Ode to albatrosses

I like to think that I’m wiser than my years. I guess that sometimes I just feel like I’ve lived slightly more than most people of my years. It’s probably just vanity, but it leads to the question: what do we have to endure to say that we’ve lived life more than most?

Do you have to endure great hardship? Can a person who lost their child say that they have lived life more than someone who never lost anything? Or does it rely more on reaching the point where you can say that you are truly happy with your life, happy in your own skin? Is it none of these and based on how much a person has travelled, how many different jobs they have done and languages they speak? Is it just a matter of perception: if you believe you’ve lived life to as full as you could?

At Christmas my mother went missing. If you’ve followed my blog before this won’t come as a complete surprise. I’ve never spent a huge amount of time with her as she left the country when I was six and I hadn’t lived at home with her until I was five. However, as awful as abandoning your children may sound it was the kindest thing she could do for us as she suffers from schizophrenia and her and dad had very loud, and sometimes almost physical, fights literally every day they spent together. So causing quite an unpleasant atmosphere at home.

I forgave her everything years ago because of her illness so when she went missing I was very worried. In late January after numerous missing person’s ads, and phone calls around every hospital and morgue in the city she surfaced in a mental ward under a pseudonym. She had admitted herself under a different name and when queried stated that she was no longer my mom; she had undergone a transformation and was twenty eight years old and Latina rather than Chinese. According to her doctor while it was good for us to speak to her and that her fantasy would allow her to still recognise us as her daughters regardless of age discrepancies, we were not allowed to tell her that her fantasy was not real. We couldn’t call her crazy.

She’s still in hospital five months down the line and the doctors and nurses caring for her have only just started calling her by her real name. So far I have not managed to visit her as a cross-continental flight costs more than my student loan and supermarket wages allow for. Somehow, as much as my mother has been through, I don’t believe she’ll ever reach the point where she can say she’s lived life fully. Giving up seeing your three children grow up will be a lot to come to terms with if she ever gets through this. She seems slightly less insane every time I talk to her but she’s probably past the point where they can properly cure her, and way beyond the point where if she were cured she’d be able to find happiness.

Sometimes I feel sorry for myself. Growing up without a mother made me become a lot more mature earlier, a lot more neurotic generally, and made me search for a mate who was so stable he couldn’t even comprehend the meaning of the word dysfunctional. Mostly I feel sorry for her. I can find happiness, she has to create fantasies of billionaires falling in love with her and magically altering her to become younger and a different person to cope with her unhappiness.

One day I will be a better daughter. Going through all this has taught me that as awful a mother as she was; I’m a much worse daughter as I don’t have a psychological illness to blame it on. I know I will be a better mother than she was. But, I have hopes that even if she never becomes a better mother to me, with continued treatment she will one day become a decent grandmother and that my children will not hate me for letting her back into my life.

Labels: dynasty, Reflection

This year I never made any resolutions. It came to the right time and I just didn’t know what to say. Usually they seem so… predictable. I must lose three pounds, I will exercise regularly, I will be more considerate of those around me, I will dedicate myself to my career. And how many people stick to them?

I once rejected a boy for the sole reason that he would never go anywhere. He loved his “home comforts,” his job which kept him as close to the nest as possible, I just couldn’t be with someone who never wanted to do anything. A little while earlier, that sweet but hopeless boy not even an issue, I made a resolution.

“[I will] Fall in love. Not just lust or like. Actual love. Somehow I think this one may take longer than a year to be fulfilled.”

It took me five or six months, but I fell in love. He was… I don’t know, just someone there at the right time maybe, or perhaps he was right for me. He was what I thought I wanted but almost exactly opposite to what I needed. He was unsupportive, antagonistic, and made me feel like I was somehow less than I actually was. It ended, as always, badly.

That boy who I rejected, that one who I could never grow to love, he was the one who appreciated me. That one who I loved never could. Of the two, I would now say both were wrong, but wrong for the same reasons. Neither will escape their comfort zones, those homes where they are spoilt and looked after, and I can never go back to mine like that.

I now resolve not to make resolutions. The ones that are forgotten are probably best that way, and the ones that come to pass should never have been uttered in the first place. Events will take place when they are meant to and resolving to do something important can come at any time of the year, while new years resolutions are made solely because we’re forced into saying we’ll do something.

Falling in love is good, and always a lesson. But it should never have been hurried, and while I don’t regret how it came to pass, I’m glad of the fact it ended, and I wish that when it did it had ended more definitely. I have done some truly stupid things. I’ve betrayed people and never been able to apologise because the damage finding out the betrayal would cause is more awful than the lying and hurt from having to lie. Resolutions just remind me of how naïve I was, and how much I don’t want to look back in future and realise how naïve and stupid I am now.

I can never make an apology without causing hurt, and no matter how hard I try I can’t take back the mistakes I already made. But I don’t have to repeat them, and I don’t have to make myself remember them by writing down pointless resolutions that will hurt me in the future.

Labels: Reflection

“One day, eventually, will you marry me?”

He gave me that look, the one where they’re not upset or worried, just questioning. “Are you proposing to me?”

I giggled, “No, that’s your job.”

He smiled, “Then yes.”


