Picking beads
We’re all young once. Thoughts about home and loved ones from the road.
I’m from California. But I left when I was 18. That’s what I tell people when they ask me where I’m from.
I left home, and I haven’t really lived there since. I used to say that with a hint of pride, glowing with that sense of independence as I pursued careers, dreams, my Life.
Nowadays, I wander and wonder: is it really so bad to have a place to call home?
On a recent trip home — my parents’ home, I’d always correct myself — I raided my mother’s closet instead of visiting the mall. I move around too much to have much with me, so every piece of clothing is either multifunctional or sentimental. Borrowing my mom’s old sweater for a season or clipping my hair with her accessories was a way to remember where I came from without being too nostalgic. Having a little jade slipper on my purse from my mom was a way to keep her close.
We’re close but not close. We love each other better from far away. We miss each other more.
When we’re together, the frictions of every day life rear up like ugly dandelions, exploding to fertilize new grievances farther and farther afield. It feels like we have forever when we’re together. We have a three day cease-fire limit, I joke.
When I’m on the other side of the world, I remember: I have one mom, I have one family. I know she remembers too.
But this time, digging through her drawers, I found a necklace with colorful glass beads. So colorful like the early 2000s, with that youthful vibrance I hadn’t associated with my mom in so long. It was a young woman’s necklace. Already probably too colorful for me.
“Take it,” mom said.
“But it’s yours,” I protest. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you wear this. Maybe once when we did family photos when I was seven?”
I do remember the necklace. I’m pretty sure we fought that day. Over what? I don’t remember.
My mom laughed. She’d gotten when she first moved to the U.S. She was close to my age, she said. Just five years older, if that. She saw it in the mall and wanted to be pretty.
I paused, but I didn’t pause too long in case she noticed.
Her long-ago thoughts were an echo of mine. I also just wanted to dress up and feel pretty sometimes. It was like staring into a mirror and seeing myself in my mom’s past. I was shocked.
For the first time, I was old enough to remember my mom as she had been at my age. I remembered her as a mom, as someone who braided my hair or sometimes was too frustrated to wrangle my long hair into order. Someone who was anxious that I’d be late to school when I didn’t get up on time. A mom who was more hell-bent on me getting an A than even I was.
In all that time, I’d never seen her as a young woman. Probably just as confused as I am now. Maybe less so, because she always seemed to have her shit together. Or maybe that’s just how it always looks from the outside.
What roads had my mom walked to take her from then to now?
I put the beads back in the box. Maybe another time, I told her.
When I arrived at my apartment and opened my suitcase, I found three of mom’s hairclips. They were neatly sealed in a ZipLoc bag and stacked on top of the clothes I’d packed.
Also published on Medium.com.
