Written by Liên, my second daughter, who lovingly went back to the botanical garden three times to get me a hat. The first time she went back, the store sold out of all the hats. The second time, the store was closed. The third time, the store was stocked with ALL colors and she picked purple, the color she'd have told me to get while we were there.
A few months later when I was in a flower shop in Irvington, NY with Jane, I spotted the same hat on the sale rack. There was only one, so we didn't get to choose the color, but we got it for Jane to match with me. We look fabulous. Sisters with matching hats do.
For three months, there were four generations of women living in my house. When I gave birth to my baby girl, my mom and my grandmother (or Bà, as we call her in Vietnamese) visited me during my maternity leave. It was a magical time filled with tap dancing, slapstick comedy movie nights, Bà's favorite card game "tam cúc," incredible home cooked meals, and of course plenty of cooing over the new baby.
The time flew by. Before I knew it, it was time to go back to work and my mom and Bà would be returning home. On our last day off together, I thought it would be nice to let my mother choose any outing she wanted. We lived 3700 miles apart, Bà was getting older, and my baby was still so young. Who knew when the four of us would all be together again? What special memories should we make on our last day? I was ready to do whatever my mother chose. Would it be a hike? A park? A beach?
My mom chose Pearl Harbor. I took a deep breath. I've lived in Hawaii for 13 years and I've somehow always managed to escape the inevitable pull to visit Pearl Harbor. I love exploring Oahu, but frankly I just haven't had any desire to go to a touristy historical site. "No Mom," I complained. "That sounds so boring. Let's go to a botanical garden instead!" My mom agreed. And just like that, I had given my mother the freedom to choose any activity and in an instant I had taken it back. I felt mildly guilty, but I was sure I had made the right call. Walking among orchids and rainbow eucalyptus trees sounded so much more fun and relaxing than learning about military attacks.
The four of us got ready for the day. As I was loading my baby in the car, my mom suddenly looked panicked. "Where's Bà?!" she asked. I didn't see much need for alarm until my mom ran into the front yard mortified, yelling for Bà to stop peeing on my plants. She was too late.
A word about Bà. She is 97 years old and 85 pounds. In the medical world, we refer to her as "pleasantly demented." She has a happy-go-lucky smile and a propensity for only remembering good things (in the three months she lived with us, she insisted that my newborn never cried, not even once). Her memory has worsened so much over the last couple years that sometimes she mixes up, or even outright forgets, most of our family members. And what my mother had been too embarrassed to share with me until this moment was that sometimes she also tries to pee outside. We were off to an interesting start.
Despite that little hiccup, we made it to Foster Botanical Garden. After walking around for a bit, I sat on a bench to nurse my baby. Bà said she needed to rest and sat on the bench next to me. As soon as my mother started walking away, Bà jumped up and walked to a bush with the same focus my dogs get when they're about to mark something. "Mom," I called out, "Mom, come back!" My mom ran over and stopped Bà from peeing in the middle of the botanical garden just in time. Crisis averted.
We grabbed lunch at a Vietnamese restaurant nearby and then returned to the gardens. I needed to change my baby so we made a bathroom stop. Bà refused to join us, saying she did not need to use the bathroom and would prefer to rest on a nearby bench. While I was changing my baby, I overheard my mom screaming, "Mę!" (which means mom in Vietnamese) “Mę, no0000000oo!!" I jumped up and watched my mom rushing from the bathroom to Bà, who was peeing in the middle of the botanical garden. My mom tried to convince Bà to come with her to the bathroom. "I don't need to now," Bà replied in Vietnamese, "I already went."
I asked my mother if anyone had seen Bà peeing in plain sight and she told me she didn't think so. "Well," I responded, "if they hadn't noticed on their own, they probably did when you started yelling like that." We laughed. It had been a long day and Bà was already beating us 2:1. It was time to go home.
On our way out, we swung by the botanical garden's gift shop. There were a bunch of cute sun hats in an array of colors and my mom decided to buy one as a souvenir. "Which one do you think would be fun?" she asked with a bright smile. "Blue? Purple? Pink?" She started trying them on one by one. I was distracted by Bà suddenly making her way out the door and beelining toward some nearby bushes. "MOM!!" I cried. We were both thinking the same thing. My mother threw the hats down and we abruptly left the store, giggling the whole way. We stopped Bà, guided her into the car, and made our way home in a hurry. Oh, sneaky Bà. We had managed to tie 2:2, but we had to leave the hats behind.
That evening, I recounted my day to my sister. Her response was, "Well... if you had known all that would happen, you would've chosen Pearl Harbor!"
No comments:
Post a Comment