Perfect Family

My mother is standing in the doorway. She’s asking me if I’m back with my ex-boyfriend, and I feel my skin get prickly.

“Absolutely not!” I turn my shoulder to her and squeeze past. I’m hiding something, but it’s not the embarrassment about retreating to a safe ex.

“So, why are you spending so much time with him?”

I lock her gaze and I’m gifted with a flash of meanness: “Well, maybe I’m gay.” I watch her petrify. Her look makes my heart drop into my stomach, and my stomach drops into seemingly a second stomach reserved for a special kind of feeling. It might be Shame, but it does not feel mere enough to fit into a five-letter word. My second stomach says: Look how even the one who created you hates you. I remember how she contorts her face when she talks about our butch lesbian cousin. My mind telescopes through the branches of evolution which have converged at me: (circle one: homo/bi/something)-sexual – evolutionary reject. “You are joking.” We’ve made this joke in the family before, but this time there is something knowing in the invisible mother-daughter fabric that alarms her. She is peering through a hole in the fabric, directly at me. Look how she hates how you love. “...Anak?” Fix it. I turn away, tell her I’m joking: worry not as I am not, in fact, who I am. Fix the fabric.

My girlfriend gets me high, strokes my hair and tells me it makes her sad when I tell mean jokes about myself. I am honey melting in her green tea irises. I dimly hallucinate through the iterations of evolution which have fashioned me into an animal whose sole purpose is to bathe in her eyes. She draws me into her overheated chest, and I count the pretty moles on the side of her arm. My cheek warms from her dulcet tones rumbling through her chest. She tells me: you are safe here. I see you. They do not understand.

This is the dance my mother and I do. I pretend to be interested in her religion and marvel dryly at how wonderful it is that everyone can go to heaven. Except gays, of course. My sister hates my gleeful needlings and when we’re alone she tells me I’m wreaking havoc on the family unit: I should know better, our mother comes from a different place, she needs her religion, I shouldn’t paint our brother like a bigot because he’s a good person, just because he doesn’t want his son to be gay doesn’t mean he’s homophobic, life is just so much harder when you are gay, it’s harder to relate to a son who is gay, no loving parent would wish that suffering on their child – our brother is just being a good father. Stop ruining our family.

My mother answers my needling: “You know, they’re just like us, anak. They have the capacity for love and suffering, just like us.” I pace over the words: They are just like us. Like how we say that cows have feelings too, and eat them. She looks sideways at me and makes a joke about anal sex to remind me that sodomy is a sickness. Darkly disarming and always magnetised to the taboo.

She is right, though. About the capacity for love and suffering, I mean. My girlfriend asks me: Why do you keep trying to get her to say that God hates fags?

Why does the girl say this? Circle one:

(A) She thinks this to herself.

(B) She thinks that her mother thinks that.

(C) Her mother does think that.

(D) All of the above.

She always jars and jams me with her peering ‘Why?s’. I have never felt like such an enigma. I feel like I’m interesting when I’m with her.

Time unfolds something strange. It’s the day that I’m yelling at my girlfriend through the phone. She’s been having sex with my best friend for the past year. I’ve never yelled before, even when she’s yelled at me. I remember the three times in our relationship I had asked her if she was attracted to her and she told me she understood I was feeling insecure - it was simply never a thought that entered her head. I write down the exact things she says so I don’t misremember, just like my therapist told me:

I’m sorry I didn’t know how not to hurt you.

It would have been so much easier if you loved me less.

I thought it better that I feel guilt than you feel pain.

Darling - I do see you. I was trying to protect you. You’re so important to me.

The first time she said it I believed her and told her I was sorry - I don’t know what for. I saw her pleading, child-like eyes. She thinks I don’t know now how she yells at Sam that she is sick and hateful and selfish for ever wanting to tell me, she thinks I haven’t seen how she talks about me like her precious, empty possession. I tell her that I’ve seen the screenshots and ask if she feels love or shame. There is a low rattle through the phone: “If I ever do, I’ll let you know.”, and it hangs up.

