Enter Mother

Mother is a bit like me.

She doesn't realise it yet. But I know. I've repeated some of her histories and learned from my choices. Her story is remarkable and when I ask her for it she tells me little save for the words: My Story Is Very Sad

I believe her. I'm 21 now and for years I've made assumptions and been caught up in my own world. Oblivious to hers. Perhaps I just wasn't as perceptive. When I ask her to tell me about her life in Cambodia, when she was a young girl, she speaks quietly and methodically, trying to recall what she can from her past. I want to start off with good memories, so I ask her

Tell me about your happiest time.

She doesn't understand. But she does tell me her parents sent her to french school and she recites flawlessly for me:

Parlez-Vous Français?

Little escapes from her, I try to penetrate her round eyes, they are glassy and red. She tells me some more. About being alone and very young. About how she escaped from bad people. About using rice to barter and bargain. She has been seperated from her family. Seeking charity from other families, trying to find her way back to Battambang. She tells me the man in the family, looks at her funny, She doesn't tell me any more and I am left to exercise my own horrors.

My mother and her brother are both orphaned in Cambodia. Their Aunty (her father's sister) adopts them both and in 1983, they all migrate to Australia. The family consists of my mother and her brother Sam, The Aunty's own three children, plus her sister's son and another adopted boy.

I don't know much about my mother from before I was born. I do know, she was incredibly beautiful and that she worked hard and saved money. She tells me that her Aunty (The matriarch) was very controlling and took her money. She tells me that she couldn't stand living with the family and that she chose to marry, only to leave the house as soon as she possibly could.

I favoured my father over my mother whilst growing up. This of course has completely reversed. She wasn't a very good mother to be honest. My brother and I were often, always hungry, especially at school. Sometimes we would have no lunch. She got into gambling and would usually leave my brother and I to fend for ourselves. Sometimes she would lock us in the house overnight or the weekend and have the neighbour keep an eye out. We lived on noodles. I didn't like the company she kept, the people she hung out with. My mother's thirst for easy money was insatiable and it inevitably was her down fall.

My mother did devote herself to religion. Her shrines held statue upon statue, idol upon idol, offering upon offering. In retrospect I found it somewhat ironic that what she offered to her idols were always much more lavish then what we got offered. But, in any case, we always got to eat the fruit after the gods were done, "spiritually munching". Though with mother being neglectful mother, flowers wilted, fruits bruised and browned and fruit-flies buzzed and swarmed. Our family co-existed symbiotically with a colony of cockroaches. The kitchen was their breeding ground. But we lived with it.

Three kids later, and I may have single handedly been the one to seperate her from them. Although perhaps her incarceration is possibly a large playing factor. Years of neglect hurtled out of my mouth when the kind people from DoCs interviewed me. I got in big trouble by my uncle for ratting out my mother. Big argument. The turbulent episode resulted in me smearing FUCK YOU in red oil paint (and that stuff doesn't wash off easy) all over my bedroom door ( I was living with the Matriarch at this point). Uncle kicked a hole through my door and as the door swung open, it punctured out a hole in one of my paintings. The painting was due the next day for assessment and was the one I considered the best.( Until the hole of course).

to be cont...