The Joy Luck Club

Every time after my mum and I disagrees or argues, I think about the movie ‘The Joy Luck Club’. I’m not sure why the movie makers called it that but I gather it’s got to do with some direct translation of some Chinese saying.

How the movie relates to me though is the wedge in the relationships between the mothers and the daughters in the movie. Like the movie, the wedge is the different lifestyle, culture and country they each spent their youth to adult life in. But the wedge is also the similarity in the patterns of choices they each make – like mother, like daughter, there’s a same thread in the choices they make, although in different scenarios.

I broke away from my mother’s patterns of behaviour early enough in my life. Thanks to a crisis, I now have a life I’m proud to say, is a product of my own choices and responses. But, it didn’t come till I was in my early thirties though.

Last December, we asked my mum if she could come live with us for a while to help look after our newborn baby. She said yes. I wasn’t sure how long she would stay for this time because efforts in the past to make her honour her 3 -6 months visit were unsuccessful. The last two times she’s visited, her stays were cut short. Twice it was a result of an argument between her and myself.

This time, many arguments happened but she stayed despite many times threatening to leave. This time, my weapon is my newborn baby girl, Ella. She’s the reason why mum stayed longer than 3 months. She’s the source of happiness for mum, who made that very clear. It is not me. I on the other hand, is like a stranger to her, she claims. She doesn’t ask to spend time with me but she expects me to do that. She has lots of expectations which she doesn’t speak about until we have a blown up argument over something small. She pants it all up and then, like a bottle of coca-cola shaken up, she spills it all out. I on the other hand, am too busy to stop to talk to her or to be creative in engaging her. I already have to be creative in engaging my 5 year old, my 9month old, and my clients. I don’t need really want to have to parent my parent either, if that is to put it bluntly.

This year, my sister’s daughter also came to live with us to study in Australia. My mum pampers her, much to my disagreement. She claims I’m jealous and I should let her show her love to her grand daughter if she wishes. That’s alright if mum doesn’t live under the same roof. But pampering a grand daughter who lives under the same roof means she’s going to undermine my niece’s character growth and maturity. So there goes another wedge driven into our already fragile relationship. The relationship that is only held together by my baby daughter, so it seems.

Mum claims I am a horrible person – that I’m not a nice person. When my niece said this evening that she thinks I’m a nice person, that I’m patient and kind, mum said, that’s the first she’s heard. She claims that others do not know me like she does. That others have not seen the other side of me. My niece has seen the other side of me. Who I am at home is who I am with others. I don’t always have to assert myself with others as I have to with mum because I don’t find myself clashing with someone’s thought processes as much as I do mum’s. She doesn’t give me credit where credit is due. She hates my guts, my confidence, my assertiveness, my voice – the voice she never had.

When will we ever see eye to eye? When will mum ever credit me for who I am? When will she agrees with me like my friends agree with me? Isn’t that what every daughter wants from her mother? Sure, when I was a child, nurturing and security was what I needed and she was the best with that. She took me everywhere I wanted, gave me almost everything I wanted within her abilities and budget. She did everything for me and I never had to lift a finger at home. She still does all the housework except that I am no longer a little child needing only to be fed and to be fussed around. Without that, we don’t have a relationship. We don’t look at the world the same way. We have different parenting styles. We have very different outlook on life. We are like chalk and cheese.

But mum will never have her own home where she can do what she likes. Unlike many older people I know who have their own abode to do whatever old people like, mum will never have that priviledge to. I wish I could give her a house she could call her own and she could live on her own but the closest she will have is a granny flat down stairs our house in the Gold Coast. I will have to try and not say much about what she does with that space there and I will. But till then, we have to share this little 3 bedroom house with her and my niece… and it’s hard when mum stashes away incredible amount of junk I would normally throw in the bin.

I know mum is still unhappy with me for throwing out her stashes of tissue paper or kitchen towels that she claims she wants to reuse for cleaning the floor because they are not very dirty, the sauce in the fridge that was almost 2 months old (that still tasted good) and a whole bunch of things I've told her to stop doing. Hence here I am writing this long block to process it all while the rest of the household sleeps...