Please Look After Mom - Kyung-Sook Shin [22]
“What do you mean, in constant pain? Mom has always been pretty healthy.”
“Well, I don’t think that’s true,” the doctor said.
You felt as if a nail hidden in your pocket had leaped out and ambushed you, stabbing the back of your hand. The doctor drained the blood pooled in Mom’s brain, but her headaches didn’t get better. One minute Mom would be talking, and the next minute she would be holding her head gingerly, as if it were a glass jar about to break, and she would have to go home and lie down on the wooden platform in the shed.
“Mom, do you like being in the kitchen?” When you asked this once, your mom didn’t understand what you meant.
“Did you like being in the kitchen? Did you like to cook?”
Mom’s eyes held yours for a moment. “I don’t like or dislike the kitchen. I cooked because I had to. I had to stay in the kitchen so you could all eat and go to school. How could you only do what you like? There are things you have to do whether you like it or not.” Mom’s expression asked, What kind of question is that? And then she murmured, “If you only do what you like, who’s going to do what you don’t like?”
“So—what—you liked it or not?”
Mom looked around, as if she was going to tell you a secret, and whispered, “I broke jar lids several times.”
“You broke jar lids?”
“I couldn’t see an end to it. At least with farming, if you plant seeds in the spring you harvest them in the fall. If you plant spinach seeds, there is spinach; where you plant corn, there’s corn.… But there’s no beginning or end to kitchen work. You eat breakfast, then it’s lunch, and then it’s dinner, and when it’s bright again it’s breakfast again.… It might have been better if I could have made different side dishes, but since the same things were planted in the fields, I always made the same panchan. If you do that over and over, there are times when you get so sick of it. When the kitchen felt like a prison, I went out to the back and picked up the most misshapen jar lid and threw it as hard as I could at the wall. Aunt doesn’t know that I did that. If she did, she would say I was crazy, throwing jar lids around.”
Your mom told you that she would buy a new lid within a few days to replace the one she broke. “So I wasted some money. When I went to get the new lid, I thought it was so wasteful and felt terrible, but I couldn’t stop. The sound of the lid breaking was medicine to me. I felt free.” Your mom put a finger to her lips and said, “Shh,” in case someone could hear. “It’s the first time I’m telling this to anyone!” A mischievous grin hovered on her face. “If you don’t want to cook, you should try throwing a dish. Even if you’re thinking, Oh, what a waste, you’re going to feel so light. Of course, since you’re not married, you wouldn’t feel that way anyway.”
Your mom let out a deep sigh. “But it was nice when you kids were growing up. Even when I was so busy that I didn’t have time to retie the towel on my head, when I watched you sitting around the table, eating, with your spoons making a racket in the bowls, I felt like there was nothing else I wanted in the world. You were all so easy. You dug in happily when I made a simple zucchini-and-bean-paste soup, and your faces lit up if I steamed some fish once in a while.… You were all such good eaters that when you were growing I was sometimes afraid. If I left a pot filled with boiled potatoes for your after-school snack, the pot would be empty when I came home. And there were days when I could see the rice in the jar in the cellar disappearing day by day, and times when the jar would be empty. When I went to the cellar to get some rice for dinner and my scoop scraped the bottom of the rice jar, my heart would sink: What am I going to feed my babies tomorrow morning? So in those days it wasn’t about whether I liked to be in the kitchen or not. If I made a big pot of rice and a smaller pot of soup, I didn’t think of how tired I was. I felt good that these were going