By the time this is posted, it’ll be my birthday and I’ll be in Japan with my mom. I wanted to treat my mom to a nice trip and give her a break from her routine day-to-day.

“Oh wow, a trip with Mom sounds so fun! You must be excited!”

I heard some variation of the above from friends and yeah, I know I should feel excited. A quality time trip with Mom at a fun place like Japan. I should be excited.

…

In the days leading up to this trip, instead of feeling excited, I felt a weird sense of dread and stress, which isn’t a new feeling. We already got into some fights while planning for this trip, which definitely didn’t help.

Hm.

So, for this song that I chose to cover this time, it’s the song, “unspoken words” by mxmtoon.

I don’t actually have much to say on this musically-wise. This was pretty straightforward to arrange. There is one part, in the second half of the second verse (“Oh, it’s complicated and I need to say it.) where I tried something a little bit new by incorporating a descending scale into my LH, which felt a bit weird, since I usually reserved my LH for strictly accompaniment with no secondary melodies to keep up with. It’s a pretty melody but it’s actually the feelings that certain lyrics convey.

Taking a snippet from the second verse:

"I'm happy with it all now
We both had to grow and learn
To understand each other
And with patience we took turns

I'm sorry for my anger
I was just too young to know
That cause of your exterior
And just what you wouldn't show"

At first glance, this song does seem like another cheesy love song, which  is easy to assume when the hook of the song is, “I love you”. However, the music video, as well as listening more closely to the lyrics, makes it more apparent that it’s a bit more than that. It’s a love song about the singer’s relationship with her grandma. The singer talks about how she and her grandma did not have the most understanding or easiest relationship. They would fight/argue often. However, it’s only until when the singer is older and the grandma passes away that the singer understands more of her grandma’s perspective and how deeply she loved her, without ever saying the words, “I love you.” Unspoken words represents all the things that her grandma did or say without saying, “I love you” and all the things the singer regrets not being able to say to her until it was too late.

This song makes me think about my mom and our relationship. If any of you fall into the following categories, you will have a good idea what I’m about to talk about:

• You are Asian American. Bonus points if you were born in the US and grew up more white-washed than actually Chinese. I am very deeply ignorant of my Chinese heritage.
• Your mom is an Asian immigrant. Bonus points if she’s Chinese.

My pastor once mentioned that there are some grievances or things that we’re better off not raising up with our parents about how they raised us because of how that would change our relationship. Parents who try to be good parents, even with their best intentions, feel pressured to do their children right and inevitably will make mistakes. Children bringing up every single grievance or issue they have with their parenting doesn’t help.

Which is why I won’t say any of this stuff to her face. I would like to add a disclaimer that the following paragraph is very feelings-based. I wrote it with the self-awareness that my feelings, as real as they feel, are not objective and that my mom isn’t here to defend herself.

I fight a lot with my mom. Without being too specific or discussing what led me to feel that way, there were times where I found her nagging and nosy, where I felt so annoyed and angry with her. I found some of the reasoning of why she was not okay with some of the things that I do arbitrary and unfair. She would say just the wrong thing at just the wrong time that would rub me just the wrong way. The opposite also applied where if I made a comment that she took issue with, it would trigger a lecture response. I felt that she didn’t see me as an adult, despite how much I wanted her to. I felt that she judged the way that I live, always having some unneeded comment or nagging to say about it. My default response towards my mom is to always be ready to fight, regardless if there is one imminent or not–which ironically does lead to more fights when I get angry/triggered.

Yet, on the other hand, she’s one of the toughest people I know. You kind of have to be tough if you have a son who is severely disabled to care for everyday. My mom is sacrificial and has given up so much so that I can live well. She’s the type of person to make my favorite foods on the nights I fly back to visit and asking if I ate dinner, even if I get home past 10PM. When she asks me to call her or always tries to pick up my calls no matter how abrupt it is, I see how much she thinks about me. When she nags me to stop going out so late or why am I spending so much of my free time doing “church things”, if I pause and take a moment to think, I see that she says these things because she’s concerned about me and wants to know how I’m doing. No matter how much I blow up at her and get into fights with her or disappoint her in other ways, she always makes time for me. There had even been times where she has been vulnerable with me and I see that she is still trying to learn new things about me and how I react too. Even though she has all of her unsolicited comments to say about how concerned or how much she doesn’t like my choices, at the end of the day, she has proven time and time again that she will be my biggest advocate and let me stand by my choices. She gives me a lot and I give nothing back.

Through her actions, she has told me that she loves me without saying it but I haven’t been doing the same.

My mom will always be one of the more under-appreciated folks in my life and I do want our relationship to be better. I’ll try to enjoy myself on this trip and humble myself and make an effort to be more gracious towards her. Because as much as I think it is a burden trying to handle my mom, if I think about myself clearly, she has clearly dealt more in trying to handle me.

I don’t know if I ever can convey how much I love her with how easily I get angry/triggered with her. However, I don’t want her to wonder on her deathbed if I actually did love her.

I love my mom but I don’t do a very good job of showing it.