Leather jacket, circa 1993, faux punk, black with superfluous folds and pockets hemmed by zippers and buttons. It hung on the wall of Merry-Go-Round, a fad clothing store in Eastview Mall, where my mother and I spent the afternoon every Wednesday, the one day of the week she didn’t have to work. It was the most expensive item I had ever wanted. It must have been really expensive, because she didn’t buy it for me on sight. For weeks I coveted it, trying it on over the cheaper polyester, nylon, and velvet dresses my mother did buy for me right away. I would strike poses, stare at my reflection in the mirror. For the leather jacket, she made me wait until Christmas. She probably had to save up the money.
I was twelve years old, and the jacket was too much—not simply in terms of expense and frivolity, but too much swagger. I wore it once but couldn’t pull it off. It wasn’t me. I wasn’t it.
Each morning before I left for school, my mother would ask expectantly, “Are you going to wear your leather jacket?” Eventually she stopped asking.
Thirty years later, paused at an intersection, I see a kid crossing the street wearing a similar leather jacket, and I recall not just the jacket but the sequined Michael Kors Mary Janes, the cashmere Burberry scarf, the $366 worth of silk and lace panties and bras I ordered from a Victoria’s Secret catalog in 1998, when I was sixteen and had no occasion to wear such fancy lingerie. All were buried deep in a drawer. I couldn’t bring myself to discard or donate or sell these items on eBay. Maybe I kept them as punishment—because my mother never punished me, and she never stopped buying me whatever I wanted.
I wince, then weep a little. Then a lot. Such a response seems disproportionate. I know I’m not the only daughter who got spoiled. But not all daughters are created equal.
At forty-two years old I’ve finally learned how to budget and track the nitty-gritty purchases that add up: Tabs at the bar. Streaming subscriptions. Skin-care products. I have chronic shoulder pain and used to enjoy a two-hour massage once a month. I used to put it all on my credit cards. When the balances got too high, my mother would pay and clear them out. Recently I started working three jobs: as a full-time instructor at a university and a part-time instructor at two colleges. I’m trying to manage my debt, afford my life. I can’t believe it took me so long to hold myself accountable for how much my life actually costs. Forty-two feels incredibly, abnormally late to realize that, yes, time is money. And, conversely, money is time—time that someone, somewhere worked.
At seventy-five years old my mother still works at a restaurant. She takes and assembles to-go orders, tends the cash register, guides customers to their tables. She doesn’t move as fast as she used to, doesn’t cook or serve food unless she’s covering for someone who called in sick. Over the years she cut back from ten to eight to six hours a day; from six to five to four days a week. She earns fourteen dollars an hour, plus shift meals, plus glasses of wine she brings home in styrofoam cups.
“You should ask for a raise,” I tell her.
“No,” she says, laughing as if it were a joke. “I can’t do that.”
“Why not? Just a dollar more an hour. Doesn’t hurt to ask.”
“Elizabeth. Who else is going to hire an old lady?”
“They’re not going to fire you. You’ve been there forever. You deserve the extra dollar.”
“I already get free wine. And free soup.”
I wish she didn’t have to work. I wish I earned enough to take care of her. But I took so long to barely take care of myself.
My mother was born in Okinawa, formerly a colony and now a prefecture of Japan. She was born three years after the Battle of Okinawa destroyed and devasted the island, killing a third of the population and rendering survivors homeless. She witnessed the postwar militarization of the island’s economy: the US soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen swarming the streets, bright neon signs in English advertising to them. Nearly 20 percent of the landmass was occupied by US military bases, concentrated in central Okinawa, where my mother lived. Her father and older brothers built those bases. Her mother and older sisters cleaned those bases.
My mother grew up poor, living in a tin-roofed shack and sleeping in the same room as her parents and seven siblings. She scavenged snails, berries, and sweet potatoes to eat and was hungry most of the time. Eight of her front teeth blackened and fell out. She quit school to work at a factory when she was twelve. She quit the factory to work at a nightclub when she was sixteen. With her first stash of discretionary income, she bought herself a set of pearly white dentures.
