Get Married!

A repost of a now-lost story about my mom...

Kazue Muraoka Drew: My mom about a year and a half before her death.

Grab your tea and get comfortable-- I want to tell you a true story about my very tiny Japanese mama. She has always made it very clear to me and to anyone who would listen that her job as a mother wasn’t done until I got MY job done, which is to get married and then present her with a few grandbabies. My siblings have gotten married, so they were off her radar as far as that went. I am the youngest, her last 'hold-out,' and she was determined to crush my 'rebellion' and make me perform my one and most important duty to her. Since the time I was really young, she had been on me like white on rice to get busy with the business of marriage and motherhood. I can vividly remember her trying to arrange something between me and the family’s mail carrier back when I was 13. (I'm pretty sure that my dad didn’t know about it!) But you know, I was in junior high school and I had a crush on a boy named Stuart. In my 13 year old eyes, the mailman was gross because he was really, really old (a.k.a. over 20). Despite my protests and rolling eyes, my mom wooed him with cookies and smiles. She probably scared the bejeezus out of that poor man once he finally understood what she wanted. Either that or he could never quite put together her broken Japlish/Engrish and just thought to himself, “Gee… there’s that friendly Mrs. Drew again!” Needless to say, her scheming and plotting failed. And so year after year I tried to tune out my mom’s scolding voice:

“When are you getting married?” “Don’t be so picky!”

“Stop wasting time!”

“Tina, when are you getting married?”

“What? You’re going to high school? WHY?! GET MARRIED!”

“You’re getting very old.”

“You’re such a lazy girl—GET MARRIED!”

“Quit being disobedient—GET MARRIED!”

“What? MORE school?? GET MARRIED!”

“Why are you so picky? You don’t like anyone.”

“What’s wrong with that one? He’s married? Why won’t YOU get married?!”

“Get married!”

“AGAIN with the school?! When are you going to stop? GET MARRIED!”

“Where’s your husband? What? GET MARRIED!”

My mom as a young married woman.

On top of that, every year for my birthday I received a special gift from my mom. I call it the annual Happy GET MARRIED Birthday Talk. Don't get me wrong-- on regular, ordinary days I got The Talk, too. Sometimes in the morning, sometimes in the afternoon, and sometimes at night I heard my mom and the dreaded M word. There has been many theme and variations on The Talk, which usually went like this:

“Tina, you’re getting old. Another year has gone by and you’re still too lazy to get married. What’s wrong with you? Stop being so picky! What do you mean they don’t like you? Quit worrying about loving them, worry about that after! Just GET MARRIED!” or “Hey Pickle Girl—where’s my grandbabies?! GET MARRIED!”

Mom and Dad with their only grandchild.

The Talk have been mostly annoying, sometimes distressing, but occasionally unbelievably hysterical. Take the year of my 29th or 30th birthday. I went home as I always did for my birthday dinner and cake, and true to form my mom started in almost as soon as I walked through the door. She was in a very cranky mood that year, though, so it wasn’t long before she had worked herself into a screaming frenzy: “You’re just a bad daughter because you haven’t gotten married yet!” Without thinking, I hollered right back, “You’re just a bad mama because you haven’t found me a husband yet!” That shut her up! But alas….she was only quiet for a moment. That woman sucked all the oxygen out of the room before she began bellowing for my father to come downstairs to where I stood—legs planted, hands at my waist, chin jutting out, glaring furiously down at my short mama. My poor dad came running, thinking that he had to break up a cat-fight or something equally horrifying to his peace-loving soul. Imagine his consternation when my mom calmly—but firmly—told him, “Charlie! Find your daughter a husband!”

My absolute favorite Happy GET MARRIED Birthday Talk occurred the following year: My sister and I had been eating my birthday dinner with our parents, and we had just polished off our plates of cake and ice cream. We kept throwing puzzled glances at each other and then stared pointedly at our mom all evening long. She had been curiously silent as she ignored us and meticulously ate her dinner. Then she ate her slice of cake. And then down the hatch went the scoop of vanilla ice cream…. Finally, our mom shooed us off and urged us to go lay down on her futon to rest. So my sister and I clomped heavily (we were stuffed) downstairs to the basement, kicked off our shoes, and belly-flopped down onto the homemade futon and started talking.

“Hmmmm… wonder why mommy didn’t say anything?” she asked.

