Coming of Age: Two Tens In
I’m not one to generally dwell on age, just because I know it’s a heavily used cliche and that I rather irritate when I hear moanings about age-increases in the early 20s. Whatever it is, though, I had a bit of a reality check today, just less than twenty days from my twentieth.
Since coming home from China, I’ve realized that I had to learn how to cope with my largest problem: I have a tendency to reveal as little information as possible about my daily/weekly/monthly schedule to anybody. Family included. Simply out of laziness or perhaps some internal mental setback (Freud, care to explain?) that has yet to be fully uncovered. Whatever the magical answer, I hit a snag with my mother this afternoon as I returned from an engagement, the second in a row this weekend, and she asked me about where I had gone and why I hadn’t told her.
Perhaps its an inner rebellion that I have never taken care of, but I always feel like a 6-year-old again, squirming in greasy sneakers, hands twisting around each other, picking at hangnails and cuticles when I have to answer the question. Although in all technicalities, I’ve done nothing she doesn’t want me to do. I’m not a sneaky type, and the only reason I ever drive out is to meet one of my girlfriends from MSA or attend an organizational meeting. Or maybe buy secret Hot Cheetos from the neighborhood Wal-Mart. That’s about it. In fact, its for the more edgy stuff that I do ask for permission/inform her about the exact deets.
Whatever it was, I really squirmed.
That was incident one.
Later in the evening, we had choir practice. On the way home, we broke into a small guilty pleasure and bought Starbucks to keep going in the night for work. Buying a small cup for my grandmother, we returned in high spirits.
Most everyone had settled into a quiet routine and I found my grandma lying in her bed happily reading a book in reverie. As I approached and handed her the coffee, I could feel the familiar feeling of needing to leave quickly. She beamed, her teeth reaching the high cheekbones I inherited from her. Her glossy eyes (filled with cataracts) sparkled lightly and she grabbed my arm with her conventional granny method. “Look at my 小美人！真是二八佳人～！” Proceeding to beam with unsolicited happiness, I bent forward for a goodnight kiss and felt her hand grasp my skull, then pat my ponytail fondly. She sighed contentedly and asked, “And pray, what are you going to do with your hair? Grow it out?” I nodded in silence and smiled. She seemed so exceedingly happy, I could hardly tell why. I felt overwhelmed with a sudden rush of unending love and bent over to give her a tight hug. “About the sales at Wal-Mart,” she began suddenly, harking back to a conversation from dinner, “take me sometime! I want to check it out too.” I nodded fervently, a wash of sudden soreness in my throat. “Have good dreams!” She gabbed happily and waved me off. As I left the room and shut her door, I felt so ashamed.
We’ve lived with my grandma since 1995, and I’ve loved her forever. But of course, over the course of years, there are the discrepancies of childhood excitement and fervor that clash with the slower-paced livelihoods of grandparenthood. Over the years, perhaps in congruence with my exposure to “bad teenage behavior” as my parents labeled it, I began to grow annoyed with certain things my grandmother did. Which often really dealt with the typical Chinese way of talking about the mundane and the obvious. “How’s your day?” “Don’t forget to gas up.” “Did you hit the lights?” “Did you eat breakfast?” “Did you use the bathroom before leaving?” “Watch out for accidents!” etcetera. There are more times than I count when I became extremely frustrated and brushed off her caring remarks, often wondering why she could be so caught up in the small things in life when I was oh-so-busy trying to catch up with school, homework and work.
Oftentimes, her memory would collide with our daily routines. She often forgets whether I’m still a college student, high school student, or a working individual. She forgets I was in China for a year, that I’m the 4th child, that I am in fact younger than my three brothers and am almost 20. She forgets that I work 7 days a week. She forgets a lot, but she never forgets her love. And ultimately, she remains very human.
When at the dinner table she mentioned wanting to visit Walmart, my first visceral reaction was to inwardly groan. It was horrible. But that was now my trained reaction. Couldn’t she see that I have so much work to do? I don’t have time to take her shopping. But when I gave her the coffee later in the evening, all I could think about at that point was what a horrible granddaughter I’ve been.
At nearly-20, with three younger sisters and teaching elementary and middle school students, I begin to see a small slit of capital-T Truth to reality and a sense of temporal importance or prioritization in life. In our early youth, our dislike for people is very obvious and stated. We don’t care to hide it. But as we age, we begin to consider ourselves a little more “adult” and hide our more visceral reactions, masking it and explaining it and tolerating it. Our priorities shift from bawling over missing homework assignments, to trying to make a work deadline, to making financial ends meet in a home to finally, remembering the correct day of the month and remembering engagements.
My grandmother has long passed her years in which materialistic things matter or harry her. Her prime enjoyments is to crow the adhan to wake us up in the early hours of the morning, to playfully berate us when we look to be in a bad mood and to tease us. As we become heavily absorbed in the materialistic world in which we live, the z-axis, or “spiritual” has become lost to us in many ways. In her old age, there is so much my grandmother has come to peace with. And she is not perfect, which is why we often conflict. But she certainly has arrived at another plane of life; one that I have not fully understood yet. I see my younger sisters get angry at me for not “getting it” and laugh childishly at their anger. Because in my perception, it is a temporary concern, one that disappears with age. And this is precisely the lens with which my grandmother views us with, and yet I don’t understand or accept her for it. I wonder sometimes how she records these little nuggets of life to us.
Her plane of life does not necessarily supercede ours in priority or importance. But simply, it is a view of life that we have yet to understand and see.
Tonight, as I stepped out of the car, as I do several times throughout the day, I threw my head back to take a quick gaze at the sky as I often do before heading into the house for the evening. Watching the beautiful dark gaze of the evening light and bright stars, I felt a wave of insignificance wash over me. Who am I to the light of God and the billions of other people around the world? How have I become such a shallow minded person that I have completely blunted the amazing beauty of the night sky and the gorgeous 360 view of the world? I have become completely swallowed by the materialistic world and forgotten the Earth into which I was born into wholly. I live in a flat, two-dimensional world where the z-axis is totally slighted. Where have my priorities gone?
I pray to God that I please Him and Him only, and that He Guides me to His path of love and holistic truth. Dear God, thank You for giving me life to enjoy the full extent of reality in this world. Thank you for giving me the insight to remember that there is so much more to the world than the materialism that we’ve built our measly human structures around.
@3 months ago with 2 notes#grandma #reality #slice of life #age #coming of #chinese #culture