No one wants to admit to others when their first queer experience is also their first experience of abuse. So I don’t. A dismal question arises in my mind, that maybe lesbianism (lesbianism, as if my love is an ideology rather than a bodily fact) isn't the sole escape from the suffocation of patriarchy. Maybe we can also suffocate each other. I keep this question to myself, also.

I’m away from work for three weeks. It disturbs my mother, so she makes my sister give me something to do.

My sister graduated at the top of her school in mathematics, became an engineer, and is now getting married. After that day she will spend most of her time loving her daughter, making ten perfect dresses a week with her shaking, anxiety-medicated hands. She will make dresses with the trappings of engineering elegance: functional, resourcefully made from old tote bags, and so geometrically beautiful.

I fear sometimes she will become the cliche of brilliance quashed by the mundanity of housewifery, and I play through scenes of Revolutionary Road while she and her fiance argue over slate grey versus sand countertops. I once thought that seething spousal wars and suffocating suburbia were just ‘hetero problems’, then I found that a woman can yell at you in a different way and about different things but it still feels like being yelled at. At most times, though, I feel that my sister is a domestic deity. She blesses light and practical care into the world - an impact that is so much more precious and less reducible than that of the engineer she might have been. She conjures a steamed fish and a soup for every frequency of distress I signal, while also forgetting that I’m vegetarian. Who in their right mind would waste such love on a machine?

My mother and I sit side-by-side at her dining table to prepare her two-hundred wedding cards. I impress a deep groove into each card with the side of a pencil, slowly, one-by-one, and fold. Along every groove I recite: this is the only thing happening right now, this is safe, this is certainty, I create it here on this paper. My mother is folding with me. I look up and witness her float off to the side, dreaming of the blissful days my sister will live alongside her husband and her perfect child.

A query gently arises: Maybe she doesn’t hate how I love.

Maybe she just wants me to have a wedding where she can fold cards that she can send to her friends.

I know that the more that I tell her, the less she will understand. My mother is one of those immigrants who overdeveloped her vocabulary because she had no reference for everyday English conversation. So I know it’s not a language barrier.

I can’t tell her that the same electricity that surges through my body when I touch this woman also makes me sick, maybe I am a cow because I must have seven stomachs with how sick I feel all the time, sick in my stomach of stomach of stomachs. I can’t explain that this same woman makes me wake up in the middle of the night, feeling a million ants crawling under my skin, trafficking tiny rocks around and poking their feelers through my veins. I can’t say that and tell her that I love this part of myself and beg that she love it, too.

In the car, she is disinterestedly re-telling a story about death. I can’t remember how we got here. Our conversations are either preoccupied with mortality, or else imply it: job, food, this or that person is dangerous. This one is about the time police asked her to identify her friend from a series of bombed corpses, and she laughs. I hate this story, I hate the way she delivers it. My inner critic appraises: Awful - dishonest execution!

Then the image sits with me. It slides down into my second stomach. It feels like Fear? But it’s greater. I don’t know it well enough. I am sad that anyone does. I’m sad that my mother does. I hope it did not feel like I felt under abuse - but it might have, and my feeling might be able to be packed a thousand times into hers. I am annoyed that she is afraid of being vulnerable, which is probably true, but it’s probably also true that she believes she is concealing the forbidden knowledge of human cruelty. I realise that I know nothing about her twenties. I know she feels left out of my twenties, but I have good reasons for that.

I’m slowly turning a dial on a blur of radio noise - she is still reciting methods for me to avoid my own death - then, I think I hear a couple notes of a sentimental, anonymous melody. I hear her. I place the stones of her life in my left hand and those of mine in my right and make them equal. Some of ours look and feel different; some of hers are more dense, some more distinctly carved by erosion of her years. I almost indulge the idea that (just as she insists) maybe there is nothing I have felt or known that she hasn't already. I feel the anguish of her, I feel the anguish of me. I feel the anguish of her, and me. I tell her I’ll pray, I’ll keep my back away from the door, I’ll stay away from people who want to use me. I don’t know at this moment that these promises will hold. She probably knows that they won’t – but I hope that she knows that I mean them. There is a gentle ripple in the fabric. It says: perhaps, right now, this fabric here is enough.