He Told Me a Story Anyway

For the past few weeks I've been spinning like a top. Then, two weeks ago, a car accident turned busy into frantic. I had just dropped the kids off and was driving home when a car that didn't stop when it should have slammed into me and knocked me clean out of my lane. When I started calling around to get it repaired, I discovered that everyone, everywhere, is short-staffed. The body shop's earliest opening was two months out.

The next day, in the rental car the insurance company had arranged, I went to a dealership and bought a new car, and got a firsthand lesson in how surreal car prices have become since the pandemic.

Three days after that, the house we'd bought the month before officially closed. The kids had been counting down the days: a front yard and a backyard, a short walk to school, bedrooms on separate floors. Moving couldn't wait. I squeezed renovation work into every spare minute. I handled the new house; G handled renting out the old one. At night, after the kids were asleep, the two of us would talk, or keep working, catching up on everything we hadn't managed to finish during the day.

None of it, not the new chaos, not the money and investments we lost because everything hit at once, brought me to tears or even made my heart ache. (If anything, once the shock of the crash wore off, I felt overwhelmingly grateful to be alive, and grateful the kids weren't in the car.) But this weekend, one conversation with Xixi tore my heart open and left me sobbing. Words may not be enough, but I want to try to capture this weekend. I'll never forget it.

On Saturday morning the kids woke up a little flat. Xixi was supposed to go to cross-country practice, but he wasn't feeling well and said he didn't want to go. And I'd been feeling it too: it had been so long since the four of us had simply been together, paying attention to each other, really seeing each other. All the rushing around had left me aching to hit pause. When our afternoon plans fell through as well (a friend who was coming over had a sick kid), I said: let's not do a single thing we're supposed to do today. Let's go to the mountains. Let's go see the fall colors. The kids hadn't been hiking or walked through a real forest in ages, and they loved the idea. Off we went, all of us buzzing.

Two and a half hours later we arrived at Mount Rainier, and the fall colors I'd been dreaming of were nowhere in sight. Snow was falling over everything. It felt as if we'd wandered into winter still dressed for summer, as if time had fast-forwarded past Halloween straight to Christmas. Xixi and Dongdong shrieked with surprise and delight all the way up. Eventually we just pulled over and got out to play, and even though we were freezing, nobody wanted to stop.

I was so happy. I felt light in a way I hadn't in a long time. And yet, underneath it, something sad was quietly rising in me. I didn't understand it then. Not until we got back in the car and a very simple conversation began.

Xixi: “Mama, tell me a story~”

Me: “Mama always tells you stories. Could you tell me one this time?”

Xixi: “Hmmm, okay. I'll tell one first, and then you tell one. Once upon a time there was a kitty, and then the end.”

I turned to look at him. Lately he'd been distant, quiet. Even on Wednesday, when school was canceled for bad air and I'd been so excited to spend a whole day with him at his favorite place, he'd barely paid me any attention. That same disappointment came rushing back. “What's wrong? Why is it always like this? Don't you want to talk to Mama?”

He thought about it and said, “No. I do want to talk to you, it's just sometimes I don't have anything to talk to you about.”

My disappointment ran together with the sadness I'd felt in the snow, and suddenly I felt very fragile. “Why? On Wednesday we spent the whole day at the bookstore. We got the snacks you wanted, we went for conveyor-belt sushi, and you hardly said a word to me. It feels like you barely talk to me anymore.”

Xixi clearly had no idea where all this hurt was coming from. He thought for a moment and said, “I just want to play with my friends.”

My sadness turned to anger. “You play with your friends five days a week! Really, that's not enough?” Xixi felt the anger and went still. He just looked at me and said nothing.

That made it burn hotter. “You're only five and you already want nothing to do with me. What's the point of raising you? If you like your friends so much, go ask them if you can live at their house from now on. You don't need to come home!”

G pulled over and said, “At his age he's just starting to have a stronger sense of self. Talking to him like this, you're being ridiculous.”

But I was too far gone, blinded by an anger that had grown out of an enormous hurt, and I couldn't hear him. I stared at Xixi, and some small part of me was hoping my words would frighten him, that he'd burst into tears, so I could feel once more how much he needed me, how much he depended on me.

He didn't. He didn't cry, and there wasn't a flicker of fear on his face. He just looked back at me, calm, and said, “OK.”

“So you gonna ask them?”

“Okay.”

“Did you understand what I just said?”

“Yes I do.”

“Why are you staring at me?!”

“Because I don't know what to say.”

All the air went out of me. I turned toward the window, and a deep, enormous grief poured in. Tears slid silently down my face. G reached over and patted me. I nodded, letting him know I needed a moment alone, and he opened the door, scooped up Dongdong, took Xixi's hand, and walked them to the playground.

