my mom

 

My mom turns 67 today. It was only recently that I realized that she was three years older than her officially documented age (this changed her age to me by two, since I'd previously thought she was only one year older than her official age). Growing up in Northern Vietnam while the Communists were fighting to oust the French, she stopped going to school for a few years during the fighting. When it was time to return, they tried to put people back in the grades corresponding to their age, but they were all behind. My grandparents lowered my mom's age, so she could be in the grade in which she belonged. Growing up, she was a daddy's girl, and later, she tells me, she had many suitors (I believe her). She worked as an accountant for the government for awhile and married my dad, and then taught high school history, and somewhere in there gave birth to four boys in seven years. She took them, carrying the baby whom she fed powdered milk, through fields and marshes and sea to Thailand and to Germany and eventually to here. Her dad passed away in Vietnam before she left, and her mom passed away there too, but when my mom was in America, when I was five and remember her crying in the hallway. In California she made clothes, helped my dad run the bakery and then the convenience store and then the wine store, was and is still a receptionist at my aunt's pediatric office, and gave birth to me. When I was a kid she worried I'd never grow much hair. Once when I was in elementary school and she found out about something really bad I'd done, she didn't yell with anger; she cried with disappointment. In high school before I could drive and I wanted to volunteer at a hospital 40 minutes from home, she'd take me there after school and wait there for three hours until I was done, to take me home. When she saw me off for college, she wouldn't leave to go to the bathroom until after I passed the security gate. In med school when we had to interview a relative with an illness I talked to her about the heart surgery she had when I was thirteen, when she stayed home for a few months and we gave her a bell to call us if she needed anything. She doesn't like chocolate, butter, sweet things or any non-Vietnamese food. She likes jewelry, watching National Geographic and Animal Planet, posing for pictures, and talking to anyone. I don't know that many concrete details about her life before the time that I noticed details, and it took a long time after noticing before I started asking. I hope to know.