My Mother's Marriage - and Mine

By Jesse Bi

My mother's tears

My mother was a strong woman. Her mother had died when she was just seven years old and their stepmother had abused the five motherless children. My mother was the second child in the family, followed by her younger brothers and sisters who were aged five, two and six months respectively. My mother and her elder sister, who was one year older than her, were responsible for taking care of their six-month-old baby sister. Every day they carried her around on their backs and made egg cakes to feed her. The baby sister had sores all over her body from malnutrition and finally they had to give her away to an old couple who had no children of their own. My mother and her sister often walked for miles to see baby sister but couldn't visit her publicly because her adoptive parents didn't like it. They could only watch her secretly from a distance. They could not greet her; nor could they ask for her. But they were still excited when they saw her and they would talk a lot about it: "We've seen our sister!"

My mother grew up valiantly in a poor village in Northeast China. As a teenager she passed the college entrance exam and so was able to go to school in the city. Because of her outstanding academic record after she graduated she became a teacher in the same school. Soon after that she fell in love with my father who had also gone to that school and had also become a teacher there a few years earlier. They were married, and by the time she was thirty she was the mother of three children.

Both my parents were models of self-discipline and kindness. They were respectful to their parents and protective of their siblings. They were especially loving to their three children. Wherever they went, people held them in great esteem. Between the two of them, however, there were endless troubles.

One day, my mother was sick and stayed in bed. My father was so worried that he killed our only hen, made some chicken soup and brought it in to her bedside. My mother immediately scolded him for his lack of foresight. "We needed that hen to lay more eggs for us. Why did you go and kill it?" She was so angry that she refused to drink the soup. In the early 70's, eggs were very scarce. Even at New Year we couldn't afford to slaughter a chicken. After some more harsh words, my mother started to cry, bewailing her motherless childhood and the poverty she had suffered even after her marriage. My brother, sister and I stood around her sick bed crying too. At that time I was not even five years old, but my mother's sufferings left a deep mark in my heart. As a little girl, how cold and helpless I felt!

My tears

When I grew up, I was not only afraid of marriage, I didn't even dare to be romantically involved. Both my parents had been good people, but why did marriage have to bring them so much pain? I had no answer. So I purposely tried to avoid marriage in order to avoid falling into their same trap.

When I graduated from college, many good-hearted people encouraged me to get acquainted with men, even though I was not interested. Soon my former classmates were all becoming mothers one after another, while I was still wandering around alone on the sidelines. Wealth, social status, physical appearance or family background - none of these interested me. All I wanted was a marriage that would be happy. My husband was a poor student at college. We dated for three years before I finally decided to give him my heart.

After our marriage, I came to America with my husband. He was under tremendous pressure supporting our family, taking classes and working in the lab. He used to leave home early in the morning and came back late. When he came home at night, he was usually so tired that he didn't have the energy to eat his dinner. I became a housewife. I was shut away indoors all day and by early evening was fretting for him to get home. I was suffering from loneliness and boredom but I could hardly complain to my husband who had been toiling away all day. What did I have to complain about? He was already so overloaded. And how would we survive if he worked shorter hours?

Then finally the weekend would come around. But then my husband would don his sports wear and go off playing basketball with his friends. How I longed for him to sit down and chat with me! How I longed for him to do something that I could share in, or take me out for a walk; even if he would sit down and have a cup of tea with me at the end of the day, that would do. I was so lonely, but I couldn't even talk about it. He didn't seem to understand. "You can stay home and watch TV!" Then he was away off like a bird flying its cage. I would say to myself, " I know I can't really complain that you have no time for me during the week when you're working so hard, but how can you leave me all alone at home during the weekend? I'm like a prisoner in jail". The more I thought about it, the angrier I became. By the time he came home with a big smile on his face, my discontented face was saying it all...

My husband worked very hard at his job, making a living for us. Basketball was his only leisure activity, keeping him fit as well as taking some pressure off him. There wasn't really anything wrong about it. He was saying to himself, "Here I am laboring day and night for you and the family so that you can stay at home and be comfortable and sleep as much as you wish and eat whatever you like. I only play basketball at the weekends so why do you feel sore about it?"

I was only waiting to hear some kind words from him because I felt I was being hard done by, but he, on the other hand, thought his wife was being unreasonable. We both felt we were high quality pearls which had fallen into the hands of lousy buyers who didn't recognize the value of pearls. Then we started to quarrel.

"You should have been more considerate. You've got no right to go out having fun on your own!"

"If I had known you'd be like this, I wouldn't have let you come to America!"

The more you're in love, the more easily you get hurt! All the grievances I had been mulling over in the past few days came surging back and I burst into loud sobs. But through the tears I saw a picture of myself: a middle-aged woman sick in body and in spirit; a little girl at a bedside swearing never to fall into the same trap. Now here I was becoming just like my mother. I thought I had been very careful in picking the right man, but the result was no different! Both my husband and I were good people, pretty much like my parents when they were young. Yet why did happiness seem so far away? What had really gone wrong? My mother had gambled her whole life on it and she nearly lost everything. I wished I could find the root of our problems.

Tears again

The experience of my parents, who quarreled for years, had taught me a lesson: quarrels never get rid of conflicts. So I changed my strategy. I started to be patient. Whenever he lost his temper, I guarded my words closely. Consequently, he started to be more sensitive and he too made efforts to improve. Even though we still had our conflicts, they could be covered up with a quick joke or two could. We started to realise how much we needed to stick together. We understood that we each needed to work on changing ourselves rather than expecting the other to change. Later on I found out that this was a Biblical principle too.

One day I attended a seminar at the church. The theme of the seminar was Establish Your Marriage. When the speaker asked why married couples often couldn't agree with each other, I immediately thought about all the sufferings my parents and I myself had gone through. I had believed that an important reason for an unsuccessful marriage was mismatched personalities. Other folk attending the seminar also believed that parents and children could affect marriages. In the end, the speaker asked us to turn to Isaiah Chapter 53 verse 6: "We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way..."

So this, then, was the root of all the problems: my father, my mother, my husband and I were all sheep who had gone astray!

Once again tears flowed from my eyes. Oh Lord, I should have known you sooner! How wonderful it is that over one thousand years ago you had already written in the Bible something that took us two generations to figure out! How can a watch maker fail to fix a watch? How can you, who made us, not know our weaknesses? Oh Lord, I shall forever follow you!

The author came from Beijing. Now she studies in San Diego, California.