Habit Creature 1: Watermelon Seeds

My salty little wishes

I made a wish once. I wanted my mom to live forever.

I was a wizard, then. I had a secret code to the fountain of youth, and it was a pair of tweezers.

When I was younger, mom and I had a little dance. She would sit on the toilet, and I’d stand on the bathroom counter. One by one, I’d pull gray hairs from her head — some form of harvest — whereby I was reversing her aging, I believed.

That was my pilgrimage, and it was to my mother’s scalp — one religiously scrubbed with Head and Shoulders 2-in-1 shampoo. Efficiency was everything then, as it is now — dandruff and I, we’re one and the same.

That’s the way we grew up. Be sparing, be gracious, and most importantly, be safe.

My parents didn’t play it safe, I don’t think.

Mom couldn’t have. She came to the United States with her sister and her mother and that was about it. And that was everything. And that was enough. Oh, but they deserved so much more. Oh, but deserving doesn’t get you anywhere. She was a kid and then she wasn’t (why must life always go like this? If you could live it in reverse, would you?). She threw in an application to a school in New York, threw away her parents’ dream of having three doctor daughters, and through it all she was running running running and she didn’t even know it. She was quick, and she had to be. When you must, that is how you learn to run.

Dad’s safety was different. It was himself.

He was the guy who could walk into a room and start a conversation with anyone and they would end up both being from West Islip, even if they’d never been to Long Island. Dad was like glue.

­­­­­­­­­. . .

When they teach you to write in elementary school, they tell you about small moments. That life is, of course, how we spend these small moments, that life is momentary, and we are small. They warn you of this while you sit cross-legged on the floor. You’re waiting for a recess, and you will keep on waiting. Your innocence is no match for your education, you learn from a young age that the bigger picture doesn’t matter, and you are but legs and hands on the merry-go-round, legs and hands on that floor. They teach about watermelon stories and small moment seeds.

Mom eats watermelon seeds for breakfast. They are salty and they make her fingers swell. Mom is full of stories.

They teach you to show, not tell (the teachers, the watermelon seeds). They teach you not to say what you mean, not to mean what you say. They teach you to fold your papers into hot dogs and write your essays into hamburgers, and the only thing they are right about is that writing will be your food, if you let it. Writing will eat you alive, if you let it.

They tell you life is a series of small moments, so here is one:

Mom walked in the door and said, “I can’t even imagine what the people in Starbucks were thinking when they saw grandma picking out a casket on her iPad.”

They’d met the cemetery guy for coffee. Grandma regretted that grandpa had turned into dust.

And that was the small moment.

Dad replied, hours later, “You know, caskets are a part of life and we’ll pick ours out sometime. Maybe not at Starbucks, because of the union stuff.”

We were in the car then. So that was another.

. . .

I am meeting my parents again. Can you tell?

. . .

A lot of my stories with my dad start in the car. That’s when we can sit long enough for the silence to evaporate, and then can ask questions without looking each other in the eye. That’s when we listen to music.

Dad was telling me about the time that he was ten. It only happened for an instant because that’s how it is when you’re the oldest of four, then later seven.

I know few more than two things about when my dad was young and the first is that he never was. He would never say that about himself. Actually, he is one of those whose youth you can see in their eyes and it only gets brighter as their hair gets thinner. Once, we drew a skelly board on the sidewalk with chalk, just to ask Seattle to be 1970 Long Island for a moment. Just to play a little. Just to show it was us who owned that concrete, us that had both feet on the ground.

The second thing I know about my dad is what he told me on that day, and this is that he loves the radio, still.

Actually, what he said was that I’m really lucky to live in a world with music streaming because when he was young, you would hear a song on the stereo once and have to live the rest of your life knowing you may never hear it again.

. . .

Like everything else, Dad fell into it gracefully, folding dumplings on Christmas. Dad never really fell, except once off a bike when I was too young to understand how a collar bone’s healing is like watching your body forgive itself for hurting: slow. Dad never really fell, except for my mother, of course. How weird: to think about mom and dad falling in love, to think of them as young people I’d never meet, to picture long gangly legs tumbling and tangling. Dad didn’t fall, wasn’t clumsy; though, mom — of course — was; but clumsiness, I posit, isn’t really intentional; so she can’t be blamed for her road having more bumps in it — at least, more that we could see.

Dad’s dad decorated the tree Christmas Eve, and his once-Jewish, born-on-December-25th mother sprayed fake snow on the windows, and one house became two became one became three, and family is the most confusing thing in the world sometimes: how it’s easy, and fractalious, and impossible all the same.

There’s something half about all of this, a very half-ness that was passed down to me, families in halves, festivities halved, religion half-assed, half-white, half-Asian happy holidays.

