My Korean Deli_ Risking It All for a Convenience Store - Ben Ryder Howe [122]
Not that we ever stopped trying; as soon as we had the financial means—after Gab went back to work, after my own income picked up again, and after the store stopped being such a money suck—we started looking for apartments again, and on more than one occasion came within an inch of signing on the dotted line. Things just got in the way. Fate didn’t want us to move. And the more we failed, the more resigned we became. (The more stunted our independence became, you might say—just as my parents had feared.) It was as if we lacked the mass to escape Kay’s gravitational orbit. What we needed was to add weight.
Which should have been easy, because a few months before we sold the store, Gab finally became pregnant, and putting on pounds was not exactly a problem. It had been a year since we’d started trying, and our failure remained as mysterious as ever. (According to the results of the fertility testing, we shouldn’t have been struggling, which made me think it really was psychological.) When the biology finally clicked, however, the timing was perfect. We would soon be selling the store and getting back our money, Kay’s health was looking up (she’d gone nine months without smoking and had significantly lowered her blood pressure through exercise and treatment), and now we had the perfect excuse to at last get back to our independent lives.
But did we want to get back to independent lives? Were we even the same people we used to be before we’d given those independent lives up? Had the store not changed us? It almost would have been disappointing to think that after so much pain and drama, we could just slip back into our former existences, as if nothing had happened. I certainly wasn’t the same person. None of us was.
After we sold the store, Kay went through something of a dark period. For the first time in all the years I’ve known her, she started talking about taking a break from family.
“I’m old person now,” she said. “I’m finish being mother. You clean your own room, do own laundry.” If my mother-in-law had learned anything about herself as a result of the store, it was that she had limits (limits that had long been obvious to everyone else). Now that she was aware of them, she would have to make a choice: family or work, but not both if she wanted to remain healthy.
In the fall, she bought a ticket to visit her oldest sister, Kunimo, in Los Angeles. Before she left she told me she might stay there for a while, even past the birth of our child. Kunimo had recently joined a retirement community and wanted Kay to look at some vacancies in her building. Kay was curious.
The trip was not a success, however. Kunimo’s friends in the retirement community were of a churchly bent common among Korean-Americans, but not Kay. After two weeks of ladling soup to the homeless and picking trash off the beach, she bolted home, and soon the black mood seemed to pass. She said she had decided not to go back to work, and wanted to know if Gab and I would consider staying in the house so she could help us raise the baby.
But Gab was ready to move out. She’d just spent the two hardest years of her life struggling to be a good daughter and measure up to her mother’s example. Whether she’d succeeded or not, she knew that she’d (A) tried and (B) suffered as a result. Therefore, she reasoned, she’d finally earned the luxury of escape and a guilt-free independent life.
And there was another reason to move out: samchilil.
Samchilil is the traditional postpartum-care regime mothers undergo in Korea. Like everything in Korean medicine, it has to do with maintaining a sort of yin-and-yang balance