Unbearable Weight
January 28, 2018
My mother makes kimchi on the kitchen floor. She fills three large tubs, the kinds you use to bathe infants, with cabbage, salt water, and gochugaru seasoning; cross-legged and wearing plastic disposable gloves, she slices each cabbage head with a knife the size of my forearm, salts the leaves, and tosses them in red spice. Just six years old, I sit in the living room adjacent to the kitchen. Between pages of my coloring book, I watch. Her motions are deft with years of practice. As easily as she draws princesses or dresses salads, she packs fresh kimchi into brown sealable plastic boxes, tight as a swaddle. Once she is done, she will stack the boxes on the counter, where over the course of the week the kimchi will ripen and fill the house with its strong and familiar smell.
She is still young, in her mid-thirties, hands healthy, the veins not yet showing through. As I grow older, my own hands will develop into hers: small, dainty, and slender, middle finger curved slightly outward. She tells me that this particular characteristic comes from the years she has spent holding pencils the wrong way.
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In the spring of 2017, I am diagnosed with depression. I have been fighting with my mother for two straight months, to the point where we rarely speak anymore without a third party mediating the conversation, my father and my sister struggling to hold together a family that is slowly crumbling apart. On the surface, the conflict is simple: my mother does not approve of my current boyfriend. Deeper, there lies the fear that she is losing me; that this small act of rebellion symbolizes eighteen years of upbringing and edification and guidance slipping through her fingers. She grips tighter. She is forty-seven. Her hands have started to shake when she holds onto something for too long.
The week before spring break, I am attempting to finalize travel plans. I text my mother to ask her about flights from San Francisco to Raleigh-Durham. She responds by telling me that she does not want me to come home. She does not think she can handle the strain of seeing me. She says, I am so depressed and emotional that I cannot have you here.
In South Korea, clinical depression does not exist. To admit to a mental health issue is to admit weakness. To be unable to overcome one’s problems on one’s own is to succumb to a personal failing. South Korea also happens to have one of the highest suicide rates in the world.
I call my father and tell him that I want to start seeing a therapist. My mother, meanwhile, refuses help. She has been baking since my junior year of high school; now, she throws herself into the kitchen. The pastries pile up. She cannot knead bread for too long, because it makes her wrists ache for hours afterward.
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When I was two years old, my mother was accepted into professional school at Rutgers University. Since my father was already working, she enrolled me in daycare so that she could attend classes during the day and return in the afternoon to pick me up.
She won’t tell me this story until I’m seventeen, of how this arrangement lasted less than a week. From the moment she dropped me off, I would cry, sometimes so hard that I would make myself throw up, until the caretakers, unable to quiet my tears, would call her to come get me. Only in her arms would I finally be calm. She says that the reason she became a homemaker is because she and my father decided that someone needed to take care of me, and she was willing to make that unimaginable sacrifice for my sake.
I sometimes wonder when I developed my propensity for dramatics. Like depression, our ability to express emotions is hereditary. It’s likely, then, that I was born with it.
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My family likes to go on walks. We can’t fit four abreast on a sidewalk, so we pair off: my father with my sister, my mother with me. She laces her fingers with mine. In appearance, our hands are remarkably similar, but for the twenty-nine-year difference etched into every line on her skin.
I have terrible circulation, so she tucks both our hands into the pocket of her coat, rubbing her thumb against my knuckles. You need to put on more lotion, or you’ll get wrinkles well before your time. I always roll my eyes when she says this. She started buying me anti-aging cream when I was fifteen, and I’ve probably preempted so many wrinkles that I’ll still be clear and glowing at seventy. Yet in the same way that she discusses studying and red wine, she never forgets to remind me that more is always better in cases like these.
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In April, there are days so apathetic that I can barely drag myself out of bed in the morning. I don’t discuss it much with my friends, unwilling to burden them with my problems. I talk to my therapist. He listens well.
Despite the sadness, I cannot get myself to cry. To provoke tears, I watch videos of dogs greeting their owners returning home from war. It is exhilarating to feel an emotion strong enough to rouse my body from its stupor to react in the way that it should.
I break up with my boyfriend on April 23.
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Only recently have we begun to talk about it. My mother and I, cross-legged in a hotel room, cry together one December evening, the first time the subject has ever occupied the space between us so openly. Later, my parents and I retire to the bar downstairs, where my mother orders a glass of Cabernet and my father a peach bellini, which, once the waiter turns away, he slides over the table to me. We eat parmesan truffle fries and I get tipsy off of a single drink. This, too, is genetic.
There will still be nights when I sit in my room and stare at the wall, unable to work, unable to move, unable to do much more than wrap myself in blankets and hope that sleep will fix whatever circuit in my brain has decided to short out. I don’t cry as much as I used to. I wonder how much of that comes from growing up. I wonder how much of my mother I carry in these hands of mine. She will often take them in hers and tell me, my hands used to look like this, too. Isn’t it sad, how old they look now?
I see her, twenty-nine and holding me for the first time. Her first daughter. Her first child. Reaching up to wrap all five fingers—thumb index middle ring pinky—around a single one of hers. I have never held my own child in my arms, but I imagine it must be the most exhilarating and terrifying thing in the world. I wonder at the years and experiences and memories that will one day carve themselves into my skin.
Isn’t it sad, daughter of mine?
Yes, Mom. It most certainly is.
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