Listen to the Squawking Chicken: When Mother Knows Best, What's a Daughter To Do? A Memoir (Sort Of) (17 page)

There was bed creaking.

There was heavy breathing.

There was flesh connecting.

MY PARENTS WERE DOING IT TWO FEET AWAY FROM ME.

You are crazy if you think I stayed there, suffering silently, until it was over. No. The minute I realized that they were having sex TWO FEET AWAY FROM ME, I screamed, jumped out of bed, and locked myself in the bathroom. It was chaos after that. Dad started pounding on the door, begging me to open it, apologizing over and over again. I shouted at them that I hated them and never wanted to speak to them again. Typical teenage threats. Then Dad started moaning, “We’ve ruined her forever! We’ve ruined her life forever!”

And the Squawking Chicken? For her it was just a regular evening. Like it happens all the time that a girl would find herself in a goddamn motel room in New Jersey sleeping next to her fucking parents actually fucking.

She waited out my hysteria. She talked Dad off the ledge. Then she calmly and authoritatively reminded me that we
had to wake up early the next morning so don’t come to bed too late. And that was it. One day I had a stepfather in Hong Kong. The next my parents were living together again. After living for ten years as a child of divorce, I was now, at sixteen, expected to acclimate to being part of a “whole” family without justification or input.

Seven years later, deeply mired in my own romantic entanglements, I called the Squawking Chicken out on her own relationship bullshit. I might have been throwing it all away for Bobby, but it’s not like she was qualified to judge me.

Not surprisingly, Ma was unrepentant.

“If you think I made mistakes, why aren’t you trying to be better? At least I have an excuse for my mess. I came from nothing. I had nothing to offer. You have so much to offer and you still found a way to make yourself into nothing. Bobby’s not going to stay for someone who’s nothing.”

And he didn’t. Unlike me, he had plans after college. He’d been accepted into an overseas teaching program. The sad fool that I was, I intended to follow him there too. We decided that he would go first and I would join him a month later. Two weeks before he left, though, after a long discussion with his mother, he told me he was going alone. Is that irony?

Bobby’s mother was proud of her son. He had a degree. He had opportunities. He had a placement with a well-respected educational exchange program that would improve his skill set in a foreign country. He had a girlfriend who’d been dicking around for an entire year and had to sell off jewelry just to go snowboarding. So she asked him—did he really want to start this new chapter in his life with a person who was less-than?

I was officially less-than.

And I was judged to be less-than, not by my own mother, but by someone else’s. It’s the shame that endures, you know? The shame lasts so much longer than the heartbreak. This is why the Squawking Chicken spent so much time shaming me at home. Shaming me by barbecue pork. Shaming me in public. Shaming me with love in the hope that I would avoid being shamed by strangers, by mothers of boyfriends for whom I wasn’t good enough. The same way she was shamed by her husband’s family who tried to make her feel like she wasn’t good enough.

I realized then that the tragedy wasn’t Bobby leaving me. The deepest cut was that my experience with Bobby led me to realize the Squawking Chicken’s greatest fear: I had become her. And worse still, I didn’t have to. Ma gave me every opportunity to avoid being powerless so that I would
never be at the mercy of a man. And I had voluntarily put myself at the mercy of a man the way she seemed to always find herself at the mercy of them. This force of a woman, with the most indomitable spirit I have ever known, a phoenix seemingly undefeatable, didn’t want me to be like her at all.

Nothing is more humbling than to know your mother’s darkest truth. The Squawking Chicken’s darkest truth was that her wanting me to be more-than was based on her belief that she was the one who was less-than. It’s up to me to prove that she isn’t. That started by loving smarter. For both of us.

Two days after we met briefly at work and well before we’d even had our first conversation, Jacek went home and told his mother about me. Right from the start, I was never less-than for Jacek. Which is why he’s never been less-than for the Squawking Chicken.

He doesn’t flinch when she sticks her hand out and asks for money. He has submitted to every baffling feng shui fortune-telling requirement even when he doesn’t understand it. In 2008 we visited my parents in Hong Kong for
Christmas. One day before we left to go sightseeing on our own, Ma wanted me to bring a sweater. It was warm, I didn’t want to carry it around. Jacek had a small messenger bag with him, but he didn’t want to carry it around either. She suggested that he was lazy, and that made him a bad husband because he would rather risk me catching cold than be inconvenienced. Understandably, he was annoyed. But he didn’t take it personally and he didn’t challenge her either. Instead, he defused the situation by laughing it off, tucking the sweater into the bag, and teasing her to change the mood. By these small gestures and his good-natured submission, he was passing her tests.

