“Dan Tuhanmu telah memerintahkan agar kamu jangan menyembah melainkan hanya kepada-Nya dan hendaklah berbuat baik kepada kedua orang tua.
Dan jika salah satu dari keduanya atau kedua-duanya telah berusia lanjut dalam pemeliharaanmu maka sekali-kali janganlah kamu mengatakan kepada keduanya perkataan ‘ah’ dan janganlah kamu membentak keduanya.
Dan ucapkanlah kepada keduanya perkataan yang mulia, dan rendahkanlah dirimu terhadap keduanya dengan penuh kasih sayang dan ucapkanlah: ‘Wahai Tuhanku, sayangilah mereka keduanya, sebagaimana mereka telah menyayangi aku sewaktu kecil.’” (Al Israa’: 23-24)
It rarely feels like it’s alright. To keep this as a secret, to keep lying to everybody, and smile every time I’m trying to lie. But it doesn’t matter now. Not anymore. For now I have seek the reasons, imploring rationale and being strong.
I am being melancholy for the time being. I reached UPM at about 10.00 earlier tonight. And all that greeted me was that feeling of betrayal and rejection. This is how I imagined things will happen anyway, so it’s not that I am shocked or anything. But I’ve got to tell that I’d feel disappointed with a few human beings right now. Especially after came back from home, these hard feelings keep creeping inside my ribs and crushing my chest from deep within. I think the main problem now is me feeling homesick. I miss my mother, my father, and my siblings, as well as my nephews and nieces. And when those people here treat me like crap, it doesn’t help in any ways. In fact, my mood dramatically swing and my hatred magnified enormously.
And to tell the truth, I felt like being stabbed in the back. A few really wrong facebook statuses can really mess up your relationship with people. And it’s easy to play the victim card, to tell everybody that somebody crossed you or wronged you, when in fact you know that you are just being hypocrite. You’re just like the Jews.
And I am keeping a promise to myself to help my mother. It was a secret between us. I cannot stand to see my mother suffering when what she should do now instead is enjoying her life downhill. It’s unfair to her to have only her kids as possession and not a single fancy clothe or jewelry, or a piece of land, or anything else for a change. Damn it! So I said a promise to her to help her in some ways so that she would be happy. But it’s a secret so I won’t tell anybody.
And now I’ve finished reading few novels. The Bonesetter’s Daughter particularly had really gripped me. Amy Tan, the author had once again taught me that taking care of your parents is not because you are responsible for them, but because you love them. And this is how I’ve been feeling these three days I was at home. I was feeling like a useless kid. I don’t know how to make my parents as happy as they were. I really hoped that I could give them more money, and hoping that I am hardworking enough to give them a massage on their old knees, or hardworking enough to help doing the chores around the house. It really broke my heart to see the face of my tired father who just came back from the rubber farm. And the face of my mother every time my niece or nephew being disobedient and naughty.
Sometimes they cried at night for the fate that should have not befallen them. It’s not their fault anyways. We were happier than this before. We are one big family, with laughter and closeness. But it all went wrong. It went wrong somewhere. So that now my father is sacrificing his old days for somebody else’s sake, and my mother sacrificing her long-seek freedom for her child.
Amy Tan many times highlighted this issue in her books. How a mother is willing to sacrifice even her own life just for the sake of her child. Many characters in her book attempted suicide so that they would give their child a stronger life of their own. That mothers before they died swore that if anybody dared to lay a finger on their child, their restless spirit will haunt them and bring them bad luck. So thanks to superstition, they had saved their children from the cruelty of relatives and stepmothers.
My mother is one of the mothers. I know that she would protect the life of her children even if that means she would jeopardize her own. My mother went through a lot just to make us happy. How that full cauldron of boiling oil burnt her skin, was the testament of her love to us. It was my sister’s engagement day. How every time we ask for our own favourite dishes, she would try to prepare them no matter what.
And the thing that I think made my mother is the strongest of them all is that she would never know the name of her own mother. I often wonder how my mother put herself to sleep at night without thinking of her real mother. She was abandoned by her own mother, for goodness’s sake. Amy Tan also only knew the name of her real mother and her grandmother the day her mother died, only that because her mother was an immigrant and she used a different name in America, but her mother never left her side. And like Amy Tan’s, my mother is also a Chinese.
It must be painful to not knowing your real mother. And you are walking this planet without knowing to whom or to which family you actually belong. It must be very painful.
Sometimes I prayed that I also would have the chance to meet my real grandmother. No matter who she is, I wanted to know why she left my mother. And to ask her whether she had ever loved my mother or not in her whole life, or did she ever regretted her decision to abandon my mother. But her existence is still a mystery. Is she still alive? Was life so hard for her that she decided she could not keep my mother?
I don’t know if she also attempted suicide to give my mother a better life of her own. But I’d always hope that my mother would not leave this world without knowing the name of her own mother.
No comments:
Write curses