What Mom Says, Daughter Do

The first time I was pregnant, I carefully abided by the rules laid out by my mother.  I avoided scissors.  Stuff that was too cold.  Hammering nails into the wall.  Moving furniture.  All superstitions that she gravely informed me of, of the consequential dread and doom that would become of me if I didn't listen.  On the outside, I laughed about it with my more American half husband.  But on the inside, I carefully avoided scissors, put the nails away, let the furniture sit until my husband came home, and meticulously planned what I ate.  

The Chinese daughter tries hard to escape the constant reminders of a concerned and persistent Chinese mother.  I think back to when I was younger, a sophomore in high school when I had hurt my ankle after spraining it while leaping into the air to grab the phone, but landed over a contraption that moved my mom's ankles and was supposed to help her lose weight.  I'm not sure if I was more mad at the idiotic Chinese contraptions my mom purchased because all the Asian ladies were doing it, and swore it made a difference, because if you can't exercise, a machine that moves you is just like exercising, or if I was more mad at myself for leaping into the air with excitement that I hadn't yet used all three of my daily phone call allotment and was about to go pick up the phone and talk to a friend.  

But when the pain came back in college as I was ballroom dancing in heels, my mom did what any asian mom would do.  She took me to the Asian doctor, not because she didn't trust the white Western doctors, but because the Asian doctor would have a quicker and more natural remedy.  And I'm not even sure we had an American doctor after we stopped getting shots and going to the American pediatrician, who was surely dead by the time I was in high school.  Dr. Green was quite old when we went to him, and shortly after, we switched to an Asian doctor, who glossed over my lack of period and said whatever would make my mother happy.  I wonder why I have a weird relationship with doctors and why I still do not have a regular doctor for myself.... I digress.

The doctor we went to for my ankle used wet cabbage and weird oils and stinky aromatic herbs and I smelled once more, like an Asian science food project.  I wondered when I could take the cabbage off of my foot which didn't seem to be improving.  It didn't help that my skepticism at the doctor's abilities were reduced by my then Asian college boyfriend who quickly told me he had also done the same to his injuries in high school when his Mom took him to an Asian doctor.  "It's weird, but it works," he had told me.  If it worked, it wasn't permanent.  The pain came back.  The swelling came back.  But I smiled and agreed, like a good Chinese daughter and girlfriend would, that it was definitely improving, wondering if I could one day be an actress with these manipulative good lying and smiling skills I was inadvertently gaining.  

Memories of earlier visits to the Asian doctor who would remedy my random periods which came four times a year flooded into my mind.  The bitter aroma of medicine I would swallow down immediately, every day, with fresh hopes of seeing blood once a month in my underwear as a result of the disgusting medicine, but make me normal like all the other girls struggling with pads and wings and tampons, festered in my mind.  My mom eventually gave up and let me have random periods or no periods throughout my high school life, simultaneously treating me to every single acne face wash and medicine over the counter, and starting me on the extraction part of monthly facials beginning at 16.  I would not receive the spa portion, aka the actual relaxing portion of the facial until I was 18, but by then, I had secretly gone to the college medical doctor and obtained a prescription for birth control, which would not only rectify my lack of periods, but help regulate my hormones, which shockingly, were the reason for my acne.  Mother would never know of these things.  She would swear my monthly facials were the cure, and continue to pay for me to get a monthly facial until I was married and with my first child.  I would gladly oblige and figure out this way the way to a successful relationship with my Asian mother.  

To this day, she believes that birth control is the reason all my friends are struggling to get pregnant, not because they are trying in their mid to late 30s.  I do wonder if she ever wondered what that patchy thing on my skin was, if she thought I was smoking, or if she knew birth control had evolved into a sticker. She never saw me with pills, so she must not have realized it. Though if memory serves itself right, I remember a flicker of her finding some pills she thought were birth control but was actually gum, and in that instant, I knew I would alway stick with the non pill forms of birth control forever, if not to escape the ridicule and scrutiny and judgment of my Asian mother.