my mother

my mother grew up with a huge paddy field facing the back of their house.

wait, now i make it seem as if the house was big, but it wasn't. the house doesn't really matter that much, and it wasn't big but they still had everything they needed.

one mother, one father and 13 children in house and i think they were all sharing rooms. maybe they had two rooms. and they had a kitchen with a little wood stove. my mother learned to cook when she was 6 or something. no-one taught her how to cook - or that's what she tells me - she just learned it. that's why my mother never taught me how to cook either, she said that it's my responsibility to learn it, so i look up recipies online.

but yes, it was a tiny house after our standards, but they had an enormous farm. and a huge paddy field. her mother's dowry was the huge farm with a paddy field. my mother's mother's father was a rich man, he owned an umbrella factory. he married his daughter off to an educated man that worked for an english cream and powder company. i don't know what his title was. but it seems like something fancy but useless. i just know that he was extremely clever and intelligent and educated, and he didn't need to work on the rice field.

they had other people to do that. my mother sometimes tells me that her mother was a beautiful person because she would always give jobs to people who needed it, cook for them and she never cheated them. when we had people working on our house in norway, my mother cooked for the workers too. she would say: "this way they will work better - do not save on anything, be generous to those who are doing something for you - you must never let people go hungry".
i asked her if that didn't seem a little egoistic to her - why did she make it sound so nice and humanitarian when she wasn't solely doing it for the sake of the workers' hungriness, but also for the fact that it would affect their work that they were doing for us in a better way? she said that that doesn't matter when what you are doing is a good deed. we never finished the conversation, but i think she would have emphasised that it was based on good-will rather than a self-interest and i wouldn't have accepted it anyway.

my mother's mother died when my mother was 14. my mother only tells me happy stories from when her mother was alive. how she would laugh, how cute she was or stories of unfairness (from a child's perspective; as when your mother takes your toy from you and gives it to your younger sibling). she always smiles when she tells me those stories. we talk about her mother because she didn't die in the war. it was unfair that she died, but no-one could have prevented it.


i don't want to ask her about the other stories, i usually only ask her about things that were nice in one way or another. how they fled from the war and stuff, i don't ask so much about that. did they hide in bunkers as you see those people in pictures do? those people with ripped t-shirts - mommy, were you one of them? although sometimes my mother makes fun of pictures like that. she'd say: "i remember us laying like that and your youngest uncle started crying because he wanted to poop but he couldn't".

and then she laughs. i wonder if my mother knows that i want to know, but i don't know how to ask.

you know.
it's unfair to me too. i know all about cells and embryos, so i probably wouldn't have been alive if it hadn't been for the war, because then my mother and my father probably never would have met and they would never have had intercouse at the time they did and I would never be here.

nonethelss, my mother would maybe had had a better life without the war and she would have married someone else and they would have had other children - beautiful lucky children that got to grow up milking cows and making cow shit into compost and stuff. and my mother would have taught them the names of all the different types of mangos, because there are so many of them, there are unbelievably many mangoes and my mother knows almost all of them.

but in stead of that, in stead of raising her children in a place she could have called home, she raised us somewhere were she didn't know the names of anything. she must have felt stupid. she couldn't even understand the language, she didn't know much about where she was living; she didn't know much about the trees, the flowers, the fruits and the berries, but she had to raise her children there anyway. and that was unfair to all of us, but it was uttermost unfair to my mother.