Eric Budding > Recent Status Updates

You’re too good for him.

“She would have been so tickled to have seen the past few years. And though it felt contrary to my beliefs, I had to believe that she could.”

“The lessons she imparted, the proof of her life lived on in me, in my every move and deed. I was what she left behind. If I could not be with my mother, I would be her.”

“If dreams were hidden wishes, why couldn’t I dream of my mother the way I wanted? Why was it that whenever she appeared she was still sick, as if I could not remember her the way she’d been before? I wondered if my memory was stunted, if my dreams were consigned to the epoch of trauma, the image of my mother stuck where we had left off. Had I forgotten her when she was beautiful?”

“Let me feel this, I wanted to scream. Hold me, and let me wallow in it. I thought to myself that if I ever had children, I’d never tell them to save their tears. That anyone who’d been hardened with those words would grow to hate them just as much as I did.”

“I could feel my heart hardening—crusting over, growing a husk, a callus.”

“She leaned in closer and stared into my eyes, like she was certain this would solve all my problems. It was how I’d felt about music once, back before everything happened. A pure, childlike belief that songs could heal. I had believed that with such conviction before I’d confronted a loss so consuming it had rattled my clearest passions, made my ambitions appear frivolous and egomaniacal.”

“My mother had struggled to understand me just as I struggled to understand her. Thrown as we were on opposite sides of a fault line—generational, cultural, linguistic—we wandered lost without a reference point, each of us unintelligible to the other’s expectations.”

“Christianity was a language she understood. Religion was a comfort and in that moment I was grateful it was there for her.”

“The house was quiet aside from her breathing, a horrible sucking like the last sputtering of a coffeepot. Sometimes it stopped completely and my father and I would go silent for four full seconds, wondering if this was it. Then she would gasp again. The pamphlet hospice left told us the intervals would lengthen over time until eventually her breathing stopped completely.”

“For the rest of my life there would be a splinter in my being, stinging from the moment my mother died until it was buried with me.”

“My denial was still in full force. I was convinced that all she needed was another infusion, an IV to stabilize her. I felt we could go on like this for years, just fixing her.”

“For the first time, she didn’t scold me. Perhaps because she could no longer fall back on her staple phrase. Because here they were, the tears I’d been saving.”

“I found myself looking back at Seoul as if it were a stranger, something else now than the idyllic utopia of my childhood. With Halmoni and Eunmi gone, it felt like it belonged to me a little less.”

“I had spent my adolescence trying to blend in with my peers in suburban America, and had come of age feeling like my belonging was something to prove. Something that was always in the hands of other people to be given and never my own to take, to decide which side I was on, whom I was allowed to align with.”

“I could not even cry in his presence for fear he would take the moment over, pit his grief against mine in a competition of who loved her more, and who had more to lose.”

Again, all too familiar. 😔

“Alone in the privacy of the car I finally let the shock melt away into tears. Everything I had ever done in my life felt so monumentally selfish and insignificant.”

This is too familiar of a feeling. 😔

“Over time our conversations became a lot like explaining a movie to someone who has walked in on the last thirty minutes.”

“You don’t know me at all,” I said. “This weird thing—is the thing that I love.”

One of the hardest parts of being an immigrant in my opinion is the feeling that you need to give up on your own dreams, or be made to feel that your personal desires are invalid, because your parents gave up everything they had to get you here. And you have to settle for that which aligns with their wishes for you.

Wait, was Michelle’s dad at Camp Green Lake?
🪏

“I assumed the seven years I’d lived away from home had healed the wounds between us, that the strain built up in my teenage years had been forgotten. Now we were closer than ever, but my father’s admission revealed there were memories of which my mother could not let go.”

“I’d never seen my mother’s emotions so unabashedly on display. Never seen her without control, like a child. I couldn’t comprehend then the depth of her sorrow the way I do now.”

But every time I got hurt, my mom would start screaming. Not for me, but at me. I couldn’t understand it. When my friends got hurt, their mothers scooped them up and told them it was going to be okay, or they went straight to the doctor. White people were always going to the doctor. But when I got hurt, my mom was livid, as if I had maliciously damaged her property.

Is this a universal immigrant experience? :(

“Sometimes my grief feels as though I’ve been left alone in a room with no doors. Every time I remember that my mother is dead, it feels like I’m colliding with a wall that won’t give. There’s no escape, just a hard surface that I keep ramming into over and over, a reminder of the immutable reality that I will never see her again.”

Bawling at work as I read this.

“The circle… it will go on.”

This fucking guy and his fucking chair 💀

Red.

“One by one they faded, yet she still felt their power, their love, and knew they were with her, part of her, and she a part of them.”