From the corner of my eye I watched Xixi climb out. He gave his whole body a little shake, like shaking off dust, took a few deep breaths, and then trotted off to the slide. That's when I lost it. Alone in the car, I sobbed. I knew I blamed myself for drifting away from him, and yet I didn't want to admit that the distance between us was, at its root, my responsibility. Lost in all the things I'd taken on, I had slipped into playing the victim, wanting my child to understand me and come to me on his own. That was where the anger came from.

And I understood the snow, too. I had come for the fall leaves, and instead the snow had buried every red and gold and purple. Wasn't that the proof that, in the end, all the rights and wrongs of this world come to nothing? The people who hurt me, the ones who for years treated my brother and me unequally and never cared to see it, will never believe they did anything wrong. They'll never feel that, having benefited from the unfairness, they owe anything toward setting it right. They can look away, stay self-righteous, stay certain, keep casting themselves as the victims in their own story. My hurt and my anger change nothing. None of it really means anything.

And I understood why, no matter how much I've grown, how much I've strengthened my heart, how hard I've tried to understand my parents, I was still wounded by their ignorance, their narcissism, their cruelty, until I had no choice but to cut off all contact. Yet deep down, a voice still judges me harshly. It asks: are you setting a boundary to keep yourself safe, or are you punishing them because you hate them?

I let out a long breath. Yes. Which is it? Am I protecting my safety, or punishing out of hatred? I am not the child I once was. My parents may still try, as hard as ever, to control me, confuse me, and twist my reality, just like when I was small. They may go on living inside their narcissism and harshness. But the truth is, I am fully able to keep myself safe now. I am safe. That is a fact. Which means that cutting them off completely didn't come from love, or hope, or abundance. It came from fear, from scarcity, from weakness.

Running a red light is wrong. But does that make it right to run down the person who ran it? Even if they were at fault, they don't deserve that.

Rubbing my swollen eyes, I slowly came to understand my own heart. I would not let fear and scarcity win.

I have given every fiber of myself to a life of vigilance, of refusing to add even one more brick to the walls of fear, violence, and scarcity in this world. How could I let myself off the hook now?

I sent my mom a message. In my heart, I want to live at peace with her as a whole person. She once told me I only ever accepted the parts of her I could bear. She was right. I used to force myself to forget the demon in her, and that was its own way of not seeing her whole.

Then the kids came back from the playground, and the air in the car went tight again. My body was rigid. The tears kept coming, silently. I wiped and wiped, but it was as if I had the whole Pacific inside me. I took a deep breath in, and let it out slowly.

G asked if I was okay. I nodded and said I was much better, thanks for taking the kids out. He stroked my hair and handed me a tissue.

We drove on in silence through the thick mountain forest. I wanted to apologize to Xixi, but I didn't know how to start. All that crying had wrung me out. I was drifting toward sleep, but restless, still wanting to say something to him. Just as I was nodding off, Xixi said, “Mama, can I tell you about Brownie and the tricksy pixie at our school?”

The tears I'd only just slowed came flooding back. With my back to him, holding my voice steady, I said, “Sure, please tell me!”

He told me all of it: the background, the characters, the details. Whenever I didn't understand something, I asked, and he told me more. My heart ached and softened at the same time. My throat was tight. It felt like being pardoned. More than that, it felt like finally breathing out a cloud of black smoke the world had planted in me long ago, and breathing in something clearer and more open.

When the story was over, I told Xixi everything I'd been thinking about alone in the car. I told him that deep down, I felt so much sadness about things changing, about letting go, about him growing up. But like a book I love says, life gives us so much, and it's also full of necessary losses. I lost the little Xixi who needed Mama every second and always wanted to be held, and that's how I got this big Xixi, who understands so much, who can tell so many stories, who isn't frightened by Mama's pain. I told him I was so sorry I'd said words I regret, and that I'd hurt him. He listened, nodded, and said, it's okay Mama, I know you didn't mean that. Then he asked: is a necessary loss like how I lost all of your attention and time, so I could get Dongdong as my little brother?

And I was crying again. By the time we stopped for Korean BBQ, my whole face was puffy from crying, and Xixi was still a little sad too. Together we sat with this truth that can't be changed, and held each other tighter.

After that Saturday, which wrung out my body and filled up my soul, came Sunday: Xixi's cross-country race. He was the youngest runner in the 6 & under group, and at the starting line he started crying to his coach. He was nervous, and anxious that he hadn't practiced (the air had been bad all week, so I'd kept him home), afraid he wouldn't do well. I stood off to the side and watched. In what felt like a moment, he went from facing his coach with tears in his eyes to turning toward the course with a smile, ready. He could live alongside his fear, let it move through him, let it be there, and so he could turn around calm and smiling, and when the gun went off, give it everything he had.

The story of Xixi and me has only just begun, but I have a feeling it will carry me into deeper thinking about culture, history, spirituality, even the great unknown. Xixi, your life came into this world through me, and that is the greatest blessing of mine. I hope that everything Mama learns along the way gives you more courage to live a life as bright and boundless as it can be.