At the mall every Wednesday, my mother and I shopped mostly in silence, our conversations limited to which store to visit next, which item was required to complete an ensemble. We discussed colors and sizes, never prices. At home I watched television while she cooked, washed dishes, scrubbed counters, swept, vacuumed, and mopped. When she returned late at night from her shifts at the restaurant, I was often asleep. If not, I pretended to be asleep, or else blatantly ignored her while watching television. No “How was your day?” or “Let me make you some tea.” For most of my childhood I hid from her and her foreignness. It wasn’t just her imperfect English that embarrassed me but her whole approach to existence. She worked to survive. As a sullen teen I blamed her for always working. For merely surviving.
Decades later I recall the countless times, after I left home, that she paid my overdue rent, the overdue utilities, the overdue parking violations that resulted in my car being booted and my license being suspended. The shame hits hard and burns hot. I wasn’t earning my keep. I didn’t respect her or give her the credit she deserved.
At twenty-seven years old I stood in the long line at the traffic-court office. My mother stood behind me with her checkbook in her purse. She wasn’t angry, which made me feel even more humiliated. When the teller summoned me to the window, I stepped forward. Mother stepped forward, too, and I snapped, “Don’t stand so close!” As if I could fool the teller or anyone else; as if I could fool myself into thinking I was taking responsibility.
In her essay “The Work You Do, the Person You Are” Toni Morrison describes the sense of empowerment she received from her first job:
Part of my pride in working for Her was earning money I could squander: on movies, candy, paddleballs, jacks, ice-cream cones. But a larger part of my pride was based on the fact that I gave half my wages to my mother, which meant that some of my earnings were used for real things. . . . The pleasure of being necessary to my parents was profound.
Morrison had been hired to clean the house of a woman, specifically the sort of rich white woman tactless enough to hire a child to clean her house. Hence the capitalization of the pronoun. Although issues of race and class were certainly embedded in the arrangement, Morrison focuses on the intrinsic value of the work itself, both monetary and psychological.
Growing up, I was never encouraged to work. Once, when I was fourteen years old, I tried to deliver newspapers. I wanted to be like my older friend, the former paper girl, who had moved up in the world, to a cashier position at Taco Bell. On my first day I lugged the huge, dorky sack around the neighborhood, trudging across lawns and dropping papers on doorsteps. I can still feel the tingling, nauseating embarrassment. I couldn’t handle it. It wasn’t me. I wasn’t it. I quit within the first hour. That evening my mother came home from the restaurant and, in the dark of night, finished my route for me.
She meant well. She hoped to convey that I was meant for something greater, grander than hauling sacks of newspapers. But I also received another, underlying, message: I was helpless.
Now I look around my apartment at my belongings: desk, lamp, laptop, printer, shoe rack, coatrack, coffee maker, rice cooker. All of it my mother purchased, either as gifts or by paying the balance on my credit card. None of it is really mine.
For a brief period I was angry at my mother for robbing me of the pride that comes from self-reliance. She should have disciplined, withheld, stopped buying me whatever I wanted, stopped subsidizing my lifestyle. Of course, my anger was misplaced.
My mother met my father at the nightclub where she worked. She married him in Okinawa and moved with him to the United States. He was a white American, an officer who could grant her agency and status. A house with multiple rooms and a yard for a garden. Top-of-the-line appliances. Jewelry. Dining at fancy restaurants instead of working at one. She would never have to worry about money again.
Like too many men his age, my father let pride dictate his decisions. He’d grown up wealthy. He’d gone to private schools and pursued two master’s degrees. He was destined to become a boss or upper management. He was supposed to have influence. People who deferred to him. A corner office, a big desk, a nine-to-five schedule with weekends off and vacations. He wouldn’t settle for less.
He owned a video store until Blockbuster put it out of business. Then he was a stockbroker for a series of firms. Got fired, quit, got fired, quit. He traded on Wall Street until the market imploded in 2008. Then he retired and became executor of his mother’s and great-aunt’s estates. His paychecks and then the inheritance covered the larger expenses.
My mother picked up the slack when he was between jobs, and after he retired, she kept working at the restaurant. She saved some of her earnings in cash, which she stowed in a purple wallet in the bottom drawer of the china cabinet. The coins she divided into three jars—one for quarters, one for dimes, and one for nickels. When the jars were full, she rolled those coins in paper wrappers marked $10, $5, and $2. She saved little by little, took out a loan, and bought a car. She saved little by little, took out a loan during a time when she and my father were separated, and bought a house. She did that by herself, with skimpy tips and even skimpier wages.
