When I was a kid in elementary school I often told people I had two mothers — and thoroughly confused everyone. When I would finally explain that I was talking about my mom and my grandmother, they would laugh, like I was revealing the punchline. Except I wasn’t joking — my grandmother cooked for me, packed my school bag, and told me where I would find my pink sock with the tiny bow on it. She replaced my dead goldfish, listened to me when I spoke a mile a minute, and during long nights, she would tell me to imagine stories until I fell asleep. If that didn't make her my mother, then it was obvious to me that there was something missing in the definition of mother.
My mom is amazing — but I don’t think I need to justify that or prove it in some way before saying I have two mothers. People will always assume that there’s some deficiency in one and that’s why I turned to the other, but that’s only until they experience what I was so lucky to encounter at such a young age: the fact that when you receive love, and especially the kind of unconditional love that a mother gives, the love you give back doesn’t diminish a supply in you. It expands something in you, and makes you wonder how you could get so lucky — twice.
And I did hit the jackpot — because my grandmother is not like other grandmothers: Yes, she gardens and knits; she even obsessively reorganizes our house every chance she gets. But my grandmother is also the most inquisitive person I've ever met. Since I was young she has shown me exactly what it means to be a lifelong learner. She hoards yellowing pages from old magazines that are filled with articles and wonderfully weird facts from all over the world. She never finished high school, but that hasn't curbed her curiosity in the slightest — she wonders about everything, and listens with a greedy ear.
When I was a child, I would reenact my lessons for her benefit, and she would always pay attention while I ran around the coffee table to illustrate the solar system. That's another great thing about her: she never makes anyone feel less significant because of his or her age, or any other factor, because to her, nobody is less. My grandmother's love can feel like an unwavering force that has always existed, like being born into this world with the right to be loved, because she loves people in their entirety. Her love is quiet but strong, and it makes one wonder how someone could have so much to give inside them.
Her love is force feeding you something you told her you liked when you were in second grade and her love is having to run to her room whenever she sees something on TV she thinks you’ll like. Her love is walking into your room and seeing it rearranged — it is noticing, after the initial anger, that all the drawings you stashed in a shelf somewhere are now on display. Her love is the warnings you receive before going out at night: an ever escalating list of people to not believe.
How do you capture a person, an entire lifetime of one person, in words? Or rather, can you? But I'm always trying regardless — trying to draw her green-veined hands or write down her infamous recipes. Because somehow I want everyone in the world to know about my grandmother and how she works so hard at home every day, so that all of us can go out and do whatever we need to do. I want them to know that when I was a child, I would sometimes wake up and realize I had tugged the blanket off of her, and cocooned myself in it, but she never once tried tugging it back. I want everyone to hear the stories of her childhood with ten siblings whose names I can never remember. I want everyone to know that my grandmother doesn't like hugs and even though I live with her, I didn't know she had dentures for years. I want the world to know that when you make my grandmother laugh, and she tries to cover it up with her hands, it's the best feeling in the world.
A year ago, I showed her Japanese cherry blossoms in full bloom using Google street view. I was irritated because it was glitchy and buffering slowly, and this was supposed to be a birthday gift, but my grandmother was just sitting there watching. Once I saw her, I don't know exactly why I couldn't look away, but in the blue-ish spotlight of my computer screen, the smile on her face was so happy.
My grandmother has taught me numerous things over the years, but I think the most important is that there are many ways to live a life, and none of them are inconsequential if they make you happy. She taught me that fragile human connections are the glue lives are enriched by, and that there is always space to be found in your heart for more love. And simply by being herself she’s taught me that there's an enormous beauty in ordinary things — if you have the courage to let them in.
