When my grandfather's body was put in the coffin and put in the hearse, my mother, who was standing in front of the crowd, cried hoarsely.
For the first time in more than two decades, I witnessed my mother crying like a child with no regard for decency.
The white linen cloth covered her tired face, revealing only the bloodshot human and the tear-groomed eyes. After the emotion, she fainted at the funeral, and the relatives around her hurriedly shouted for me to come.
When I was supporting my mother, I stroked her back and found that her spine had become curved and even rugged due to half a lifetime of work.
At that moment, this flesh-to-bone touch made me strongly and intuitively aware of my mother's aging and fragility.
The once capable, decent, mellow mother who always becomes strong in front of her children and looks delicate in any scene is gone, but a "child" who needs my best to protect.
Before this, I felt that my mother's vitality was very tenacious and tenacious.
Stills from "It's Worth the Trip".
Born in the early 70s, she is a loyal believer in "motherhood and rigidity". At the age of 40, her husband died of illness, making her a "widow" with a pair of children. This identity, even in the coastal towns around 2010, in the crowded vegetable markets, attracts others with pitiful, ridicule, and even cold eyes that are not motivated by good intentions.
Mom sometimes pretends not to see or hear, and sometimes she secretly scolds herself with a kind of market cleverness, and occasionally looks gloomy, but she always maintains decency, neither humble nor arrogant.
Mom's strong shouldering of everything, to a certain extent, is the way she has to choose to survive, and at the same time she is willing.
There are many mothers like my mother who have endured the dedication and sacrifice that comes with being a mother.
And each daughter's feelings towards her mother are also different. In a holiday like Mother's Day, which is full of personal feelings, we try to clarify the common causes behind some of the stories, and also try to discover the differences of individuals.
Last year, a book called "My Mother Cleans" became a hotly debated book on the Internet. "Diligence is written in her genes, and fear of lack of money is also written in her genes. As long as there is an opportunity to make money, she will definitely try."
Reporter Qiao Yue will unconsciously compare her mother with Chunxiang when talking to Zhang Xiaoman and Chunxiang, she is curious about how Chunxiang, who is highly overlapping with her mother in the first half of her life, walked out of another way after the age of 50, and all this was recorded by her daughter Zhang Xiaoman into a book.
When I saw this, I couldn't help but think of my mother, who was also hardworking.
Zhang Xiaoman and his mother Chunxiang
In the year my dad died, I was in junior high school and my younger brother was in elementary school, and she worked a few jobs at most. After finishing his work in the hospital, he will also work some simple but time-consuming part-time jobs to raise his two children, pay off the money he borrowed from relatives and family when he bought a house, and even accumulate capital for his children to buy a house in a big city in the future.
Whether it's Haruka or my mom, part of the reason they do so hard for their families and children is that they are inevitably influenced by mainstream culture.
For a long time, social culture has often used the meaning of "motherhood is rigid" to explain the identity and responsibility of mothers.
This idea comes from Liang Qichao's translation of Hugo's "Woman is weak, But mother is strong" in Liang Qichao's "Xinmin Shuo", "women are weak, but mothers are strong", and then it was quoted by Lu Xun in his letters to friends, becoming a daily tribute to the dedication to the mother in later generations. They take their dedication to their families for granted.
The binary contrast between strength and weakness may have limitations in interpreting women's identity and femininity, but the strong side does write about the side of women that is different from traditional gender temperament.
This kind of strength also smoothly integrates the current trend of women's independence. In 2021, the number of single mothers in China has exceeded 30 million, and my mother is one of them.
When single mothers become an issue and appear in the public eye, or even single childbirth becomes an active rather than passive choice, their stories enrich the connotation of "motherhood is strong" at the moment.
Reporter Yongzhou interviewed four mothers, who took the initiative to escape from unreliable marriage and love relationships during pregnancy, became single mothers, and took on the responsibility of raising children alone.
Stills from "Imperfect Her".
They feel guilty about having a child born without a father, but would rather the child be "better off without a father than a bad father." When they become mothers, they also have power, and the cliché "motherhood is just" becomes a reality in them.
But more importantly, the plight of single mothers needs to be seen, for whom family and work are indispensable, and they also need to assume the "fatherhood" while fulfilling their motherhood.
Ding Lan, a single mother, placed an order for a 2,000 yuan stroller without blinking her eyes, but on herself, now she is reluctant to buy clothes for 29.9 yuan.
But when she saw someone else's husband buy a camera for more than 10,000 yuan for her child, she suddenly collapsed: "Other people's fathers buy this and that for their children, where is my child's father?" This occasional sudden surge of emotion left her with nowhere to run.
This is behind the tenacity of single mothers, the unspeakable fragility and the incomprehensible sadness of outsiders.
As a stranger, or the next generation, even if we can't change the life of the previous generation, it doesn't mean that we can't do anything about our mother's life, at least we can do the simplest thing is to care for them and understand them.
