In my  last post, I wrote about being in hedgehog mode.

Fully immersed in writing a book about my ancestors, some of whom I never met and some I knew for decades, the process keeps surprising me.

There are the usual suspects for the unexpected. It’s taking longer than I expected (yes, I quickly adjusted my timeline from months to years) and I’m amazed at how AI speeds up my research.

What I didn’t plan for is this:

I feel closer to my mother than when she was alive. I know her in a tender, intimate way that was not possible during her lifetime. Her M.O. was to keep things close to the vest. It was a survival strategy, learned during her childhood.

My mother was in my life for nearly 60 years old. For over two decades, I could drive to her place in less time than it took to make hard-boiled eggs, saw her nearly every week (except during COVID, when she was in lockdown in an assisted living facility), and chuckled when square containers of Chinese food regularly appeared in my frig after her grocery runs to an Asian food market.

But now, after researching and reflecting on her life in detail, and asking why (“Why did she marry my father?”, “Why did she decide to emigrate from China to a country she knew nothing about?”, “Why did she let her first love go?”), I see Mom in a different light. I see the events that shaped her–WWII and other conflicts in Asia, family dynamics, school environments.  I understand the thinking and sense the feeling behind her choices, big and small.

For most of my life, I watched my mother being Mom, but didn’t observe to learn. In writing about her life, I have become curious about what was underneath–her motivations as a result of fears, joys, hurts, losses and anxieties. I am discovering her story, the one she would or could not tell, but is there for me to see.

I also wonder about things that I had taken for granted. How did she learn to sew like a professional seamstress? Where did she acquire flawless Mandarin as a second Chinese dialect? Who taught her the qi gong routine that she did every night before bedtime? These are questions that come to me like a text notification on my phone in the middle of the night, nothing urgent but definitely something to look at in the morning.

I’m building a relationship with my mother that I never had when she was alive. That is transformative.

Me and Mom, in the late 1970’s

There are more surprises from this journey. Stay tuned for my next post.