My mother likes pretty things.
She likes to garden, cook, sew and embroider. She likes a spotless house and modest dresses. She used to dream about living on a farm and collecting fresh milk and picking fruit off the trees to have with her pan de sal in the mornings.
She has very strict definitions about what a wife, a mother and a woman are supposed to be. She likes things to have their place.
She doesn’t like the offcuts. The messy bits.
She doesn’t like the things that don’t fit.
*
I am six.
It has only been a couple of years since we emigrated from the Philippines. We’re in the kitchen of the house my parents are renting, and my mother is making cookies.
My fingers are crusty with dried batter, but I hold them still. She has already scolded me twice for getting batter in my hair. I don’t want to be scolded again.
“We’re going to cut them now,” she says, rolling the dough flat over the bench top.
She gives me my own section to roll and cut while she cuts little women and little dogs out of hers. She arranges them on the baking tray in families (one man, one woman, one dog) and clucks her tongue at the wrinkled men, and the too-thin men and the men with missing limbs.
“Those ones aren’t nice,” she tells me, folding my imperfect ones back into the dough. “Why don’t you try again?”
I do. Only the perfect ones make it to the baking tray. The offcuts are tossed away.
*
I am nine.
My mother is gardening. I hear her shriek and call to my dad. “Get rid of it, it’s so gross!”
I hurry outside. “What happened?” I ask.
My mother wrinkles her nose. “Nothing, anak,” she says, looking disgusted. “I just dropped some limes.”
I glance downwards. There is a single earthworm wriggling around in the soil, harmless and pink and trying to get home. “It’s just a worm.”
Mum shudders. “It’s yuck,” she says. “Don’t touch it!” she adds hastily, when I bend over to take a closer look. “Nakakadiri.” Disgusting.
Dad kills it with a shovel. Mum only goes back to gardening once she knows it’s gone.
*
I am fourteen.
I have choir rehearsals and music lessons most mornings before school, and I am tired of getting up extra early just to style my hair. I wear it in a bun usually because it’s easy and it’s practical and I have other things to worry about than how to wear it.
My mother frowns at me when I climb into the car. “You always wear your hair like that… You’re like a tomboy”
My mother frowns at me when I climb into the car. “You always wear your hair like that.”
I cock my head. “What’s wrong with it?”
“Para kang tomboy,” she says. You’re like a tomboy. “Or a soldier. You should wear it down more often, so you look like a girl.”
“School rules say I have to wear it up if it’s longer than shoulder length.”
She makes a face. “There are other ways to wear your hair.”
“I like wearing it like this.”
“Oh, so are you a tomboy, then?”
I’m fourteen. I don’t know what a tomboy is. She makes it sound like a bad thing, so – reluctantly, sourly – I pull my hair out of its bun and redo it on the drive to school. I do it in a braid, and my mother smiles as she drops me off.
“Ayan,” she says. There. “You’re a young lady, after all.”
*
I am twenty-seven.
My husband and I are in hospital because our daughter has just been born. She is beautiful and bright-eyed. She is perfect in our eyes. We hadn’t realised it was so easy to love something so small.
My mother arrives not even half an hour after my baby is born, and the midwives let her into the ward because we’re too stunned to do anything about it.
“I’m so happy,” she says, plucking my daughter out of my arms. “I can’t believe I’m a grandmother. What a beautiful apo I have.” She coos and giggles, studying my baby's eyes, nose, hair, ears – and then she pauses. “She has a crooked ear.”
She shows us. It’s not even that crooked; one of my baby’s ears is flat on one side, and it gives it a corner instead of a curve. My husband and I think it looks like an elf ear, which makes us chuckle, but it doesn’t make our child any less perfect.
“So?”
My mother tuts. “You should massage it while she’s still young,” she tells me. “There’s still time to get it into a normal shape. You just have to be diligent about it.”
I am twenty-eight.
Rosie with her child. Source: Supplied
I graduated from high school second in my grade. I have a degree in medical science. I work for the public health system. I am married. I have a child.
These are all the things my mother wanted for me when I was younger: an education, a career, a husband, a family, yet somehow it isn’t enough. I am suffocating. There is weight on my chest and fog in my brain from years of trying and trying, but there is always something I am doing wrong. My mother finds imperfections everywhere: my house should be cleaner, my husband should do more, my daughter should sleep better, I have gained weight, I have lost weight, I’m not doing enough, I’m not doing it right.
My therapist listens. I have my daughter with me at the session, and she is sitting happily on my lap with a teether in her mouth. “She’s such a sweet girl,” the therapist says, chuckling at the way she dribbles.
“Yeah,” I agree tearfully. “She’s perfect. She’s such a good kid.”
The therapist smiles. “She is. And she’s your daughter. Not your mother’s. She’s yours. Look what a wonderful job you’ve done.”
“What?”
“You’re doing it right,” the therapist says. “The proof is there, on your lap. You’re doing enough. You’re doing it well. You deserve to have a good kid because you are enough, and you deserve to believe it.”
They are words I take to heart.
*
I am thirty.
I stopped speaking to my mother two months after that conversation with the therapist, when I realised how much her negativity weighed me down.
I have a second daughter now, and my mind has never been so clear. It’s like I’ve been drowning all my life and I’ve only just broken the surface, emerging for the first time, a person in my own right. My husband takes me home from the hospital someone different. Someone healthy. Someone new and unafraid of not being enough.
My older daughter is two now, and we are in the kitchen making cookies. We have no aprons. There is flour on her nose and in her hair and all over the bench.
She hands me wonky stars and rolled-up leftover dough.
We cook the offcuts.
Rosie Christoff is a medical laboratory scientist and a mother of two. She writes outside of work and parenting and hopes to publish her first novel set in Spanish colonial Philippines in the near future.
RECOMMENDED READING
My Filipino parents show their love through actions, not words
