When I think about the beginning. From start til now, how I became the person that I am and how I got here, I always go back to my parents. My mother doesn't believe in love. At least, not romantic love. But she loves family. She is the most filial person I know. She would do anything for my grandparents.
Her marriage to my father was a business deal. One that she readily agreed upon. He was to leave Vietnam for a better life and his parents needed someone capable to look after him. They were willing to pay in gold. My mother agreed. Her family needed the money. After the Vietnam war, her family suffered and left in poverty. My grandfather, who used to hold a high military position was stripped of his job and became a fisherman. Fishing was not enough to feed two ageing adults and four growing adolescents. My mother, the eldest child, made the ultimate sacrifice. At age 21, she married my father, left her family, left the country on a tiny boat and escaped to another country, in hopes of starting a better life, not only for herself, but for the family she left on shore.
My parents lived in Malaysia for 2 years before they arrived in Hobart, Australia. It was 1991, the year I was born. My fear of being alone and my obsession with the search for true love, I think stems from this very day. On the day I was born, my mother was alone in the hospital. My father was not there to welcome me into this world.
Because, on the day I was born, he was too busy playing chess.
I will always remember the hurt in my mother's eyes when she told me that my beginning was the start to their end.
I never blamed myself for their divorce though. I never once believed that a child is at fault for the failings of their parents. Because, children are born innocent. And even though my father was not at my birth, he was there to name me. He gave me my middle name. He based my name off a bird because he wanted to set me free.
I hope you can look at the way you view love as a victory, because it is. You were raised with tainted examples of love around you; your father's absence at your birth, your parents' marriage of practicality and subsequent divorce. Living with this through your impressionable years, it would have been very easy to follow in these footsteps. But you didn't. And although I know you feel fear and anger and uncertainty about love, you still pursue it. You WANT to feel it, to know what it is because you never allowed yourself to be broken. That to me is everything.
ReplyDeleteYour mother may have told you that your beginning was the start to their end, but any loveless marriage ends before it begins. Time just fills in the rest. Your birth brought life into your family because of your capacity to love.
~ B
I didn't follow my mother's footsteps because I know there are more to relationships than just practicality. I chase after love because I want to prove her wrong, that her idea of love is wrong. And to prove to myself that true love exists.
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