Recollections
Posted: 05 Oct 2012, 16:01
Maya Cui
Maya Cui, on her good days, was a vibrant woman with a great penchant for artful cussing and an even greater penchant for younger men. They came to her in droves; her expertise as a surfing instructor wasn’t the only thing that made her popular.
People ask me about it all the time, and I always tell them that I never resented it—my mother’s promiscuity. I think some part of me, even as a young girl, admired her freeness, her “liberation”.
That’s what they call “loose women” over there, in the Philippines: Liberated. It’s a ridiculous euphemism for “slut”; a “liberated woman”. “Liberated” means something “bad”, which should tell you about the state of feminism over there.
You’ll have to excuse the overuse of inverted commas. My early adolescence was full of them.
Though I idolized her, my mother and I never really got along. We argued when we talked. Our temperaments were too different. I was too ambitious for her. I read too much. I talked about the wrong things. I asked too many difficult questions. I fussed too often, about what she thought were the most inane things. We often misunderstood each other. Ingrid, my little sister, born four years after me, was our medium.
Ingrid was more my mother’s type. Ingrid, like our mother, moved around in bursts of boundless energy, ricocheting off the walls from activity to activity. She swam, she surfed, she browned like the boys our mother taught to surf or snorkel. Ingrid was made in the image of our mother.
But on her dark days, usually around monsoon season, my mother and I eased into a kind of complicit silence. I understood her silence, when Ingrid could not. I understood how her energy could invert itself like that; how it turned nervous instead of elated; how she could sit inert in a dimmed room for hours on end, doing nothing but smoking and staring into space. I didn’t have a word for it, and I didn’t know why I understood, but I did. We kept our distance as if we were strangers then, my mother and I, but when she surfaced from the depths of her bedroom (only when she needed to), we exchanged looks and in them said what we didn’t have the words to.
Much later, after Ingrid and I had both taken short courses in psychology, we would have a name for her cycles: seasonal bipolar disorder. The two of us would spend some evenings smoking—a sick habit we both inherited from our mother (though I hear Ingrid finally quit)—and point out the symptoms and signs. The way she would suddenly break into song or a little dance; the way she could never find her things; the way she could go for days, in the summer, with only four or five hours of sleep under her belt.
The binge eating, when what we called the “-ber” months rolled around (brrr). The way she sat there.
Ingrid and I never discussed, although I know that we were both thinking it, the possibility that her death wasn’t an accident at all. Maybe she meant to drown herself in that shallow pool. Maybe she knew that nobody would notice until it was too late, since we were all having too much of a good time doing karaoke. There are a lot of maybes, really, but they’re useless now. I could maybe all I want, and I could guess at the answers, but it wouldn’t make a difference.
The earliest memory I have of my mother, if I’m not imagining it, is of her on the deck of a ship, holding my hand. I see flashes of her blue skirt and of her dark hair in the wind like flags while she tries to keep her balance. It’s raining, and windy, and the waves I think are tossing the boat around like a rubber duck in the bath.
Another memory is of her telling me that the criss-cross of scars on her left wrist were from a window that crashed on her hand when she was trying to shoo a pigeon away. The pigeon, she said, was trying to pluck the seeds out of her garden.
My mother wasn’t a poet, but the pigeon and the garden were perfect (and accidental) metaphors for her illness. She worked hard for her happiness. She tilled the earth. She sowed the seeds. But something with wings came every monsoon season and, sobbing, plucked each one out.
Maya Cui, on her good days, was a vibrant woman with a great penchant for artful cussing and an even greater penchant for younger men. They came to her in droves; her expertise as a surfing instructor wasn’t the only thing that made her popular.
People ask me about it all the time, and I always tell them that I never resented it—my mother’s promiscuity. I think some part of me, even as a young girl, admired her freeness, her “liberation”.
That’s what they call “loose women” over there, in the Philippines: Liberated. It’s a ridiculous euphemism for “slut”; a “liberated woman”. “Liberated” means something “bad”, which should tell you about the state of feminism over there.
You’ll have to excuse the overuse of inverted commas. My early adolescence was full of them.
Though I idolized her, my mother and I never really got along. We argued when we talked. Our temperaments were too different. I was too ambitious for her. I read too much. I talked about the wrong things. I asked too many difficult questions. I fussed too often, about what she thought were the most inane things. We often misunderstood each other. Ingrid, my little sister, born four years after me, was our medium.
Ingrid was more my mother’s type. Ingrid, like our mother, moved around in bursts of boundless energy, ricocheting off the walls from activity to activity. She swam, she surfed, she browned like the boys our mother taught to surf or snorkel. Ingrid was made in the image of our mother.
But on her dark days, usually around monsoon season, my mother and I eased into a kind of complicit silence. I understood her silence, when Ingrid could not. I understood how her energy could invert itself like that; how it turned nervous instead of elated; how she could sit inert in a dimmed room for hours on end, doing nothing but smoking and staring into space. I didn’t have a word for it, and I didn’t know why I understood, but I did. We kept our distance as if we were strangers then, my mother and I, but when she surfaced from the depths of her bedroom (only when she needed to), we exchanged looks and in them said what we didn’t have the words to.
Much later, after Ingrid and I had both taken short courses in psychology, we would have a name for her cycles: seasonal bipolar disorder. The two of us would spend some evenings smoking—a sick habit we both inherited from our mother (though I hear Ingrid finally quit)—and point out the symptoms and signs. The way she would suddenly break into song or a little dance; the way she could never find her things; the way she could go for days, in the summer, with only four or five hours of sleep under her belt.
The binge eating, when what we called the “-ber” months rolled around (brrr). The way she sat there.
Ingrid and I never discussed, although I know that we were both thinking it, the possibility that her death wasn’t an accident at all. Maybe she meant to drown herself in that shallow pool. Maybe she knew that nobody would notice until it was too late, since we were all having too much of a good time doing karaoke. There are a lot of maybes, really, but they’re useless now. I could maybe all I want, and I could guess at the answers, but it wouldn’t make a difference.
The earliest memory I have of my mother, if I’m not imagining it, is of her on the deck of a ship, holding my hand. I see flashes of her blue skirt and of her dark hair in the wind like flags while she tries to keep her balance. It’s raining, and windy, and the waves I think are tossing the boat around like a rubber duck in the bath.
Another memory is of her telling me that the criss-cross of scars on her left wrist were from a window that crashed on her hand when she was trying to shoo a pigeon away. The pigeon, she said, was trying to pluck the seeds out of her garden.
My mother wasn’t a poet, but the pigeon and the garden were perfect (and accidental) metaphors for her illness. She worked hard for her happiness. She tilled the earth. She sowed the seeds. But something with wings came every monsoon season and, sobbing, plucked each one out.