Kyung-sook Shin - Please Look After Mom

She stops and looks at you. “Tell me something about Mom.”

“About Mom?”

“Yes, something about Mom that only you know about.”

“Name: Park So-nyo. Date of birth: July 24, 1938. Appearance: Short, salt-and-pepper permed hair, prominent cheekbones, last seen wearing a sky-blue shirt, a white jacket, and a beige pleated skirt. Last seen…”

Chi-hon’s eyes get smaller and finally close, pushed toward sleep.

“I just don’t get Mom. Only that she’s missing,” you say.

I have to go now, but I can’t seem to make myself leave. The whole day has gone by while I was sitting here.

Oh no.

I knew this was going to happen. This is something that would happen in a comedy. My goodness, it’s so chaotic. How can you laugh in this situation? Your eldest is saying something to you, putting his hat on over there. What is he saying? What? Oh, he wants to go to the ski slopes. You tell him he can’t. You’re telling him that, since your move back here, he hasn’t been able to keep up in school, and that he has to study with Dad during this break to make sure he can catch up when school starts again. If he doesn’t do that, it’s going to be hard to do well in school. While you’re talking to him, the baby, who’s just learning to walk, is about to eat some rice that’s fallen under the table. You must have eyes on your hands. You’re talking to your eldest and looking at him, but your hands are taking away the dust-covered rice from the baby. The baby is about to burst into tears, but then clings to your legs. You fluidly grab the baby’s hand as he is about to fall over, as you explain to your eldest why he has to study. Your eldest, looking around him, maybe not listening to you, yells, “I want to go back! I don’t like it here!” The girl runs out of her room, calling, “Mom!” She’s whining that her hair is tangled. She’s asking you to braid her hair, quickly, because she has to go to cram school. Your hands are now fixing your daughter’s hair. All the while you’re talking to your eldest.

My, all three children are hanging from you now.

My dear daughter, you’re listening to all three children at once. Your body is trained to the needs of the children. You seat your daughter at the table and brush her hair, and when the eldest says he still wants to go skiing, you tell him as a compromise that you will talk to his dad about it, and when the baby falls down, you quickly put the brush down to help him up and rub his nose, then you pick it back up and finish your daughter’s hair.

Then you turn to look out the window. You see me sitting on the quince tree. Your eyes meet mine. You mumble, “I’ve never seen that bird before.”

Your children look at me, too.

“Maybe it’s related to the bird that was dead in front of the gate yesterday, Mom!” The girl grabs your hand.

“No… that bird didn’t look like this.”

“Yes, it did!”

Yesterday, you buried the dead bird under this quince tree. The eldest dug a hole, and the middle child made a wooden cross. The baby made a lot of noise. You picked up the bird and folded its wings as you slipped it into the hole that had been dug by the eldest, and your daughter said, “Amen!” Afterward, the girl called her dad at work and told him all about the burial. “I made him a wooden cross, too, Dad!”

The wind has knocked down the wooden cross.

Listening to your children’s chatter, you come over to the window to take a better look at me. Your children follow you to the window and stare at me. Oh, stop looking at me, babies. I’m sorry. When you children were born, I cared more about your mom than about you three. The girl stares at me, her hair braided neatly. When you, my granddaughter, were born, your mom couldn’t breastfeed you. When your older brother was born, she was discharged from the hospital in less than a week, but there were complications when she had you, and she stayed in the hospital for more than a month. I looked after your mom back then. When your other grandmother came to visit at the hospital, you cried and your grandmother told your mom to breastfeed you, to stop your crying. Watching your mom put you to her breast even though she didn’t have any milk, I glared at you, just a newborn. I even sent your other grandmother away and grabbed you from your mom’s arms and smacked your bottom. People say that when a baby is crying the paternal grandmother will say, “The baby is crying, you should feed her,” and the maternal grandmother will say, “Why is that baby crying so much, making her mom so tired?” I was exactly like that. You couldn’t have remembered it, but you liked your other grandmother more than me. When you saw me you said, “Hello, Grandmother!” But when you saw your other grandmother, you called out “Grandma!” and ran into her arms. I felt guilty every time, thinking you must know that I smacked your bottom soon after you were born.

