Dura Mater

Dura Mater: 1) A tough fibrous membrane that lies over and protects the brain. 2)My mother.

1999

Mom and I play gin. I calculate the risks and benefits of picking up the last five discarded cards. My brother had asked me to see what mom thought of us publishing dad’s memoirs for their sixtieth anniversary. I need to be casual about that.

I pick up the five cards, rearrange my hand to make a series and start a run. I take mom’s discard and use it to finish the run. When lay my hand on the table with a grin, I say. “So, what do you think of dad’s story?”

Before I get a chance to gloat and say gin mom all but explodes.

“God! I’m so sick and tired of his story. Does anyone ask me about what I did those years?”

I’m taken aback. My mother is phlegmatic, easy-going and most of all reticent. “Well, … Yeah, I have." I remind her. "You’ve always said that each day was the same.”

“Yeah.” She sighs and calculates the score.

Then, just because it probably is one of those days, she says, while shuffling and dealing our next hand. “The other day he came in and said: ‘I should have let you divorce me a long time ago. You could have found another.’

In case you wonder, there is no good time to tell your daughter this. But should ever need to share this, be shure that she has not just drained the last of her wine. For wine should be sipped and savored, not choked of and spewed out.

When I foind my voice and ask her why he would say that she shrugs and changes the subject.

I think I knew my mother as well as anyone, for as much as she allowed anyone to know her. Like all mother/daughter relationships we had our ups and downs. She had no patience with my teenage concerns, my need to fit in, my wish to have friends, my struggles with shyness and how to behave in company.

She was my role model for how to extend myself to others, how to ask for help and offer it, how to accept affection and return it, how to listen and care. All my life she gave me mixed messages. Sometimes she’d roll her eyes behind someone’s back, other times, she’d scold me for not being more tolerant. She both excused my shyness and told me to be more forthcoming. She told me to be charitable and often grumbled when people asked more of her.

Mom did not like to be touched, cuddle, even accept my father’s caresses or words of endearment in front of us. She would make me move away after a minute or two of snuggling, accusing me of “hanging on her.” She consistently negated all compliments. She couldn’t give me advice about how to behave around boys. And sadly, she was unable or unwilling to talk about intimacy.

I know she wanted more for me than she had but never told me what she saw in my future. She never praised me for standing on my own two feet. She was always doubtful about my plans and choices and downplayed my successes.

Using her as an example, I assumed that a mother was meant to cook, clean and supply band aids. To have tea and cookies ready at four, review homework, have dinner at six and fade into the background while the real family moved on.

It took years and years of careful probing and finding the exact window of inebriation where she would lower her guard and share her secrets.

My mother and my oldest brother spent from April 1942 till late August 1945 in a “protective” internment camp on Java. Over the years my father often spoke of his slave labor working on the railroad in Burma during the war. But my mother was silent about those years. She told me once, at dinner, that an Indonesian guard had stolen something from one of the women. The Japanese commandant ordered all women to observe the man's beheading. When she told me this her gaze was unfocused; there was no emotion or inflection in her tone.

It was many years later, less than a year before she passed, that she told me her last secret.

Mom was petite, 4’11”, with auburn hair, grey eyes, and a slender, athletic figure. She was a looker. Dad claimed to have fallen for her on sight. But most of all she was a fierce mother lion, willing to do anything to protect and care for her cub.

Anything.

1942 - '44

Commandant Yoshi, a forty-eight-year-old city clerk, is called to serve his emperor. Because he is physically unfit to fight, he is sent to Java and put in charge of a camp of roughly 800 Caucasian women and children. Yoshi, the youngest in his family, has never seriously considered marriage. After all, his mother is doing an admirable job of caring for him. But now the Emperor of the Land of the Rising Sun needs him to serve.

Without significant training, Commandant Yoshi finds himself in charge of a camp, overseeing soldiers and local "volunteer"’. For the first time in his life, he has more power than he has ever dreamed of. Each morning, he proudly stands on the veranda of his modest quarters and watches the roll call. There are several women who stir him, make him feel things only a rare geisha has evoked. These women are not even worthy of his gaze, they are less than the lowest of street women at home. They are not to be thought of in the same sentence as an honored geisha, and yet …

There is the buxom, strong, blonde with the laughing blue eyes, the one who holds an infant and has two little ones hanging on the hem of her floral dress. She nods at the tall skinny woman with long dark hair. The one with a broad smile and slender hips. They entice him.

And then his eyes seeks and finds the one he almost misses each time. A delicate flower. Small for a European woman, her dark hair streaked with red-gold lights from the sun, her eyes downcast, so becoming in a woman. In her arms is a small, chubby child with dark curly hair and round cheeks. The little boy's smile is full of trust, knowing that he is safe with her. Knowing that she will take care of him.

Yes, Yoshi, decides she will be perfect for him.

2006

Mom’s grey eyes stare out the window, not seeing the pond outside her senior care apartment, not seeing the ducks placidly floating on the water, not seeing the children holding their mother’s hands after a half day in play school. She sees the camp, breathes the oppressive heat and humidity, smells the stink of hundreds of unwashed bodies wearing the same clothes for weeks and weeks, swallows against the tantalizing aroma of roast duck, the sight of ripe mangos and sugar cookies. The taste of sake.

“For Hans.” She finally says. “I did it for him. To give him that mango, maybe a wing from the duck. To keep him alive, to be allowed to see him. He had taken him, locked my baby in a room. I could hear him cry, call for me. ‘When you perform your duty to the emperor, the child will be restored to you,’ the commandant told me. So, I did. I did …”

Then she shuts down.

I can’t imagine how she lived with those memories locked inside, never forgiving herself, never telling anyone for sixty plus years. I don’t know if she ever told dad. I doubt it. It explains her inability to accept touch.

She might not have believed that forgiveness would be here right. I doubt she could forgive herself. I fear she may have submitted to dad, the way she submitted to the commandant. While in her mind she was ensuring that her cubs were taken care of.

I don’t know why she spoke that day, the last time I saw her. Maybe she needed to unburden her shame, her sacrifice of never feeling again. Maybe she needed to share this so that she and others wouldn't be forgotten.

I do know that my mom was tough, resilient, able to swallow more than she was supposed to. That she did what she needed to do, to protect hers. I wish I had a fraction of her strength.