You know when your mother loves you when she is willing to fly to a country she has never been to to live with you to help you with your language skills. o.O And you know she really sacrifices for you when she’s willing to make time outside of a full-time job to help you translate things. Sometimes, it still amazes me how much my mom has and would give up for me.
It all started pretty much from birth. My dad had to leave for the US 6 months before I was born, so she bore the pregnancy herself. Then, 6 months after that, she had to leave to join my father in Pennsylvania. She and my father had to work as Research Assistants (and my dad was also a Teaching Assistant) to save up the money to bring me over three years later and support us from there.
From then on, she supported my dad in every move we made, from PA to Kansas to Missouri to New York to California to China again. Sometime in Kansas she decided that to provide the sort of flexibility in mobility that we would need, she would stop working and be a stay at home mom. That meant that growing up, I was rather spoiled with the ease of having my forgotten homework delivered to me during the day, being driven to all kinds of activities (mostly sports meets), and having my mother on call for all of my wants and needs.
Starting the day she started staying home, other than the years she went back to China working on a business she started with my dad, I never had to go home to an empty house. She’d wake up at 4 in the morning to drive me to swim practice, she’d sit around waiting in the car for me every day after school that I had to stay late (back before we had cell phones), she’d trek out to school in the middle of the day to drop off something I needed, and she even came back from China to live with me after I graduated UCLA to keep me company until I started working.
Throughout those years, she has also spent her time managing our finances, making sure we were saving up and investing wisely, laboring over the pains of day trading (thank goodness she gave that up), anticipating my dad and my own needs, finding a balance between giving me what I wanted and what I needed, always supporting my dad with what he needed, cooking, cleaning, and tirelessly devoting herself to being a great mother and an amazing woman. She did so much behind the scenes that I may never know about, but one of the things I learned a few years ago was that she always carefully planned trips to either be the whole family traveling together, or she and my dad splitting up. That way, it decreased the odds of both of them getting killed in an accident, leaving me an orphan.
Beyond that, she had great potential to be a highly successful engineer (and potentially, manager) in her own right, but she gave that up to be the cornerstone to her husband and daughter’s success. Even now she is extraordinarily gifted in that area and could be a great engineer for an aerospace company (which is her dream), but being out of the work force for so long has hindered her aspirations. She has never complained about what she has given up for us and happily shifted her life to fit our needs.
Now we are all in different countries, though she is based in Beijing with my dad, and she is willing to come to Singapore to stay with me! I was explaining to her how it seems that people here seem to assume that I know so much of the background for Chinese language and culture just because I have a very standard accent and sound quite like a native, but I essentially grew up American, so much of that knowledge is lost on me. I am concerned about my reading and writing skills in Mandarin that I may need to use for an upcoming project, so she suggested she come so she can be here with me and help me. Of course, she’s still got her own work to do, so that would be a lot of time out of her day to help me improve my Chinese.
To her it may seem like a small gesture, but to me it really speaks volumes for her deep commitment to me, my future, and my success. It really meant a lot to me. I’m learning to appreciate her more and more. A few years ago, I probably would have thought it was normal and nothing special. That’s just how much she has conditioned me to her support. So I hope she doesn’t feel under appreciated, because she isn’t.
