Knowing something and understanding it are different.
I’ve always been curious about this distinction.
I think “knowing” means storing some information in your head.
On the other hand, “understanding” is something that happens at a deeper level. Sometimes, rather than pure comprehension, it comes creeping in accompanied by an inescapable sensation or something akin to pain.
That’s how it seems to me.
I was born with developmental disabilities, which made it difficult for me to put certain experiences into words. And I grew up being abused by my mother. In today’s terms, she was a toxic parent.
This fact still exists within me as a mixture of parts I can articulate clearly and parts I cannot articulate at all.
But after my mother passed away, as I grew older, I came to know one thing.
Today, I want to set this story down.
About my mother’s past
My mother rarely spoke of the past while she was alive. Because of this, she existed within me for a long time not as a human being with physicality and emotions, but as a symbol represented by the term “toxic parent.”
Perhaps that was a strategy I, as a child, used to protect my own heart.
In middle age, I became obsessed with researching my roots. I requested my birthplace’s registry office for my family records, obtaining the full extent of records legally accessible to direct descendants—those of my grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather. I also visited the actual locations and researched folklore materials in libraries.
Through this process, I came to know my mother’s “story,” one I had never known before.
When my mother was four years old, her father, the family’s breadwinner, died. It was April 1945. It was the final phase of the Pacific War, the Battle of Luzon Island in the Philippines.
My mother’s father died in that tragic battle. Her mother, who seems to have been frail to begin with, also died soon after, as if following her husband. And from the records, I could see that my mother, then four years old, was placed under guardianship.
Amidst adults each burdened by their own circumstances, each insisting on their own righteousness,
the one who could assert nothing was pushed, defenselessly and mercilessly, to the margins of the conversation. That, I imagine, must have been the scene.
After all that turmoil, it was probably to reduce the mouths to feed. The four-year-old girl, who had lived her entire life in a peaceful country town, was sent alone as a foster child to a city far from her hometown. I later learned that she remained there for years, until her big brother was finally old enough to work.
As far as I know, my mother never spoke of those times. I might have asked her about it, but she always changed the subject, and no photographs from that time remain at all.
That is all I “know” about my mother. I still cannot put into words what kind of change came over me through ‘knowing’ this. But I feel I can say one thing: something “changed.”
Perhaps, within me, my mother finally transformed from a “symbol” into a “human being.”
Of course, that doesn’t erase what she did to me.
Forgiving her, or sublimating my feelings—
such simple words cannot express what I feel inside.
Personal suffering
can arise
on the fault lines of history.
Or perhaps it could be said another way.
Through this, I’ve come to understand one thing.
That is,
once you realize someone is a being connected to you, you can no longer keep them as mere symbols.
Will the day ever come when I “understand” my mother? And if I do “understand,” how will I change then? I keep asking myself these questions.
If this story
becomes a piece of material
for someone
to think about their own life.
That’s what I hope.
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