For example, when Zhang Xiaoman wrote "My Mother Cleans", Chunxiang gradually understood her mother, she wrote: The longer I spend with my mother, the more I realize that it is the past she has experienced and the harsh environment she has been in that has made her who she is now.
I also tried to understand my mother. Once, on the way home from junior high school, I once asked my mother, "Are you tired of raising me and my brother?" She always said with a smile and a strong pretense: "As long as you two have a chance, it's worth the tiredness." After all, she always throws me a look, which is her habit of being optimistic, and I know that this look is also her courage to talk to herself and let herself persevere.
But after hearing these words too much, a sense of suffocation always came over me, and as a woman, I often felt unwilling and resentful for my mother: she was so open-minded, gentle, intelligent, and resolute, that she deserved a better life.
When she was young, as the daughter of the village party secretary and the "role model" of the eldest daughter of the family, she cultivated extraordinary courage and became the first group of people to work hard in Shenzhen in the era when the town was still conservative and closed. She could have run away from the town like the author Hesu's mother, and in Shenzhen, a hot land in the 90s, she rode the Times Express to earn the first pot of gold and get a better life experience.
But soon after, under the pressure of her family, she hurriedly got married on a blind date. Marriage and childbirth became the starting point of her tired life. An unreliable marriage, a husband who died young, and young children weaved the cage that trapped her.
Author: The Story of Heisu and His Mother / Stills from "Daughter".
To this day, when I go home and chat with her, I always mention, "If you hadn't come back to get married, now you can live a life of collecting rent and playing mahjong, just like your cousin who went to Shenzhen with her." ”
She always responded to my "complaints" again and again with a smile that narrowed her eyes into slits: "If that's the case, there will be no you and my brother".
"But I'd rather not be born than have you have such a hard time." Mom, I really think so, you can go and live your own life, I don't want you to sacrifice too much for your family.
When I was a child, I asked my mother, what is your dream in life? I remember her saying, "It's a global tour."
After a round of family changes, the answer became: "You are happy and healthy".
Behind this transformation is the magnification of the value of motherhood by my mother, and I sometimes even feel "extremely" that part of my mother's suffering is because of my birth.
This is certainly an immature thought under my emotions.
Coming back to rationality, I know that for many women, becoming a mother is indeed one of the contents of their self-fulfillment. The relationship between becoming a mother and women's self-realization was hotly discussed by many colleagues during a lunch chat in the editorial department. Reporter Zu Xiaoqian's mother once told her daughter that becoming a mother is part of her life's value.
A similar answer also appeared in the group of "county accompanying mothers" that Zu Xiaoqian was concerned about. Wang Xuqing, who is currently an assistant professor at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Xi'an Jiaotong University, has long been concerned about the living conditions of accompanying mothers in the county. These mothers willingly give up their careers for their children's education and future, "What's the use of earning so much money, and if the child is wasted, it will be earned in vain".
But sometimes, excessive attention to children can be controlled by love. Reporter Zhao Shuhe had a conversation with more than a dozen girls on the topic of mother's excessive love, dependence, and even control over her, and discovered the universality of the phenomenon of "parent-child relationship inversion" of "being a husband to her mother". This is the most entangled and painful part of the awkward mother-daughter relationship in East Asian families.
Stills from "The Legend of Cheng Huan".
But Lin Xiuyun of the Department of Psychology of Beijing Normal University advised: This report must not blame the mother. Because, "every mother with a problem is first and foremost a person with a problem, and the inindependent personality and imperfect spirit are caused by the previous generation." ”
This reminds people of Dai Jinhua's thinking about the identity of motherhood: "It turns out that mother is just an identity and a character. It was only when she emerged as a person that some of her difficulties came to the fore."
At present, some women are not willing to accept only the praise and praise of their mothers, and have developed critical thinking about the concept of "motherhood is rigid".
Starting from their own life experience, they use a critical eye to examine the control and use of love caused by excessive amplification of maternal love, and use their own experience to break the binding and restriction of women's self-growth due to one-sided emphasis on motherhood.
In today's festival, which belongs to all mothers, instead of singing the praises of mothers, we should first reduce mothers to a person and look back at their exploration: how does a woman become a mother? How does the relationship between mother and daughter reflect the changes in family relationships? When mothers are suffering from menopause, how can children, who are also "menopausal victims", help mothers get out of hot flashes?
Mom! Stills
The above topics and manuscripts are all topics discussed in the cover planning of the 10th issue of Nanfeng Window.
Here, we see that the mother is not strong, she can be vulnerable, she will be selfish, she will be low, she will fail, she will age, she will leave......
In the face of hot life, no fanatical praise and pale language can stick to their hearts more than a heartfelt voice of care:
Mom, are you okay?
Author | Wu Qing
Editor-in-Chief on Duty | Zhao Jinghan
Edit | Zhang Lai
Typography | Toru Kazama