Bonding

EB turned eight a few weeks ago, and I had the opportunity to spend a mommy-EB day doing all of her favorite things – painting at a local painting class, going wall climbing and watching Big Hero 6. At one point while EB and I were painting, she turned to me and said with a bright smile: “I love spending time with you.” The words simultaneously jarred and melted me. It felt great to hear the words because I felt the same way. But it also reminded me of how little mother-daughter bonding time I had when I was EB’s age. And at that moment, I longed to have the same experience with my mom.

It’s not that my mom loved me any less than I love EB. Part of the reason is generational. Ask folks who were born before the 80’s, and they will marvel at how much we dote on our kids nowadays. We didn’t have any “scheduled” fun –we were expected to entertain ourselves. We were told to go out and play until dinner time. Things were just different back then. But the other major reason why Mom and I didn’t do what EB and I do today is simply this—when I was eight years old, my family and I had just immigrated to the U.S.

Instead of going to painting classes, Mom was tied up trying to learn English and make sense of a vastly different culture. Instead of conquering the climbing wall, she grappled with the basics like driving and grocery shopping. Mom was not the best driver (yes, the stereotype is true) and she committed to rote memory the directions from our apartment to the grocery store. During one of our shopping trips, she missed the turnoff into the supermarket. Instead of driving ahead and legally turning back around, she quickly looked behind her. And seeing that there were no other cars nearby, she frantically threw our car into reverse and backed up over 200 meters on a one-way, 45-mile-per-hour freeway, just to get into the parking lot.

And it wasn’t as if I was sitting at home, pining away for bonding time with my parents. I was grappling with scary, exciting experiences of my own. I took intensive ESL classes when I first started third grade, and I struggled with just about everything. Pronouncing the word “apple” was especially hard for me. Instead of saying it with a short “A,” I kept pronouncing it with long “A” – “ape-le”-- just because it sounded better to my ears. For months, I stubbornly refused to pronounce it the right way, until I noticed that kids from the class would giggle every time I said the word wrong.

In the end, bonding happens when we have a shared experience, large or small. So I guess, just as EB and I spend purposeful bonding time together, my mom and I bonded in our own ways. Together we marveled at how big everything was here in our new country– the food, the supermarket, the houses. We were both scared and bewildered but at the same time, excited at the strangeness of everything. And every little thing we did—learning to drive to the supermarket, learning to pronounce “apple”—was a collective adventure that we faced together.