Jacek has had to endure many of Ma’s tests. He passed his first test when he was invited to come over to the house. Ma’s doctors were monitoring her kidney function at the time. They needed to evaluate her urine over a period of twenty-four hours, so she’d been urinating into a jug that she kept in a cupboard above the bathroom sink. Dad was busy doing something else and couldn’t reach up and get it for her. From the kitchen, I heard her ask MY NEW BOYFRIEND:

“Jacek, can you help me to do my twenty-four-hour pee-pee?”

I didn’t panic. I didn’t rush over with a million excuses. I
didn’t worry that he’d break up with the girl whose mother walked around telling perfect strangers to handle her pee-jug. But I was impressed with the guy who handled Ma’s pee-jug, no problem. And so was the Squawking Chicken. Sure, it was an unorthodox request. But his desire to be helpful trumped his discomfort. He wasn’t embarrassed by the request because he wasn’t thinking about himself. He was just thinking that this woman was obviously sick and needed his assistance. Jacek proved that he is not driven by ego. His natural reaction to her twenty-four-hour pee-pee showed he is self-assured enough to not let ego damage relationships. That he is mature enough to not be petty. That he is strong enough in his own self to know that being with a strong woman doesn’t make him less of a man, but in actuality, even more of a man. And also that he has empathy. He was able to fill in the blanks, give her the benefit of the doubt that she wouldn’t be asking him to help her with her twenty-four-hour pee-pee if not for her ongoing health issues.

Jacek was there for her when she was hospitalized before her POEMS syndrome diagnosis, shriveled to ninety-five pounds, scared and hurting, and struggling to communicate in English with a medical team that couldn’t figure out what was killing her. I had a work commitment and had to travel.
Ma was insistent that I not jeopardize my career because of her health problems. So it was Jacek who flew from Vancouver to Toronto to spend a week at her bedside, taking the day shift so Dad could sleep and spend the nights there, setting up his workstation in the corner of the room, lifting the straw to her mouth when she was thirsty, discussing with the doctors their next course of treatment, buoying her spirits when she became despondent, distracting her by asking her to tell him her history. With her life in the balance, the Squawking Chicken had a son to support her and stand up for her. Jacek is the husband to me that she had waited thirty years for Dad to be for her.

Is it a great love story or a sad love story that the Squawking Chicken only experienced marital satisfaction when she was facing possible death? Dad had disappointed Ma in his youth. He was incapable of defending her and their partnership in the face of family conflicts. In overcoming his own insecurities, however, he tried to demonstrate to her that they could confront obstacles together, united. He pledged to her that it would be different when she came back to him. Even still, given her grudging nature, and conditioned by a lifetime of
emotional treachery, she struggled with forgiveness. Before her illness, every time Dad was in a funk, every time they got into an argument, she’d dredge up the past, she’d list all his inadequacies, she’d recount, over and over again, the incidents when he’d let her down, the occasions when he didn’t have her back. Ma’s inability to Get Over It became as detrimental to their love as Dad’s past shortcomings.

Ma was waiting for her warrior. And just as she thought her life was over, he came. Dad was single for ten years after Ma left him. There were colleagues at work who tried to set him up. He once went on a few dinner dates with a woman who was interested in more. Ma told me later that when the woman pressed, Dad couldn’t do it. I was his priority. And he was waiting. Dad was waiting for the Squawking Chicken to come back. Every night he’d study until two or three o’clock in the morning, then he’d get up to drive me to school and he’d take on as many jobs as he could. On the days he felt tired and wanted to give up, he’d think of his motivation: Ma had promised she’d come back when he deserved her. Ma was his motivation. Ma has always been his
only
motivation. It’s not that Dad loves me less than he loves her, but Dad’s life—his happiness, his dreams—has never been dependent on mine. He understands and accepts that I will find my own fulfillment separate from him. His fulfillment, however, is inextricably linked to her.

In her sickness, Dad found his redemption. Morning to night he was there with her in the hospital. We’ve never seen a more devoted husband, the nurses would say. He changed her diapers. He cleaned up the vomit. A small person himself, he carried her in his arms up and down the halls because it was too painful for her to sit in a wheelchair, her bones bumping up against the steel. I saw the determination in his face, even as his thin arms trembled from muscle spasms and his legs wobbled from the weight.
Let me do this for you now,
he was saying.
Let every step be an apology for every time I let you down before.
As he cradled her they would dream together, making plans for after recovery.

When you get better, we’ll go here . . .

When you can walk again, we’ll do this . . .

Will I ever walk again?
she asked.

You have to walk again
, he’d answer.
You are the only thing I have. You are the only thing I have ever had.

And this is my father’s darkest truth: he may not have always known how to keep her, but the Squawking Chicken is all he’s ever wanted.

Ma finally felt wanted.