I tell you again that I’m moving to Seattle and I can see the words blur at the edges as they leave my lips, and I know that you won’t remember again. Our realities have been pulled apart by the thousands of miles I put between us a thousand years ago, but now they are also being pulled apart by you retreating, leaving, departing into a world where only your memories are real. You are leaving me, and I don’t know how to stop you. You are leaving me, and I feel angry, lost, blurred at the edges, just like my words. You are leaving me, and I feel orphaned.
So many of my memories of my mom start with me getting in trouble… The time when I was 5 and managed to lick all the icing off my aunt’s birthday cake when the adults weren’t looking. The time when I was 6 and was determined to find out whether a balloon would fit into my mom’s china cabinet – it almost did! The time that I was 7 and had built a flying apparatus and was determined to do a manned test flight as a proof of concept. Mom was always the disciplinarian, the strict parent, the one with the rules, the one in charge of making sure that I don’t run off with the circus or hop out of a window to see if I’d finally learned to fly. I, on the other hand, have always been skeptical of rules: if I couldn’t join the circus, then I would start my own by training the neighborhood stray dogs; if I wouldn’t be allowed to launch my flight prototype out of the window, I would at least challenge gravity by hopping off the top of that same china cabinet (again, that didn’t end particularly well). My mom and I, we clashed often, even if I did see the soft warmth in her eyes while I was getting punished.
But there was something that had always brought my mom and me together: our wanderlust. We would pull our world atlas off the shelf and pore over far away continents, planning trips of discovery and adventure. We planned rafting trips on the Amazon, trips to see Mount Kilimanjaro and the Eiffel Tower, trips to the pyramids in Giza and the Big Ben and the Great Wall of China. We played anagrams with names of countries and cities we had never seen. We pretended to eat with chopsticks the kinds of foods we had never tasted. The world was ours to discover, and all we needed was each other.
I would get into bed with her and demand she tell me a story. “Tell me about Egypt,” I would say and listen for the hundredth time about how she took a boat from Naples to Alexandria with two girlfriends. There had been a man who stared at the three of them the entire voyage, making these three fairly sheltered Armenian women absolutely terrified. After spending inordinate amount of time staking them out and just before their boat was about to dock in Egypt, the man came by, put thick gold necklaces around each of their necks, and proposed to marry them – mom couldn’t tell if this marriage proposal was more or less lurid than what they had been afraid of. Leave it to my mother to be offended by the fact that this proposal had been so indiscriminate – “how could he not care which one of us he was marrying?” They let him down gently, mainly because they were still afraid of him. But now they faced the fact that they had to come back to the Soviet Union with their ill-gotten gains of gold obtained in the West – one got investigated for less. And I still cannot believe that my rule following goody-two-shoes mother smuggled this necklace into the country in her bra. You go girl!
My mom had been beautiful once. The kind of beautiful that inspired artists – my childhood home is still filled with portraits of her. The kind of beautiful that inspired strange men to show up at my grandmothers house with gigantic bouquets of flowers, getting my mom into hot water with her older brother. But this had been before grief robbed her of her bloom: the grief of losing her first child, of being betrayed, of trying to feed and clothe and keep me warm through a war, the grief of surviving a war when so many didn’t, the grief of watching me leave as soon as I could get away. I had been hard for me to see her anything other than my mom: old, careworn, always ready to tell me *not* to do something. But she had been beautiful once.
She met Minas Avetisyan who had wanted to paint her. But leave it to my mother to refuse to sit for the man because his intensity gave her goosebumps – “it was as if he could see into your soul.” And she didn’t think it was appropriate to go looking into the souls of unfamiliar women when you were married. She met Catholicos Vazgen I (the head of the Armenian Apostolic Church at the time), and in her anxiety dropped her handkerchief. The Catholicos bent down to pick it up, which only amped my mom’s anxiety – the head of the church was absolutely not supposed to be doing that. “I am a man first, and a man of God second,” he had said. Had mom inadvertently flirted with the head of the Armenian church?
I would get into bed with her and demand that she tell me a story. And while normal kids got fairy tales, I got to hear about my mom riding a camel across a desert, going kimono shopping in Kyoto, skinny dipping in Bulgaria (mother!), and doing a polar bear plunge in Finland. I would fall asleep to her stories to dream up my own adventures, even though I would have totally let Minas paint me.
There is a picture of me at about 6 – I am sitting in a chair, nearly swallowed up by one of my mom’s dresses, shoulder pads and all (it was the 80s after all). I’m also wearing her heels and her red lipstick and grinning so hard that my face must have hurt. Did I ever tell her how incredibly cool I had always thought she was? Did I ever tell her how much she always inspired me? Did I ever tell her I was sorry for all the heartache I must have caused when I was growing up?
We sit over a cup of tea, and I tell you again that I’m moving to Seattle. We look at the world atlas together the way we used to a thousand years ago, and I show you Seattle on the map. But the contours are blurry, and I know that you won’t remember again. But it’s okay because you still remember Egypt, and Italy, and Japan, and Hungary, and Finland. So I put my head into your lap and say “tell me about Egypt,” and I listen for the thousandth time about how you took a boat from Naples to Alexandria with two girlfriends.
I miss you so much, mom…
Packing List for Immigration 