love your mama

hello friends,

i must confess i have let deadlines creep, and can not spend as much time with you this thursday night as i would like to.

if i had my way, i would bust out the bubbly and cozy up to all of you. knock back a few until that awkward silence blanketed the room; our eyes would meet, our hands would touch, and then i would ugly-cry about how much i adore my dear young mother.

but alas, i'll have to get a raincheck and instead leave you with a surrogate: writer mary h k choi penned a fucking awesome piece about her foreign mother and succinctly expressed the pangs of growing up with a mom who packed stinky food in your school lunch when you were 12, followed by the longing you feel at the age of 20-something, wishing she would fill your silent second-floor studio, 1200 miles away, with those same familiar smells of home.

I then did what any normal kid would do and yelled and yelled about how embarrassing it was to have her at school with me during lunch of all times. She presented me with a sack of cheeseburgers that I could give out to my friends. I refused the damp bag and screeched about how it was so cheap that she didn’t spring for bright red boxes with toys for them as well. I made her take the burgers back with her. If I were an actress and had to think of something sad to make me cry in a scene, I would think about this moment. 

... She said that when I was four, I stole hundreds of dollars from her and bribed my bus driver to drop me off last and to make a pitstop at the deli so I could buy candy on my way home. I’d stuffed the change in my shallow pinafore pockets and when my mother frantically berated me for stealing the money and trying to get myself kidnapped, I told her I loved money more than I loved her. These days I don’t love money how I used to. My mom though, I’m crazy about.  

read it here and tell me what terrible things your mother did when you were a child, and what you wish she would still do for you now (laundry, hugs, take me to taco bell, brush my hair, and tell me not to go out past 8 pm because i'll get pregnant come to mind).

see you next thursday,
-m

p.s. the writer is from texas.