My first memory of my mother is her voice. It is low and soothing. She is murmuring something to her younger sister, my aunt, and my grandmother. I want to tell her that I’m awake, that I’m uncomfortable because I’ve wet the bed, but I don’t want to interrupt her. That was in Korea. I must have been about two years old, maybe younger, but I don’t remember. What I do remember is thinking that everything would be okay, that I would be warm and comfortable again because my mother would take care of me.
Other early memories of my mother have to do with other people talking about her. Specifically, my other aunties clucking at me, almost pityingly. Your mother is so beautiful, so sweet, so kind, she had so many suitors, she could have had her pick of any one of them, but she chose your father. Your mother is a real Korean beauty, so classic, oh, she’s so lovely. You look just like your father, too bad, wouldn’t it have been so wonderful if you looked like your mother.
My father was no Quasimodo. He was a former Navy officer with an education from the most prestigious university in the land, and he was destined for great things in America. But in the looks department, ah, why didn’t little Euna take more after her stunning mother, they questioned. I guess I’m lucky that I grew up with a healthy ego, nonetheless.
Our move to America in 1964 had to be wrenching for Kyungha Park, then 30 years old, mother of Euna, four, and Osong, two. The residents of Midland, Michigan, where my dad took a job as a chemical engineer at Dow Chemical had great difficulty with our names. So my mother became Katie and Osong became Robert.
The newly dubbed Katie Kwon didn’t know a stitch of English, but my dad made her sign up to be a room mother for my first grade class at Plymouth Rock Elementary School, so the assimilation process could be accelerated. I can’t imagine how hard it would have been for a shy, non-English speaker to fall in to the culture of the American heartland just like that. Learning a new language at the age of 30 is no easy task. How did she even talk to my teacher and the other room mothers?
Imagine having to adapt to the foreignness of an entirely different cuisine. Back then there were no Korean grocery stores or restaurants. Every few months we would receive a large brown package and we would breathe in the fragrance of my grandmother’s house in Seoul even before the first string was plucked: roasted seaweed, hot red pepper flakes, dried squid — these were just some of the tastes of our homeland that regularly flew across the Pacific so that my mother could feed us our native foods that we craved.
We dressed out of the Sears Roebuck catalogue, my mother and I. She was stylish in the way of the 1960s, and I remember her wearing those graceful sheath dresses, with her shapely legs in pumps. She wore a strand of pearls around her neck, and knowing what I know now, they absolutely were of the costume variety; my parents lived and breathed budget shopping.
My brother and I would come home from school, and my mother would be watching television shows on the big black-and-white in the living room, shows like “Queen for a Day.” She would be listening intently, trying to understand the words, trying to figure out the language.
Later on, her favorite afternoon shows were “As the World Turns” and “Love is a Many Splendored Thing.”
While I adored my mother unconditionally as a young child, as a teenager, she irritated me to the moon and back. Some of it was normal teenage stuff, but a lot of it was not. I was embarrassed to bring friends home because they might catch a glimpse of her out in her garden wearing her wide-brimmed hat, which smacked to me of “coolie.” I winced when I saw the herbs lying out to dry in the hot sun in the yard, or the laundry out on the clothesline flapping in the breezy sunshine. I shuddered at the smells in our house, kimchee and seafood that caused my friends to wrinkle their noses. Why couldn’t my mother bake chocolate chip cookies like the rest of the moms? I resented the fact that my mother could not or would not drive, leaving me at the mercy of my father to get me from here to there.
I resented the fact that she refused to stand up to my father, even when he was grossly, egregiously wrong or unfair. I didn’t understand or accept the cultural deference to the man of the house, and in my soaring feminist phase, which reached its height in the Helen Reddy “I am Woman Hear Me Roar” era in the 1970s, I would scold her to stick up for her rights.
I am older and wiser now and love my mother in ways that have taken me a lifetime to appreciate. She has been the quiet wind beneath the wings of all of us in my family, always there, self-effacing and sweet.
This year, she and my dad did not come to our house for our annual day-after-Thanksgiving-Korean-side-of-the-family tradition, because on the Saturday before, she took a fall. She banged herself up pretty badly: bruised ribs, skinned knee, chin, and cheek swollen and bloody. More troubling than the fall itself, however, is that she doesn’t remember how, why, or where she fell, only that she was able to get herself into the house, where my father was able to help her. She’s seeing doctors this week, and hopefully they’ll be able to diagnose something benign and treatable.
After a lifetime of counting on my mom always to be there and take care of us, suddenly, I am aware of her frailty. I’m realizing that even as Will approaches college and my heavy lifting years with my children are nearing an end, I am now entering those heavy lifting years with my parents. Life is coming full circle. My mom has always been there for me, and now, I need to be there for her.
