Like most daughters, my relationship with my mom has had its ups and downs with the usual refrain of “Please don’t let me turn into my mother!” Complicating matters is the fact that culturally we’re pretty different: I’m American; she’s Korean, and (shamefully) I don’t speak Korean well (read: hardly at all). She speaks Korean to me; I answer in English. Oh, and my parents live in Seoul so I see them at most once a year.
These are not the ingredients that make for a close mother-daughter relationship.
Now the birth of my own daughter meant that my mom was coming to help me out, which I dreaded. I witnessed how stressful these grandma visits were for my sister when she gave birth (four times!) I wanted to avoid that at all costs and quite frankly, I thought her visit would be more aggravating than helpful. But Dman insisted that she come and see her granddaughter and since he was leaving for three weeks, it was the perfect opportunity to get some needed help with my newborn.
Mom arrived and I tried to be positive. But as the week wore on, she wore on my nerves. Everything annoyed me. She couldn’t figure out how our lighting system works. She kept insisting the baby and I were cold and should cover up. She seemed afraid to go outside and see Paris. Most annoying of all, she left wadded-up, wet paper towels all over the kitchen so she could re-use them instead of chucking them out. (What was annoying was that I would do that, too, and Dman pointed it out to me once, saying, “What is up with these used paper towels? Just throw them out!” All I kept hearing was, “You’re turning into your mother!”)
Anyway, after the first week, we had a huge fight about just about everything and I was ready to send the woman packing on an earlier flight back to Seoul.
Once again, my mom didn’t get it, I thought. She wasn’t the mom I’d wanted her to be since I was a teenager. Back then, I thought my best friend Lisa’s mom was the coolest. She could talk to us about boys and let us go out clubbing on South Street. She also didn’t freak if we drank (alcohol, duh) and let me sleepover so that I could extend my ridiculous 10pm curfew. In high school, that is the epitome of cool. When I married Dman, I also got a formidable mother-in-law who’s a movie director, travels the world, speaks three languages and was a cougar before the term (or Demi and Ashton) ever existed. For an independent New Yorker like me, that was again the epitome of cool.
My mom? Not so cool. Her career as a piano teacher was intermittent. She’s been married, not always happily, to my father for almost 40 years. She’s traveled a little bit, but isn’t the kind of free-spirited adventurer that I admire. She can be awkwardly timid around non-Koreans, which frustrates me because she can speak English—but always preferred us kids speaking for her when she lived in the States. She’s modest in how she spends money and wears clothes. And I don’t think I’ve ever heard her utter a curse word in my life. Basically, she couldn’t be more different from me and I was highly, highly critical of that.
Right after our fight, we went for a walk around the Marais with my sister (who was also visiting) acting as a buffer. At one point, my mom leaned over the baby carriage to coo at my daughter and suddenly, all of my hard, resentful feelings disappeared. Her open love for my baby made me realize how much she loves me and in that instant, I saw my mom for everything she was instead of everything she wasn’t. She’s kind and caring; thoughtful and resourceful; sweet and generous. And a fantastic cook, on top of it all.
Once I stopped acting like an adolescent whining about wanting a “cool mom,” I got my cool mom. I just had to give her a chance to show me or, more likely, I needed to grow up a little lot.
Mom cooked and cleaned for me everyday and took care of the baby so I could take care of myself for a change. She started telling me stories about her life in Korea when she was a young piano teacher (and mother) traveling between Pusan and Seoul to work when my father got laid off from his job. (I gathered that he was the stay-at-home dad, while she brought home the bacon.) She wound up giving a Korean cooking lesson to my chef sister-in-law and me—as well as making a Korean feast for my impressed in-laws. She even went out in Paris alone, doing the shopping because it was raining and she didn’t want me and the baby to go outside in the wet.
As for those wadded-up paper towels? The woman is totally green. She doesn’t waste a single thing. You should see how she peels and cuts up a mango—not a single piece of pulp left on the seed. Pretty amazing. What I used to see as parsimonious is actually pretty damn ecological. And yes, really cool.
So what’s my cool mom doing now? Heading to Phuket with her girlfriends for four days of beach and massage.
Mom, can I be more like you now?
P.S. I’ll be sharing her easy kimchi recipe in a post to come. It’s taken me moving to Paris and having a baby to finally learn the recipe!
I heard about how difficult it was to breastfeed. It was painful. It wasn’t easy. Terribly inconvenient. Unnecessary—perhaps even unhealthy (what?!)—after a few months. So on and so forth.
