when sheila heti said maybe motherhood means honoring one's mother
...i wasn't sure about that (plus my favorite vegetable soup recipe. yes, it's boring but yes, it's very comforting)
my mom worries about me more than she should.
i don’t really blame her. i’ve always been the child that was always doing too much or doing too little. i’m her eldest but she views me as her younger child in a lot of ways and that is my own doing. sometimes i want to scream in a childish fervor that i am an adult! i am in my thirties! let me go! but then, i wonder who is capable of caring about me in the way my mom does? selfishly, who will care about me as much in a way that feels cloying, suffocating, reassuring and maternal? selfishly, who will be worried about every ailment i carry in my body? selfishly, who will be there to carefully watch what steps i take to make sure she can be there for when i inevitably stumble and fall? selfishly, who will be there to pick up my pieces and painstakingly try to piece them back together one by one when i am fucking shattered into a billion pieces? selfishly, who else is there to prove wrong or worse, right? selfishly, who else would be there in all their unadulterated fury, disappointment, fear and love?
viv texted me a photo of us that she got developed on her disposable camera. it’s a close up of our faces, the flash of the camera making our faces pale and smooth. i’m holding my american spirit, plumes of smoke swirling around my face while viv is holding her mango ripple. she texted me the photo and said:
these are sooooooooo my mom’s bad girl days
there is another photo she sends me. we’re in burbank airport. i’m wearing the knee length faded chocolate brown sauna shorts i stole from the korean sauna two days before and i’m wearing my jellybean henrik vibskov socks with my yellow tigers and i’m slouched in the plastic airport seat with my phone plugged into the wall charger. my hair is lifeless and oily from the smog and heat. my make up is a shade too light after spending three days in la, patchy and smeared. i look like i had just gone through something that i did not particularly care to go through. i look bad. thirty minutes earlier, we were crying over our dan dan noodles at pine and crane because the melancholy we were suddenly flooded with had nowhere else to go. i felt anxious. i had a crush. i was tired. life in la isn’t real. it was time to go back to real life and something about that always feels a little heartbreaking.