Why couldn’t I just follow her example?
When Toni Morrison was injured moving her employer’s piano and bookcases, she considered complaining but didn’t want to be fired. She described her dilemma to her father, who offered sound advice: The indignities she had to endure for money didn’t reflect her worth as a person. Her job was just a job. It wasn’t who she was. It didn’t have to define her.
It is a very white, classist notion that what we do for work is an essential component of our identity, fundamentally indicative of our skill, our talent, our character. What we do for work, by this standard, matters more than our willingness to work.
My mother wore an apron. My father wore a suit. After school, on her way to work at the restaurant, my mother would drop me off at the YMCA for gymnastics class. Thirty minutes before class ended, my father would arrive and stand by the wall to watch me cartwheel and somersault. He nodded and cheered. Afterward he and I ate dinner, talked, and watched television together while my mother worked.
Within our family, I discovered which type of work was worth more, allowed more spare time, and deserved to be visible. I also observed who does which type of work. Our family adopted the systems and practices of the rest of the world. My father and I let my mother—the immigrant, the one who was accustomed to manual labor, who seemed made for it—do all the hard work.
For most of my life I tried to follow my father’s example, to emulate his authority and confidence. I was a barista, a bookseller at Barnes & Noble, an administrative assistant, a high-school special-education teacher. Got fired, quit, got fired, quit. The reasons were always the same: I couldn’t endure the indignities.
Author Eula Biss defines whiteness as the condition of benefiting, however indirectly and remotely, from the coerced, uncompensated, or undercompensated labor of the disenfranchised. According to Biss, guilt—or, rather, white guilt—minimizes this benefit.
For me the benefit is not so remote. I intimately know the source. Maybe that’s why I was initially able to deny the implications of my situation. She’s my mother. I’m her daughter. The absence of reciprocity seemed natural. At first.
Some would say I’m lucky to have found a job—or, rather, jobs—that are aligned with my interests and allow me to do much of my work at home: reading, planning, and grading while sipping wine and smoking cigarettes on my porch. What I do for work makes me proud, and that’s a privilege, but it’s not by any means a result of good fortune. My mother supported me, sponsored me, sacrificed for me.
I’m half white. The other half of me has experienced the brunt of white obliviousness firsthand. Maybe that’s why I feel so viscerally what I have done to my mother.
Just two years ago, before I got my current jobs, I stood in the checkout line of a rest-area gift shop. My mother stood behind me, as usual. I held two pairs of sunglasses—two because I couldn’t decide which I preferred. My mother insisted on paying for both.
I broke one pair, lost the other.
How many hours did she have to work for those?
Maybe I wouldn’t feel as bad if the money she’d earned weren’t inexorably linked to her time, her body; if every cent weren’t a tick of the clock, a heavy tray she lifted and carried, a trip from the kitchen to a table, from a table to the cash register, her feet getting sore. As she gets older, I think about how her time and her body are getting used up, and how bound she has always been by both.
My mother is generous with everyone. She sends money to her family in Okinawa. When she and her friends took a trip to a casino, she used her winnings to cover their losses so they could break even, and she still had enough left over to treat them to a nice sushi dinner. (My mother is a very astute gambler.)
But her extravagance toward me exceeded generosity. She was buying my love.
When I was a small child, my mother didn’t work. She stayed home and took care of me while my father was at the office or on business trips. I ached for him in his absence. My mother couldn’t understand the jokes on my favorite cartoons. She couldn’t read the stories—“Cinderella,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “The Ugly Duckling”—that my father had read to me so often I had memorized the words. I remember reciting these stories to her, but she wouldn’t listen. “You don’t need me,” she said, then sighed. Then she went back to sweeping, vacuuming, mopping. At the store she would blink and stare if she didn’t understand the clerk, or have to repeat herself if the clerk didn’t understand her. She didn’t belong. That meant I didn’t either. She would see my expression and put a Barbie in the cart.
When I started kindergarten, she started working. She would pick me up from school smelling like fish and soy sauce. She didn’t chat with my teacher or the other mothers, couldn’t speak in the same accent as they did. On the way home I would tease her for how she talked, how she looked—the same insults I heard from my classmates. By the time I was too old for Barbies, I had acquired well over fifty.