You’ve grown so pretty.

Look at your thick head of black hair. Each of your braids is a fistful of hair. It’s the same as when your mom was little. I was never able to braid your mom’s hair. Your mom wanted long hair, but I always cut it in a bob. I didn’t have time to seat her on my lap and brush her hair. Your mom must be playing out her childhood wishes for long braided hair through you. She’s looking at me, but her hand is playing with your hair. Your mom’s eyes are clouding over. Oh dear, she’s thinking about me again.

Listen, dear. Can you hear me in all this noise? I came to apologize to you.

Please forgive me for the face I made when you came back to Seoul with the third baby in your arms. The day you looked at me with shock on your face, blurting out “Mom!” has been weighing on my heart. Why was it? Was it because you didn’t plan to have a third baby? Or was it because you were embarrassed to tell me that you had a third baby, when your older sister wasn’t even married yet? For whatever reason, you hid the fact that you’d had a third baby in that faraway land, instead suffering through morning sickness all by yourself, and only when you were about to give birth did you tell us that you were having a baby. I didn’t do anything to help when you had the baby, but when you came back, I said to you, “What were you thinking? What were you thinking, three babies?”

I’m sorry, dear. I apologize to the baby and to you. It’s your life, and you’re my daughter, my daughter with the amazing ability to concentrate when you solve problems. Of course you would find a solution for your situation. I forgot who you were for a second and said that to you. I’m also sorry for all the faces I made without even knowing it, every time I saw you after you came back from America. You were so busy. I visited you once in a while, and you were always busy chasing after the children. You were picking up clothes, feeding them, pulling up a fallen child, taking the book bag of the child who came home from school, hugging the child who ran into your arms calling “Mom!” You were busy making things for the children to eat the day before you went into surgery to have a cyst removed from your womb. You wouldn’t know how sad it made me, when I was at your house to look after the children and opened the door of the fridge. Four days’ worth of the children’s food was stacked neatly in the fridge. You explained to me, “Mom, give them the stuff on the top shelf tomorrow, then give them what’s under that the next day…,” while your eyes were sunk deeply in your face. You are that kind of person. The kind of person who has to do everything with your own hands. That’s why I said, “What were you thinking?” when you had the third baby. The night before your surgery, I picked up the clothes you’d taken off and left outside the bathroom while you took a shower. There were drops of plum juice on your shirt, which had frayed sleeves, and the seam of your baggy pants was ripped, and your old bra straps had millions of fuzzy bits on them, and I couldn’t tell what pattern your rolled-up underwear used to have. Flowers or water drops or bears? It was speckled with color. You were always a neat and clean child, unlike your sister. You were the child who would wash your white sneakers if there was even a pea-sized smudge on them. I wondered why you’d studied so much, if you were going to live like this. My love, my daughter. When I thought about it, I did remember that you liked young children when you were little. You were the kind of child who would unhesitatingly give something you wanted to eat to a neighbor’s child if it looked like he wanted it. Even when you were little, when you saw a child who was crying, you would go up to him and wipe his tears and give him a hug. I’d completely forgotten that you were like that. I was upset to see you wearing old clothes, with your hair tied back away from your face, busy and focused on raising kids, not even thinking about going back to work. I’m talking about the time I said to you, “How can you live like this?” while you were wiping the floor of the bedroom with a rag. Please forgive me for saying that. Although, back then, you didn’t seem to understand what I was talking about. Finally, I just stopped visiting your house. I didn’t want to see you living like that, when you had a good education and talent that others envied. My sweet daughter! You deal with what comes at you head on, without running away, and go forward with your life, but sometimes I was angry about the choice you’d made.