How to die before your love does

“I grew up breathing the love of my mom, a love so tacit and sobering that to me, it was almost completely transparent. She never ran after and begged me not to touch the knife like others; she let me play with it, let me cut myself, and let the penetrating pain attest to her earnest warning. She never immediately responded to my shouting her name when I was lost in the mall; she let the rising fear (that quickly overflowed the eyes) teach me that I should have stayed beside her like she said. My mom – she let things happen.

Thus every time I felt like being on the childish verge of rushing to her arms, the ground would crack open a valley of doubt between us.  Only later could I decipher the muffled and bewildered voice gripping my heart back then – “Why, mom? Why?” – so I screamed, voicelessly, as if all the sound would fall right through the separating chasm.”

Now I know why – or so the rest of this essay used to go. This whole thing was meant to be an application essay, to be the freak show in which you distort your feelings, put a clown mask on your experiences, and pull out of the magic hat a self you don’t even know. All for the sake of being liked. My role in the freak show this time is that of a son, who, after all the years, realizes that the tough love is to allow him the freedom to make mistakes, that it prepares him for the unloving world, that he loves his mom so much – and a bunch of other bland, half-assed, popular philosophy of life.

No, I did not need to realize anything to always love my mom (and always not do so adequately.) Love that needs reason is a love conditional, hence a love that is destined to perish under certain circumstances. From the grossly, bluntly material reasons (like my parents are rich or my girlfriend pretty), to the more subtly spiritual ones (he understands me, she makes me smile), they are reasons after all, those that tempt you to abandon your current eternal love for someone else that either give you more cash or light up more smiles. I, honestly, cannot see the difference.

I can almost see your eyebrows frown and hear your voice protest: “No – what a gross comparison – a person that gives me money and one that makes me happy? The latter so much rarer, so much more precious – how dare you?” Yes, yes, the latter is so much rarer; yet that only guards you against the probability, not the possibility, of finding a love truer than your true love. (Your stomach should squash now.)

Some told me that is okay for them. That they can be happy with someone for the present all the while acknowledging that he or she may be gone any instant. Go grab a friend, then, people – why bother talking about love.

Because the love that cannot die is the love that does not need a reason to live. The love that cannot be overturned is a love built on uniqueness and exclusivity – for you can always be richer, prettier, more understanding, more tactful, more sophisticated, more of anything – but how can anything be more unique and exclusive? Just as I love my mom for she is my mom, and not because she has taught me more or less than other parents to their child. Those calculated feelings are strictly for essays.

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This entry was conceived when I realized that this blog has never been too personal – most of it would fall more comfortably under the social critic category, unlike my former blog, as my longtime readers would notice.  In fact, “realize” is a wrong word,  for I have been staying detached with full awareness and absolute deliberation.

The reason why this blog does not get personal, you ask? – Well, it’s too personal to disclose.

Mom, what do you know about love?

Somewhere along my forage throughout the house for some casual, non-academic readings that have been denied my time for the whole school year, I saw “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” lying on a bedroom table. I realized that it is my mom’s, but the momentary confusion and incredulity lingered: really? Mom reads this? Really?

It turns out that she does. It also turns out that I was troubled for a good reason. For years, my parents were, well, Parents, and I their Child, with an invisible but well-understood and -respected line in between. Each had his own world, with his own reigning concern and mode of thinking. And suddenly, today, I found my mom and I being both interested in one same book, and out of all possible things, a book on relationships!

Seems like my world has been inching closely toward my parents’ all along. The shock that hit me came out of the realization of a eluding obvious.

This revelation jolted me backward in time, into a dinner conversation with mom when I was in 11th grade. For some reasons she started talking about relationships, advising me (or, in hindsight, just sharing, perhaps?) that the one we love most is not often the one that stays. Overtly I responded with silence. But inside I was annoyed by my mom’s presumptuousness in telling me about what to do in relationships. I was mentally smirking:

– Mom, what do you know about love? Geez.

That’s how the 16-year-old me, who had had but a few love poems and occasional sleepless nights, judged a woman that had been nurturing a family for years!

I now know that happened because at the time I was adamantly convinced that mom and I lived in parallel universes, and that because I know so much about love (sarcasm intended), she must know nothing. Deep inside I was haughtily dismissing her talk as nonsense. But I did so, because deeper inside, I was insecurely shuddering at the fact that her world and mine were to become uncomfortably close.

Today, after so many adolescent frolics and self-absorption (which I admittedly cannot totally disclaim just yet), the two worlds have become closer. And, well, somewhat more comfortably so.

– Mom, what do you know about love?
Excuse my redundancy, but really, the great irony just never fails to amaze me.