Mother is Everything

The pattern of being traumatically separated from my mother and longing to return to her seems to be a constantly reiterating theme in my life.

It’s a pattern that can repeat with no definite end because in the final analysis I am the only real reason for why we’re separated and I am the only real obstacle that prevents me from returning to her. I do it because the paradoxical combination of her love and hate of me produces so much suffering and discomfort that eventually I am forced to secure some level of sensory distance from her, otherwise I have no real chance to consider who I am and who I want to be independently of her overwhelming presence and the pressure she imposes on me to conform to her own nature.

This has occurred time and time again ever since I was young and first started to show signs of autonomy and selfhood — and crucially, signs that I was not a typical boy. At first, the separation was minimal; being mostly spatially oriented, I would seek distance by going to another room, or leave the house to sit on the porch, or even temporarily run away to seek refuge in a friend’s house (though I was seldom ever welcomed in, usually because of my friend’s mother). Then, as I grew older and started going to school in another state far from home, the separation increased at a greater order: now it was temporal, and I would be gone for months on end, only to eventually return when I didn’t have any other place to call home. Now that I am a fully fledged adult, and am able to secure the conditions of my life independently of the care of my mother, when separation happens it becomes total: I silence all communication, and she doesn’t really know where I live and won’t be able to find me very well.

In the beginning, her overwhelming presence was almost sublime. There and then I first learned how thin the line — if there is any such line — between passion and hatred is. Moments of separation were almost instinctual and immediate, but nowhere near registered as traumatic as being in her exuberant presence. Returning after separation was almost always a different kind of pain; rather than indexing sensory overload, it was characteristically marked by the absence of sensory stimulus — she was almost cold and indifferent sometimes.

Later, her presence became more of a nuisance, especially when great spatial and temporal distance was in play. Her inability to accept any wrongdoing on her part for inflicting physical pain on my body or for forcing me to endure psychological torment added to the deep seated frustration. When I eventually had to confront her with the fact that the little boy she gave birth to was in fact a medically transitioning transsexual woman, she was hysterical with disbelief and I felt her all-too-familiar sense of distorted compassion for my mode of existence expressed as hateful wrath over my mode of appearance. She would rapidly cycle through each and every one of the afflictive emotions in order to remind me (in a manner appropriate for each affliction yet always harboring the same meaning) that as long as I strayed from her I will never, ever appear the way I exist, no matter how hard I strived to change that ultimate truth.

I’ve been going through a lot of changes, biologically, psychologically and socially due to being on hormone replacement therapy. No amount of careful study or rational deliberation would have prepared me for the lived experience of being a transsexual woman in the process of transition — with the added burden of a ruthlessly unsupportive mother who still denies that she was ever at fault and who constantly reminds me that I’ll never be who or what I want to be. There is no blueprint for what it might be to live a life like mine, especially because the life experience of each and every trans person, let alone trans woman, is so irreducibly unique (in spite of what we like to tell ourselves or each other sometimes, in order to fashion an acceptable narrative to a society who constantly questions our existence). There are no movies or stories about us other than the ones we tell ourselves, but even then we don’t always share the same backgrounds or even motivations for transitioning; sometimes we even vehemently disagree with each other, trying to make rational sense of the transrational non-sense of our lived experience or to empirically find the categorically unfindable basis of our existence. We might find some sense of community with each other, but in the end one’s transition is one’s transition alone, an improvised model modeled on no other model but itself and incapable of functioning as a model for others to model.

That is the nature of the self-choreographed choreography of my transition. Each step I take seems to be in the process of crumbling away even before I set foot on it, yet miraculously there are enough supporting conditions — and volitional activity on my part — to make progress on the path possible, all the while I’m being driven by some vague yet ever-present theo-erotic lure for becoming with only virtual images envisioned as guiding possibilities. I’ve come to learn that these virtual images are somewhat deceptive in that their picture-perfect yet primordially abstract visages necessarily become corrupted in the process of their involutionary ingression into the world of actual finite experience, thus never embodying a concrete reality that is perfectly analogous to their Platonic self-presentation. I don’t mind however, and perhaps even prefer it that way. I get the sense that these virtual images are more or less presented as the same for everyone who entertains them, but the result of their incarnational journey of becoming a part of my own being results in something that is distinctively, characteristically, uniquely and specially me, which I positively enjoy.

It pains me that my mother cannot share in my enjoyment, that she does not share in the satisfaction I have in becoming more of myself. She only ever longs for me to be more like her. Her wishes always seem to demand the exact opposite in me what I want for myself. This pushes me away even further from her, and when I inevitably come back her demands seem to be more stubbornly adamantine than ever, seemingly unmoved by the incessant turmoil of our habitual patterns.

Yet the tragic irony of it all is that in spite of these repeated cycles of separating and returning, separating and returning, separating and returning in my struggle to be myself independently of her and her struggle to remind me of my dependence on her, the deeper I go in my transition the more I remind myself of her. My voice sounds more and more like hers, and I’ve always unconsciously modeled my appearance to hers, often seeing her in my face when looking at the mirror. I still remember those days when I was too young to speak for myself, and she was exactly the sort of mother I find myself constantly longing to become — warm, serene, in wonder about what futures are in store for the little child she would sacrifice her own life for. In spite of all the separating and returning, I am coming to realize that no matter what I do or what I think I’m doing and no matter who I am or who I think I am, that not only will I never be truly independent of my mother but that she will always be proved right from the very beginning.

There was never a point in my life where she was the real reason for my suffering, since it was all caused by my own reaction to her expressing herself the only way she knew how. Her actions are faultless.

There will never be a point in my life that I will ever truly be the image of who I want to be, because as my mother always reminds me, my hypothetical appearance will never conform to my real existence. Her wisdom is boundless.

There is never a point where she is not feeling for me in some way shape or form, because no matter how afflicted or non-afflicted she may be at any given moment, she is always longing for my best. Her compassion is ceaseless.

This is why, in spite of it all (or perhaps in some secret way I still have yet to fully comprehend — because of it all), my mother is a Buddha. Every intention she ever had, every word she ever spoke, every action she ever conducted was (in its own inexplicable yet undeniable way) a model for who I would become. My father (who was always present enough to be bewildered by my changes yet absent enough to not really know what was happening) was right all along: mā sabakichu (“mother is everything.”)

You might disagree that she is a Buddha. I would agree that she is not a Buddha for you. She is my Buddha, whether she knows this or not. But if she has taught me anything, I do know that even if she knows she would not make it known that she knows, because to do so, knowing me, she would know that I would end up diverting my attention away from her principle intent: to become like her. Therefore she will never give me the satisfaction of confirming her completely blossomed Buddha-nature. So I will continue to play her (our) divine game, and return to her once more (and again and again), while being open to the fact that a final resolution is not promised and that the cycle will continue indefinitely, because there was never a point that I was ever separate from her in the first place.

The theo-erotic lure of becoming that propelled my own individual transition does not finally terminate in the attainment of my own independent self-identity but consummates itself in the return to divine communion with my Buddha/mother. My heart knows this to be true, even though my mind falls behind in understanding it. The virtual image of the possibility that one day my mother will recognize me as her daughter is in the end just an image, and may never come to perfect fruition no matter how close, no matter how temporarily satisfying, its imperfect ingressions into concrete reality may be. But I find great bliss in knowing that, no matter what I have done, no matter what I am doing, no matter what I will do, I will always be — effortlessly and spontaneously — exactly who my mother wants me to be, whether she knows this or not.