Spinach seed wounds

In a rare moment of one-on-one, the differences between Laila and her mother rise to the surface. Yet they find each other in an unexpected way.

For the first time in three years, my mom came to visit me in Rotterdam on her own, which marked a rare chance for me to spend time one-on-one with her. In our family of five, it was my two younger brothers who often took up her time. So this occasion finally gave me the precious chance to get her full attention.

However, without the presence of my siblings, the differences between my mom and I rose clearly to the surface, like stark red ink on white paper.

The most jarring difference to experience was our language. I have never wanted to admit that I am anything less than fluent in my mother tongue of Bahasa Indonesia, but it was impossible to avoid the fact that I’m far from fluent when it was only the two of us. Since I have spent more than half my life abroad, English has overthrown Indonesian as my native language and now I instinctively reach for English to express myself to my parents. My mom however, though fluent in English because of her master degrees earned abroad, still holds Indonesian as her native language and does the opposite, where she would tend to communicate with her children in Indonesian.

As a result, our car rides are quite a match to spectate. She would ask in Indonesian, and I would answer in English. Vice versa, I would prompt in English and she would respond in Indonesian.

Our divergence in language was a hidden cost of studying abroad that I privately mourned, as I reflected on the theory that language shapes the way we think and, by extension, how we perceive each other. Is this divergence a sign of the silently widening chasm between my mom and I, where we speak the same words but we are situated in entirely different worlds? Would we ever truly be able to reach each other through this gorge?

We were doing our classic family ritual of taking turns being the DJ when I played a Spanish song called “Heridas de Amor”. I passionately explained how the writer described how suffering from wounds of love felt like thorns, though tiny, digging painfully into the side of the heart.

At that metaphor, my mom’s face lit up!

She then excitedly told me of a song in her native dialect of Minang that painted a parallel image. That song also described the agonies of love as something small yet painfully unremovable, but this time “biji-biji bayam” (spinach seeds) were used as the imagery instead of thorns.

That wonderful moment of synchronisation strengthened my hope. If this metaphor for love could travel across languages, then surely, no matter what language, geography, or moment in time, the love between my mom and I would always help us find our way back to each other too.