When most of us meet our parents, we are introduced to them as mum and dad and for the rest of our lives that is what we know them as, “mum and dad”. It doesn’t really occur to us that mum and dad are actually Jane and John who are as much individuals as we are, we just see them as our parents and to be honest that is what all good parents would want, that their children are able to see them as capable beings who raised them well.
I started this train of thought because I suddenly realized that one day and by God’s grace, I will be somebody’s mummy. However, this little somebody will never truly know the me I am right now. They won’t know the student me who spent time studying or the 20-something me who spends so much time trying to figure out life out or the me as a daughter to a mother who I mostly know as “mummy”.
There are of course the countless stories parents tell their kids or the pictures they show them but unlike what the popular saying will have you believe, these pictures are often not worth a thousand words because they can’t truly capture the essence of who you were at that moment. In my days spent in the university, my roommates knew me the most because they saw the foods I ate, my randomly matched pyjamas and all my face expressions that I use with my polite voice on the phone. That is a side to me that even my parents may not know about.
This to me is one of the ironies of life, how you can be so close to someone and never actually know the entirety of who they are but I guess the truth is that knowing the important things, like what makes them laugh and the hidden meaning behind their words or even their favourite shows, is what truly matters.
I never met my mother’s mother because she died when my mum was in secondary school and in a lot of ways maybe my mum wonders about her mother too but I somehow know my grandmother. I never saw a picture of her but I have a picture of her in my mind from all the stories my mum tells. I know how to cook soups and rice and beans the way she cooked them, I tell my friends the same cautionary tales she told my mum and her other children and when I do, I feel close to her, I feel like I know her.
I don’t know whether or not it’s sad that my children will never know how happy I felt after receiving the copy of my undergraduate dissertation after it had been given its hardcover but I know it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that they know who I am at that moment, a parent who cares and loves them. I guess pictures will just have to do.