Before Our Moms Became Moms

A writing workshop I have been attending over the last two months had been asking us to write about a mom we knew when we were a child - not our own mom, but our friends’ moms. Together, we marveled at all the different personalities that revealed under our pens - the one that would rush out of her showers naked to answer phone calls, the one that was always looking for things in her house, and the one that visited all the street vendors during family trips.

And I realized this one thing: now that we are adults, having reached our own child-bearing years, we saw these moms as if they were one of us. The moms that we wrote about are no longer distilled to the giant, larger-than-life figure that made noble sacrifices of themselves to take care of their kids - they had real personalities that belonged to real human beings.

Today, as I browsed through all the mom photos that my friends shared on social media, I also discovered this trend: almost everyone shared a picture of their mom when they were young. The mom before they were born, or the mom that just got started with motherhood, before years were taken from them to nurture a baby. The mom when they were still mostly themselves.

To put it in other words, it was the non-mom traits that attracted us to them in the first place, and it was the non-mom traits that we inherited from them, which made us proud of being their daughters and sons.

My mom is the most living-in-the-moment person I’ve met in my life, and I proudly inherited this trait from her. A great bundle of joy bursts through her like sunshine, as she smiles and dances, just eating a piece of candy. On another day, a little bunny-shaped calendar at a gift shop would humor her enough to make her day, which she would end up taking home for her to stare at every day in her home office. This joie-de-vivre attitude was part of what drove me to cooking, as I chased after the deliciousness that would make me smile and dance just like her.

She was also the most adventurous and courageous person, having lived in North Africa and the Middle East as one of the only Chinese women there, back in the 1980s and 1990s. Growing up admiring the handicrafts she brought back from all over the world, I never questioned my dreams of studying and living in a foreign country. I now have spent almost 9 years in the United States, 7,000 miles away from my hometown, Beijing.

Most of the time, a parent’s biggest influence on their kid was their non-parental traits - their love of fashion which inspired a kid to later become the editor of a major fashion magazine, or their firm belief in social causes which inspired a kid to go into politics. Yet, a lot of the times, a woman’s traits would only be reduced to a mom figure, once she had a baby. She is expected to devote most of her time, if not all, nurturing a baby. If she chooses to take time away from her baby to pursue her personal interests, her career, and her dreams, the society put blames on her. And nowadays, if a woman finds out she is accidentally pregnant when she’s not prepared, laws in certain states may even force to take away her rights to pursue a life she wants, because she is obligated to her undeveloped fetus that needs her body to grow into a baby.

And in return on Mother’s Day, we paint a holy picture of this larger-than-life mother figure, who sacrifices herself in order to care for her baby.

But today, I hope to celebrate my mother, and all the other mothers, as the person she is, despite of being a mother. Let’s celebrate her qualities that deeply influenced our lives, and giving us a world that we experienced, as a result of all of her pursuits in her personal interests, her careers and her dreams. Let’s all create some space in the society for the moms to live outside their mom life, so that we all can catch some breath.