My mom’s been diagnosed with schizophrenia. At last. In my early childhood she was forever in and out of clinics, psychiatrists, therapists, etc. Dad took her to everyone he could think of but Mom’s always been good with people, and totally convinced there’s nothing wrong with her. She’d go in, and an hour later Dad would pick her up and the therapist would look at him like he was scum, like the problem wasn’t with Mom, it was with him.

We knew the bouts of manic happiness and extreme anger weren’t normal; the promiscuity while spouting values on abstinence and no-sex-before-marriage. But we were the only ones who saw it; everyone else just saw an attractive vivacious woman and a jealous angry husband. They didn’t see the children scared, or the man being pushed to the edges of sanity by a woman so far over them that at times couldn’t tell you what year it was or how old her own children were.

She would accuse my brother of stealing her jewellery, or have screaming fits about our selfishness when she made food for herself and we’d ask if there was anything for us to eat. Three months before my grandfather- her own father- died of cancer she refused to see him anymore because she’d convinced herself he was looking at her lustfully. The man had Alzheimer’s and cancer of the liver, he was so drugged up on morphine he probably couldn’t tell when she walked into the room, never mind who she was or what she looked like.

When I look back on my mum and dad’s marriage I don’t have anything good to look back on. I try to, but it always seems to be the bad memories that stick in your head, the good ones just seem to fade away. I never expected anything good from my relationships and found them satisfyingly unfulfilling as I’d always thought they would be. And then I met someone else.

I got a shock, and I’m still in shock. I think he’s perfect, and for some reason he seems to think something similar about me. My mom’s going to get treated now, my dad has been put off women for life, and I’m going to just try and pass my exams without getting too distracted by men who make me happier than I ever imagined.

Labels: Reflection

I don’t know where home is anymore, there have been so many of them. So now instead of classifying it as one place in particular, I have chosen to classify it as moments where I felt secure, happy, and content; moments where I’ve felt loved and cherished. These are the moments that define how home should be for us, and the moments when I have felt most like I was at home when a specific solid place as home eluded me.

Home is a hill in the dark with sheep on it and so many stars it’s impossible to estimate to within even a million. An expanse of open space filled only with my thoughts, my dreams, my memories, and an infinite number of sparks in the sky to give me the one thing I always lacked: hope.

Home is a boy with dark curly hair and a worried smile. It’s a boy who stays up till three waiting for me to come home, and then spends the next hour patiently listening to my drunken rambles and handing me pints of water. It’s someone who’ll rub my back when I feel ill, leave me alone when I need it, and who’ll walk me to class and take me out for breakfast at one in the afternoon. It’s someone who makes me feel guilty if another man hits on me when he’s not there, and someone who I physically couldn’t hurt.

Home is green jade and glass beads. It’s a dragon tattooed on my hip and a family that I never met. It’s a country I haven’t been to, and another continent I have yet to visit. It’s a slew of postcards, emails, phone calls, and birthday cards. Its un-cashed cheques, and a watch I lost long ago. It’s an apartment in china town an ocean away from here, and a grandfather I never met. It’s squid, crab, and tortoise; it’s Macy’s and Clinique.

Home is a pirate boat imagined between two fir trees. Its sticks as swords and a red squirrel as first mate. Its two young girls whiling away the days with games of imagination. Its princesses, the spice girls, and eels in a stream; it’s daffodils in dappled light and tea parties under tables. It’s playing block with the other kids, hide and seek and mother may I? Its crushes on boys I’d never again look twice at, and friendships with girls who I haven’t seen for years.

Home is a sofa bed at a friend’s house with a cat on my feet and a dog stupider than me. It’s a younger brother who still won’t talk to me and parents who were stricter with me than mine. It’s a period of time encapsulated in one house, it’s a futon with cushions from Ikea and a bottle of white rum. It’s a girl who I know better than my sister, and a hill that breaks your legs.

Home is… another man I’ll never quite get over. Not one I still love, not one I still need, but one who I am still grateful for. He’s someone I can ignore for weeks and months, and who will suddenly come back in with just a sentence that makes me miss him all over again. Its past sex, it’s past love and crying, and at last its past wishing things could have been done differently. It’s just a time in space, a comment on losing yourself in a crowd, and I suddenly re-remember the reasons why it took so long to move on. It’s having someone wrapped around you and making you feel safe, it’s being looked after and protected.

Home is a series of moments that terrify me. Every single one of them caused me to run away in fear because as much as they made me happy, I was just too scared of losing them. They’re a past I moved on from, or a present that I’m deliberately messing up. But that’s okay. I’m seven months in with Matt and when it ends I’ll miss him but move on. I’ll run away, I’ll act up, and I’ll go back to alcohol and bad men. And then, when I’ve done my acting up, and found somewhere decent to run away to I’ll settle down and get over him. I’ll never be emotionally stable, over my addiction to alcohol, or safe with any man. But that’s not me. I’ll still talk to the numpty, and one day maybe it’ll just stop. I look forward to the day when he finds someone who he’ll be happy enough with to forget about me. But I don’t look forward to not talking to him; I look forward to him being happy. I’m scared of everything going wrong, but know that it will, and I’ll come out of it alright. I don’t need to worry anymore because happiness is just being home, and home is wherever I want it to be. Home is just a series of moments, and while they come and go rapidly, at least I can keep the memories.

Labels: Reflection