She Hates My Habits and I Say: Like Mother, Like Daughter

I’m nestled snugly in the bean bag chair, my roommate stretched out on the couch behind me. We haven’t moved from this position in a couple of hours and were coming up on our fifth or sixth consecutive episode of Gilmore Girls. We haven’t spoken to each other for the whole afternoon, relishing in the comfortable quiet, only sharing a simultaneous chuckle at scenes we already knew front to back. It was the perfect Sunday afternoon.

“They remind me of me and my mom,” My roommate said suddenly, breaking our unspoken vow of silence. “That’s why I love watching this show.” She was referring to Lorelai and Rory in the show, a portrayal of a maternal bond that more closely resembled two best friends than a mother-daughter dynamic. It was a relationship envied by all those who suffer from any sort of mommy issues. Exhibit A: me. I was quickly overwrought with resentment. And then anger. And then guilt.

“Really?” I tried to mask my jealousy with curiosity. It was extremely unconvincing. “Mine’s like Lorelai and Emily.” If Rory and Lorelai were inseparable besties, then Lorelai and her mother were like estranged lovers who were never meant to be together in the first place. Their relationship was tarnished by generational trauma, inability to communicate effectively, and simply put, difference of opinions. On basically everything.

From my earliest memories, my relationship with my mom has always been strained. Being a first-generation, Asian American daughter, the generational and cultural gap between us wasn’t something that could be bridged by a shopping spree or a Saturday morning brunch. Add on the fact that our ability to communicate with each other was not only distorted by close-mindedness but also the physical barrier of language, our relationship suffered the moment I became coherent. With her broken English and my not-entirely fluent Mandarin, something was always bound to be lost in translation.

Raising children in a country where the language spoken isn’t your first and in a place you don’t quite consider home is a feat in itself. I can’t imagine the type of sacrifices my parents made for me. But with all the complex external factors, our relationship seemed doomed from the start. My mom tried to replicate my sister and I’s upbringing like hers, but raising a daughter in southern New Hampshire in the 2000s isn’t comparable to growing up in the countryside in China in the 1960s. To cope with the difficulties of cultural differences and an attempt to find community in a mostly white environment, my parents discovered solace in Christianity—specifically a Chinese congregation. My sister and I grew up in the church, but unlike my parents, we found that religion caused a greater rift between us and them. As we matured, our beliefs ran left politics-wise, but my parents strongly leaned right. With that, the sermons and perspectives the church forced upon us strongly dissented from our views. You can imagine the type of unproductive discourse that occurred over the dinner table when the voting season came around.

My mom was your state-of-the-art tiger mom. Phones weren’t allowed to leave the kitchen table, seeing friends was a privilege to be earned, and summertime wasn’t for relaxing but rather to get ahead, which meant extra homework and double the practice time for instruments. As a child, I was stubborn but also fearful to say no to my parents. So, my default response to everything was to lie. Yes, I practiced two hours of violin today. No, I didn’t watch any TV. Yes, I ate the lunch you made me. No, I didn’t have any extra candy. Bold-faced lies flew out of my mouth so fast and so often that they quickly spun out of control until I was caught between a rock and a hard place. It was no surprise that my parents knew what was going on the whole time. Denying the fact that I lied about anything spurred us into screaming matches and three-week grounding periods that left our relationship dangling by a thread.

There were, and still are, so many minute details that caused tension in our relationship. For example, my mom has a very distinct tone of voice. With her natural register a couple of decibels higher than the norm, it always sounds like she’s shouting or on the verge of shouting. Throughout my childhood, I associated this manner of speaking with anger. So, whenever she spoke to me, I would find myself triggered by this tone of voice. I immediately assumed that she was mad at me and thought that she was resorting to arguing in order to communicate with me. My instinct was to fight back, and suddenly we were yelling at each other, none of us truly hearing the other. Like mother, like daughter.

Though we have always been tied by blood, I don’t recall a time when I actively considered my mom my friend. When I moved out of the house for college, our relationship significantly improved. Time and distance apart, as well as my frontal lobe slowly developing, allowed us to gradually start healing our bond. It’s still something that’s on the mend today, and I wonder if we will ever reach a place where we can find peace within each other.

My anger for my mother is rooted in love. It’s frustration that she doesn’t understand me but I want so desperately for her to be able to. It’s the guilt that bears down on me after every argument and every time I snap at her, but I still can’t bring myself to apologize for any wrongdoings. It’s the regret of feeling negatively towards her whenever I remember all the sacrifices she made to give me the life that I have. It’s the anger I have for the world when I think about the struggles she’s endured and how badly I wish I could turn back time so she could just relive a more privileged childhood. It’s shame that I can’t live up to be the perfect Asian daughter she so fiercely instilled in me as a little girl. It’s everything all at once: guilt, shame, frustration, and remorse, about the fact that I cannot help but love my mother angrily.