I started writing a feature on my mother, I’m only like 15 pages in and 100+pages of notes. My mother is named Masina meaning Moon in Samoan. A famous Samoan saying “Amuia le masina, e alu ma toe sau” meaning “envy the moon, because it goes and returns”. Feel like this is about my mother specifically. A man from America put an ad out in the local paper for young women to apply for a house worker job, you just sent a passport picture and you would get hired if chosen. A couple of years later a passport with the photo, a work visa, and a ticket to LA. My mom hopped on the plane at 19 no English, no family there, and worked for the dude a month before escaping potential assault. She met my father in SF at a cricket game and did the Samoan thing of marrying and having kids. My mothers work visa ran out, so she worked her side hustles, she sewed, she made dolls, sold them, pushed us as babies in shopping carts while picking up cans, she made food and sold it while my pops worked at Jack In a Box and Dennys. My mother supported her fam in Samoa, almost co-dependently where it was almost toxic. This sparked fights and before you know it I was visiting my father in jail to ask for the rent check. My fathers only formal education in life was Sunday school and domestic violence classes that I attended with him as a translator. As much as I loved my father he was complicated and did harm to her. I can say the same possibly for my mother, but parents are people, and people are complicated. My mother had to leave my father and I. She finally got her citizenship years later and helped other Samoan women get their citizenship. She sent my younger brothers to private school in NZ. She got my older sisters jobs at the assembly line she was at. She worked her ass off, like 18-20hr days. She did that until she couldn’t physically and ended up paralyzed from a stroke. She lives between her bed and the hospital. Literally. Her feet will never touch the floor again. I’ve learned so much about giving your everything with no expectations. Being older and changing my mother’s diaper is a telling moment. You have to think about what exists in between your own birth as roles and age have changed. I’m remembering this time my mother returned home, the last kid to go and my first time in Samoa. The first rest I seen her have in all my life, my mother has never known sleep and “lazy” is not her friend. Last week she returned home from the hospital to critique me over facetime on how fish should be cooked while she watches old wrestling youtubes, something about her watching muscled up men pretending to fight each other with thousands watching them in the crowds after coming home from her thousand-plus surgery makes me rethink strength and the ideas in my mind of this sort of grand “return”.
