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My (Liberating) Secret Shame My (Liberating) Secret Shame
(about 2 hours later)
When I was 16, my mother told me that I would never be happier. Entering womanhood, leaving home, joining the work force, having children — these phases, according to her, would all be marked by suffering and disappointment.When I was 16, my mother told me that I would never be happier. Entering womanhood, leaving home, joining the work force, having children — these phases, according to her, would all be marked by suffering and disappointment.
I didn’t know how to tell her that I felt suffocated and anxious all the time, so I pretended to be the joyous, carefree girl that she wanted me to be.I didn’t know how to tell her that I felt suffocated and anxious all the time, so I pretended to be the joyous, carefree girl that she wanted me to be.
“I was happiest when I was your age,” she said. “Beautiful. Free. You should enjoy it now before it’s gone.”“I was happiest when I was your age,” she said. “Beautiful. Free. You should enjoy it now before it’s gone.”
I did not feel any of those things, only the clawing, panicked certainty that it must get better. But how could I question a body that once held me in its loving folds?I did not feel any of those things, only the clawing, panicked certainty that it must get better. But how could I question a body that once held me in its loving folds?
“I was the most beautiful one in my family,” my mother told me more than once. “So many men wanted to marry me. They came to my parents and begged to court me. I could have married anyone. A doctor from Texas. A French businessman.”
Instead, she married my father, a Vietnamese Catholic man from a good family. She moved from her close-knit community in Santa Ana, Calif., to San Jose, a distance that made her feel stranded at sea. She was 22, with a 33-year-old husband she barely knew. I was their first child. In the years to come, she kept trying to produce a brood of children, determined to follow the example of my grandmother, who birthed 10.