Mom wanted to feel American. I mean, Mom wanted the Christmas spirit without the pews and the service. I mean, she wanted lights to make a foreign place feel like home. She wanted to be white like me. I’m as white as I am Asian, I’m as Lin as I am Holland, would I have had more friends in middle school if my parents had been less feminist and I had taken my dad’s last name?

Half-white-half-Asian-happy means something will always be a compromise. ​​Popularity, of course, the most pressing of these concerns.

Dad fell, mom fell, we scraped our knees, made dumplings on Christmas, and decorated the tree in mid-December.

. . .

There are three storage boxes in our attic filled just with Christmas lights, and Mom thinks I’m a hoarder.

So, I mean she knows I get my habits from her own. Mom hates when I keep every magazine we receive, she loves when I come back with an art project made from scraps she already cut the coupons out of. Squeeze everything you can out of this country, so coming here was worth it. We find beauty in different things, we both are just collecting, collecting, collecting.

I’m documenting history in real time, I tell her. What I mean is, I have separation anxiety from every object that enters my realm of existence. I think books have feelings; I think the cups in the dishwasher know when I put one away before another; I spend ten minutes staring at my eggs before I cook them in the morning because I worry I’ll be separating a family, I worry seeing unborn chicks as precious is anti-feminist, I worry my writing won’t age well.

I learned emergency preparedness like a second language. Mom learned how to live through an emergency.

Cereal in the cupboard is better than no cereal in the cupboard.

Sometimes mom comes home with five boxes of Frosted Mini Wheats, eight jars of pasta sauce, three tins of peanuts. And we don’t know if it’s because she saved 30 cents, or if there’s some apocalypse coming that we don’t know about.

First lesson of motherhood: make sure there’s always something there. Second: motherhood is an impossible task.

. . .

When my parents tell the story of how they met, it goes like this: our professor set us up. And suddenly we’re here.

I tell it like folklore. Taiwan star meets New York rock and together they were the law (broken and written by someone else, trying and failing, unattainable). Together they were perfect. Together they were an oxymoron, together they were paradox, together they were a literary device that represents when you break the fourth wall and stare right into the reader’s eyes, shake their shoulders and say — God, I hope you find a love like that. One that lasts, but more so, one that firsts. That nods, and sleeps, and closes doors gently.

What really happened was they were 3Ls in a juvenile rights defense clinic and after a few rounds of group projects, it became obvious that everyone else got a different partner each time except for them. Loving: an assignment, an option, and a choice. They spent hot New York summers flinging triplets across a sweaty kitchen table.

. . .

People ask what it’s like having two lawyer parents.

I joke about not winning arguments growing up, which is funny only because I don’t argue much, and they don’t either.

Doors didn’t slam, I had a full-on breakdown the one time they got annoyed at one another and stepped aside to talk about it, and I could count the other times they raised their voices on one hand. This was different than the way they grew up. I don’t know what I’m so afraid of.

Rule number one: Never fall asleep angry. Rule number two: if you cook, I’ll clean.

People ask what it’s like having two lawyer parents.

I tell them I learned what forgiveness was. We grew up talking about abolition at the dinner table. I discovered disappointment. Wondered how to stay in love.

. . .

When they teach you to write in elementary school, they tell you about small moments. They don’t tell you that those are the only way you will ever know your parents. Their childhoods will become watermelon seeds, and those things will grow into the good and bad and ugly inside you all the same. You will carry the weight of the watermelons in your belly, and you may never taste the fruit. Or some other metaphor about sweetness. About how any seed you have turns into magic when time becomes a limited treasure, and it has to be love or something stronger that keeps you connected. Feeling lucky is in itself lucky. Having parents you taste even instants of gratitude for is in itself a gift. Everything I say is just a product of how I learned to navigate the world. We’re all just swimming; you probably see this differently.

Like: I think becoming a parent is the most precious thing a person can do, the most childish — to think you know enough about living to force it upon someone else. Write with your stomach, Julia. Think less, eat more, take all the candy, oranges, meat that’s growing from the table.

My parents gifted me with life, and they gifted me with themselves every day after that. I don’t understand. Being born was a lesson in forgiveness. The first time my mom forgave me was when I stretched the skin inside of her to make room for myself. The last, when I complained about having to return home. I forgave her for passing down waterlogged genes, that we were both on that boat, for reminding me of me. How does it feel to know I will never love somebody perfectly? Pointless, and it stings around my nose. Promising, and if there’s any point of being here then that is it.

. . .

I made a wish, I wanted my mom to live forever, and this became a habit.

The thing about the people we love is that they live as long as we do. And we live as long as the next, and as long as you’re loving, then, by default, it seems, you are living. You are infinite, I tell myself to cope with the emptiness. Everybody dies, but my mom must live forever; I can’t write without a burning sensation behind my eyes. All things come to an end, including lives and essays. Nothing really ends, including moms and I have — admittedly — no idea what else.