to love with abandon
𖥔 musings on motherhood, unconditional love, and refracting light back into the world 𖥔
for mother’s day, my mom showed up to my apartment with flowers. after we went to the spa together, she bought me a melon pan bun to bring home. in this day that’s meant to be for her, she still centered her affection onto me.
in the face of her never-ending kindness, i read my dear friend’s piece on unconditional love with a different kind of softness (would you still love me if i was a worm?) i have blossomed under the gaze of my mom’s unconditional love, and my myopia has prevented me from fully appreciating it until today.
“I am writing you from inside a body that used to be yours. Which is to say, I am writing as a [daughter].” -Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
in the face of unconditional love
i am deeply grateful that i grew up with all the love languages out there: words of affection, quality time, physical touch, acts of service. my mom resolved to raise me with unrestrained love the same way her mom did. there’s plenty literature about how our parents’ failings lead to our attachment wounds — but what about the inverse, how their carefulness has led to our own love languages? i’ll stop by a bakery and get an extra croissant for you the way my mom would. i’ll drop everything to coach you through your pain like my mom always did. i’ll shamelessly make a huge deal out of your birthday, maybe even embarrass you, because i knew it was love that made my mom interrupt my chinese class and bring in a costco sheet cake in 4th grade.
i grew up with the message to love life (to love with even when you have no stomach for it) & to love myself, and that bleeds into every way i see the world.
however, in the face of unconditional love i can’t help but feel guilt — after sacrifice i feel the pressure to make my own success the reward. don’t we all feel an unspeakable debt to the sun and moon, who ask for nothing in return as they watch us from above? my mom was anything but a tiger mom, but her immigrant story are inseparable from my own story. if someone moves to a foreign country, moves out of their dream city for your education, forsake their career to raise you–the message is clear: they have placed a bet of success onto your potential.
i fear the consequence of giving love too freely. unconditional love only works when it’s limited to very few: to give it to too many is exhausting, unsustainable, and as i’ve found, unfair to everyone involved — i can’t help but inherently expect some reward, in terms of friendship, when i give my all to a relationship.
& i fear losing myself. call it selflessness, call it sacrifice; call it for what it is, self-abnegation. simone de beauvoir forewarns the danger of devotion & narcissism in a relationship.1 the narcissist loves themselves & thus values the other person because of the love they have for the narcissist. the devoted only cares for the other’s freedom, desires to feel like they’re part of something bigger than themselves and will sacrifice their own freedom & goals for the other.
beauvoir uses this framework in the context of heteronormative relationships, but it can apply anywhere, especially between a mother and a daughter.
as crucial as it is to maintain a relationship, i am wary of making a sacrifice of my own. i fear the expectations for it by a dependent, the position it puts me when i give up myself to support a greater cause, the principle that i can’t expect anything back in return. maybe i am too american & narcissistic. maybe i’ve seen too many women burned by their own sacrifices before. maybe it’s the fact that my own mother warned me that i should never make the same sacrifices she did. that the precise reason she made them is so i would never have to make the same choice.
to reflect or to refract?
as the object of my mother’s affection, i’ve internalized all the warmth she’s given me. with all this light inside me, where does it go?
we expect light to reflect backwards once it hits a surface: but sometimes it travels through and it refracts to another person. my mom has given me so much love that bleeds out of me into my interactions with my friends, previous lovers, strangers.
i can’t tell if my sensitivity is a product or a reason for my mom’s empathy towards me. all i know is that i carry her capacity to care with me. when i hurt, she hurts for me. maybe that’s why she always tried to shield me while i grew up & why she still tries to protect me today.
When I got hurt, she felt it so deeply, it was as though it were her own affliction. She was guilty only of caring too much. I realize this now, only in retrospect. No one in this would would ever love me as much as my mother, and she would never let me forget it.” - Michelle Zauner, Crying in HMart
i cry about everything, but especially stories on motherhood: the short film bao when the asian mom nurtures a baby dumpling who goes on to abandon his mom; eeaao when evelyn and joy are fighting in front of the laundromat; crying in hmart when zauner, well, cries in hmart over her mother; paper menagerie when jack finds the paper tiger from his mom; turning red when mei witnesses the intergenerational trauma in some fever-dream-disney-fantasy-sequence; joy luck club and the melange of conflicts between four mothers and their ABC daughters; peking duck when ling ma’s mother confronts her about the intrusiveness of her writing.
if this list seems to go on forever it’s because as repetitive as the asian-american mother-child experience can be, my heart breaks a little differently every time.2
“When I first learned that I was having a daughter, everyone in the family was so disappointed. In China, a boy is always better, if you’re going to have one child. But me, I was secretly happy. A boy, at best, can adore his mother, but a girl can understand her. When the doctor told me it was a girl, I thought, Now I will be understood. That was my happiest moment. The idea of a daughter.
“Don’t talk to me about things you don’t understand,” I tell her now.” -Ling Ma, Peking Duck
i yearn to play the role of the daughter as whole-heartedly as she plays the role of the mother. as much as only she can understand the full extent of why i feel the way i do, only i have the potential to grant her the same empathy. only i can see her the way she sees me.
to my future daughter
another irony of life: my mother dislikes these stories… but thats a substack article for another day
i cried at bao a lot too
i never really wanted kids until i realized how much my mom loved me, and then i wanted to know what it was like to love someone beyond imagination