Lucky Me

My mom has been here to help me with Winston for a month by now, and will be here for another month. While many people I know have troubled relationships with their parents, I have been most fortunate in having a great one with my mom, largely due to her.

I am perhaps overall more exact and demanding on many aspects of childcare and housework. That is a territory that usually creates the most conflicts. Many of my friends complain about their parents or parents-in-law for being either too demanding, too old-fashioned, too nagging, or too un-yielding in their own ways to the point that they are effectively a destructive and annoying presence, especially when they play the "guilt" card (i.e. we raised you and therefore how can you treat us like this, etc, etc). One of my friends once jokingly said to me, "most Chinese grandparents create trouble or misery for their kids, even though they think they are not. My parents don't, because they know never to voice opinions on my household matters or childcare, and that makes them perhaps the top 10 percentile of the Chinese grandparents. Your mother not only does not create any headache for you, she does everything better than you could ask for and all, and even help alleviate the mental stress in your life. That makes her the top 1 percentile of the grandparents."

Indeed on that front, I have been very lucky. I can't imagine what life would have been like this past month without my mom being here to help take care of a sick Winston meticulously (and in many ways even better than I have, which I cannot say about anyone else), while cooking nice meals (she thinks that we don't eat well enough) and keeping the house clean and tidy. Except for when Winston is sleeping, my mom never rests. And most importantly, during this month of constant sickness of Winston (he went through a bad cold, a thrush and a most nerve-racking case of obsessively chewing the inside of his mouth as an aftermath of thrush), she's been providing a ton of emotional support and sharing her wisdom on life.

When I told my mom that my friend considers her the top 1 percentile of the parents of our generation, she characteristically dismissed it as impossible. She has no idea how many people in our generation are miserable because of the parents! :)