As Your Child

As I get older, our relationship shifts. I start to understand you better. I would like to believe that I have gradually approached you as an equal. We are close, I supposed because of that streak I have inherited from your personality. I think I am starting to understand you more than what you would give me credit for. (Also writing this in English is terrible because this language has no sense of hierarchal respect and the casual way I regard you seem so different from our interactions in Chinese).

Of course, I do not have a point of reference, but I think we get along much better than most people. When was the last time we fought? It was over taekwondo stuff, but that was a really rare incident in a long while. Things have gotten less confrontational since I become more of my own person – I used to disagree with you all the time, and I was emboldened by me speaking my mind more often in school; you used to always sound like you were picking a fight. Then we started having a lot more respect for each other, like magic. Or maybe all the abrasive interactions wore down our edges a little. Or maybe, for all our stubborn temper, we are both logical and reasonable people (thankfully!)

For all our closeness, however, I think that I have placed some one-sided complications in our relationship. The first of which borders on some kind of Freudian complex, irrational and twisted in its own way. I always struggle with the knowledge that I am perhaps the river opening that you have drifted into and strayed from the path of success. In a way that a rabbit knows by instinct the wolf’s superiority, I know that you are a really remarkable person, a dazzling genius, someone who I would struggle a lot in order to surpass. There is no way I can top you, and your first in math for your entire career as a student, and your life as a model essay student all through university (and one of the best ones at that). I have accomplished none of those, and I really do not see myself doing so in the future.

I have visions of what you are capable of if you did not choose the domestic life. I really think that you are on a plane far and beyond and no matter how hard I worked there is a point that I cannot cross to reach you. And I always inevitably feel guilty that all that genius is directed at someone like me. I struggle with the weight of the potential opportunity cost, as if I am a professor listening to a student’s withdrawal from school because of “family matters”. I feel strangely invalidated too, that I am only able to get this far because you have endowed me with at least a portion of your mind. It’s not crippling, but in an odd way, this inferiority complex only makes me want to do reckless things and push myself further. I can’t explain this to you whenever you chide me for taking on new commitments.

The second strange caveat that only exists in my mind is the intense feeling of inaptitude as a mother. Sometimes I look at how we have turned out and honestly you have succeeded in motherhood (not to short change your effort but) as you always will in anything you put your mind to. As of now I think I would make a terrible mother. Oh my god I would make such a horrendous mother that if I met myself on the street, I would ban me from ever having a child. How does a child learn love without a role model in their parents? You did, but I have no excuse to be so barren of love with you as a role model. You assure me that you only found your love for children after you had us, but I just cannot stand the irrationality in the package of crying warbling bundle. Yeah, I would be a pretty loveless mother. I don’t know how you do it, but I hope that I would be able to do it someday too.

I know that writing this in English is a little playing cheat since you won’t be able to understand it, but let this make us equal: you have your little blog in Chinese that I will never be able to understand fully either. Amazing, really, how I inevitably share similar hobbies as you. I try to imagine how you must feel watching me grow into shadows of you (not in a bad way). Since I am allowed this cowardly retreat behind the protection of English: you have always occupied a superhuman space in my mind.