of plants and other large objects. ( guess what mama's going to use you for son? Once you can stand up that is...)
So in the midst of me grieving at your loss of meeting him, your dad said that of course you would know grandpa because all you had to do was to know your mama. So son, guess what? Your dad has a pretty dashing and interesting character too, huh?
I am Hokkien and Cantonese –The focus of Hokkiens is on Money and Business and the Cantonese on culture and arts. Which would explain why a typical scene in my home would be my parents sitting on armchairs with my dad( the Hokkien) looking at stock exchange and reading business books while my mother was either sculpting with clay, beading or knitting, ( The Cantonese). This is also why in the renovation of our family home my mother designed a house dimensions and form and and once my father took over we ended up with a square house because it was the maximum utilization of space( Manifesting hokkieness). Imagine a house a child would draw. Rectangle body, Triangle roof, square door, square windows. And because the yellow bathtub was cheap and we had some blue tiles left over from a renovation job 15 years ago, we had a yellow bath tub put in by the cheapest plumber in a very very blue tiled bathroom.
In me it manifests as researching price, quality,availability, guarantees etc of an item to the point of paralysis only to then decide to make it myself or in me purchasing the item just because its green. Most of all it manifest in my inability to enjoy any form of art without wondering if I can make money from it. A great part of that is the guilt I feel from spending time doing it purely because it give me joy. You know how some people picture a good and evil the left and right shoulder, counsellings the conflicted soul in the middle? Mine is a Hokkienme to the right and a Cantoneseme to the left.
How do i reconcile this aspects of myself? I would say it is summed up in my love for food. I love Bah Kut Teh( A Hokkien favourite) for is strong taste and chunks of Fatty bony juice meat served often in unpretentious shops with pots with burnt bottom and tea pots that have not been washed since first use ( add to the flavour of the tea apparently. I am sure the shop boss is trying to pull a fast one) and I love Dim Sum( A Cantonese fare) for its delicate blend of delicate flavours and how the artisty and design of the food is as much part of it as its taste.
So I take this as my license to be conflicted. I do wonder however how it will be for my son who will have to contend with being Hakka, Hokkien-Cantonese, first generation Asian American and being my child.
My fear of blogging is two folds. Pictures and things once published “out there” can take on a life of its own or as bad, die an obscure and unread life!! It is however not my right to plaster my son’s picture all over the internet without consulting him when I don’t even like pictures taken of me!Or refer to him by name or something so personal that there is even a chance that it would thrill some sick perverted person out there for all the wrong reasons or fulfill the desires of some obsess fan when my son ( AND I SAY WHEN!! not "if".) is famous. I reached a compromise and decided to blog and use pictures that don’t completely reveal him or any member of our family. This actually appeals to me. Much like the seduction of a veil or being able to imply with subtlety and leave something to the imagination. A polite indirectness rather then “your face” bluntness...therefore BEHOLD!, you get the mystery butt to look at.Why this blog then? Because in my younger days I use to write thoughts on pieces of paper and diaries etc but I suck at organizing. ( yes, its means I am a mess.) I don’t know where any of those things are now! A lot of use that was! So this centralizes things. More importantly, as I go on this journey as a mother I kept saying, “ I wish someone told me that” or “ I wish I knew that earlier” and “ I hope I remember that” So, this is my attempt to share, in the hopes that someone else out there is relieved of a small bit of the anxiety that motherhood brings and and more importantly as ammunition for my son, whom I hope will one day read this and keep his mama in check….”.