“I don’t know! Maybe she gave up,” I replied. Naively, I thought that maybe, just maybe, I’ve managed to escape The Talk. It wasn’t long, however, before we both heard our mother making her noisy way downstairs and across the tiled basement floor toward her bedroom where we were sprawled like sheep before the slaughter. She eased her feet out of her slippers by the door, came into the room, and then delicately kneeled down by the edge of the futon and folded her hands into her lap. She had this very tragic look on her face as she gazed at me. Kind of like an old actor in a Kabuki theater. “Tina…” she said in this very plaintive voice. “Why won’t you get married? Isn’t there anybody that you like?” And in a moment of gregarious and profound weakness (I was probably just high on sugar), I told my mom about this man that I really liked from my church. He was an Elder, and he was very handsome, quite funny, and we once went to a Christopher Parkening concert together. After listening sympathetically to my tales of unreciprocated romantic longings, nodding her head sagely from time to time, my mama asked me, “Do you want mommy to talk to him?”

Mom and her Little Delight.

I have been listening to this tiny comedienne and her one-part act for a very long time. I was even starting to get used to it. Then it happened. One birthday I did not get The Talk. Who knew that I’d take the omission so hard—I went back to my little apartment that night and cried my eyes out because I thought that since my own mama had given up on me, I would never, ever, ever get married. My friends laughed at me and couldn’t understand why I wasn’t HAPPY that she didn’t nag me that year. They thought I had finally lost it as I began to go through the 7 stages of grief. As it turned out, she just forgot that it was my birthday (which explained the lack of cake and dinner, too), and she simply picked up where she left off a few weeks or so later. Nag, nag, nag.

Well, I’ve now endured almost 30 years of The Talk which, by the way, has a new variation—she’s skipping the ‘get married’ section and is just repeating the ‘where is my grandbaby’ line over and over again. Ha! I must have the only mom in the world who wants her daughter to have children out of wedlock. Anyway, after all this time, I've finally given up the hope of ever finding my soul mate, my companion for life and have stopped looking. A nice date for me was on the pages of a good book or up on the movie screen. Except for occasional bouts of intense loneliness, I’ve more or less adapted to the “but not for me” scenario. Lately (and especially since the death of my father this past January), I’ve found myself entangled in a complicated and exhausting web of trying to care for my old mama and deal with her myriad of mental and physical health issues, work on probate and conservatorship stuff, sort through my ambivalent feelings about being back in the neighborhood where I grew up, trying to adjust to a new routine that leaves very little time for tending to my own needs and well-being, working full-time job, and trying to find time in the few hours left at the end of the day for rest, play, and sleep. It has been quite a stressful time for me and sometimes I feel like a zombie just putting one foot in front of the other. However, I’ve noticed something that kind of makes me smile through the tears: even though my mom has been displaying really alarming signs of dementia and Alzheimer’s, the one thing that remains constant is that she never seems to forget that I haven’t yet gotten married nor given her the grandchildren that she so desires.

“Tina….when are you getting married, huh? When are you going to get pregnant—I want three boys. Huh? When are you going to be a good girl and get married?"

Mom at Colorado Lutheran Home with her beloved baby doll.

My mama really doesn’t seem to understand much these days, and her mental confusion is hard to witness. I find myself telling her things that she forgets a few minutes later. I watch her trying to figure out how to turn the record player on or struggling to find the right English words to ask me a question. She’s constantly asking me where her son is and when her husband is coming back home from the hospital… and occasionally she’ll ask me in this most bewildered tone, “Why do I keep forgetting these things?” I have been listening to my mama getting all the facts of her life mixed up as she enters this new stage in her life. She often confuses me for my sister, or my 9 year old niece, and sometimes, inexplicably, for my father, and I want to just put my head down and cry. Instead, I patiently (and sometimes impatiently) remind her that my brother lives in Texas and my daddy died in January and I tell her over and over again that I'm Tina when she calls me Kazai or Charlie. But lately my mama can’t even understand my words—not only had she forgotten most of what little English she had, but she’s starting to forget the special little made-up Japanese-English language that my siblings and I shared with her from the time we were little kids in order to communicate with her, our mama, our mommy. So I can’t tell her where my dad is buried, I can’t tell her why my brother can't come over and take her to the grocery store, I can’t tell her why eight dollar bills and a five dollar bill does not equal $85. And most of all, I can’t tell her that I’ve met the love of my life.

Oh, and that he’s a mailman.

Postscript: My mother passed away on January 1, 2015, and she is with my dad at Fort Logan National Cemetery.

~Tinooseus!