When I told her about the boys and girls who taunted me, I had to speak slowly, pause often, repeat myself. She missed so many details. She would interrupt, blurting, “They don’t like you? Doesn’t matter!” Maybe she didn’t know the words in English to fully express her sympathy. Maybe she was trying to shed some perspective on my petty melodrama. My life was always so much easier than hers. But she would still take me to Express, American Eagle, and Gap to splurge on outfits intended to impress those mean boys and girls.
On nights before her days off, she would drink a bottle of wine, sometimes two. She would stumble into my bedroom, her lips stained red and her breath acidic, collapse next to me, and tell me how much she loved me. “I’m sorry,” she’d say over and over. I would yell and beg for her to leave me alone. The next day, always Wednesday, after she’d nursed a hangover, we’d go shopping.
Long after I realized the dysfunction of our dynamic, neither of us could stop. I couldn’t stop making terrible financial decisions. She couldn’t stop thrusting hundred-dollar bills at me, refusing—sometimes with tears in her eyes—to let me refuse.
Sometimes I can’t bear the guilt, the weight of this tremendous indebtedness.
Sometimes I think I shouldn’t have to.
During that dreadful year of 2020, the restaurant closed. At first my mother hated the forced retirement. She was bored. She missed her coworkers. She drank too much wine and fought with my father. But after the initial panic subsided, she derived pleasure from the endless stretches of idleness. She tended her garden: hibiscus, hydrangeas, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, scallions, basil, and mint. She fed seeds to the birds and peanuts to the squirrels. She tried to feed carrots to the rabbits, but they were more interested in the vegetables she grew. “Rabbits don’t eat carrots!” she told me, laughing. She bought kibble from a pet store for them. She cooked beautiful meals. She walked in the park. She watched television. She began to savor this pandemic silver lining.
She called me periodically to declare the rising balance in her savings account. Her six hundred a week in unemployment benefits, plus her meager Social Security, had allowed her to save money faster than when she was working. “Seven thousand dollars!” she announced with glee. She felt so blessed, as if the world were finally taking care of her. Her joy made me bitter and angry on her behalf. As far as I was concerned, that six hundred a week was reparations.
That year I was broke and in a toxic relationship with a man who was also broke. I called my mother almost every day, sobbing.
“Does he need money?” she asked. “I give him money. Maybe if he had more money, he would feel better about himself.” Her solution to everything.
“Mom. Please stop.”
She insisted on sending him a gift. She knew he loved cooking, so she sent a portable gas stove and ingredients for shabu-shabu. Paid extra for overnight shipping.
On the day the stove and ingredients arrived, he was angry at me for not having called him immediately after I had finished a Zoom meeting with a student. He asked if the student was a man, if he was handsome, if I had been flirting with him. He demanded I show him my phone so he could see who I had been texting.
The stove and food were held hostage during the fight, long enough for the ingredients to spoil. Wasted.
I recalled the time my mother had bought a plane ticket for a guy who had then broken up with me four days before his departure. I recalled the time she had bought a plane ticket for me because my car had broken down en route to reunite with a different guy, who had then broken up with me two days after I arrived. At least with the stove, the money she’d wasted hadn’t come from hours and hours of her hard work. It had come from the US government.
Toward the end of the pandemic, my father lost the remainder of his inheritance in a lawsuit, and my mother lost her house. Her garden. My parents moved into a modest apartment with a tiny patio. My father’s Social Security covered the larger expenses, but my mother still needed to work. She returned to the restaurant before it was safe, wearing a mask and latex gloves, wiping the sweat from her brow with the exposed flesh of her forearm.
No one her age should need to work. I wish I could buy her a house. I wish I could take care of her.
Even with my three jobs, I can’t repay my mother everything I owe. I can, however, say that I feel like I’m closer to her. Like I’m doing right by her. Like I’m there beside her, treading water, working to stay afloat, instead of adding to the weight pulling her under.
My mother did eventually ask her boss for a raise. He agreed to sixteen dollars an hour. She was ecstatic, even after the raise was nullified by inflation.
“Do you know how much everything has gone up?” she asks.
“Uh . . .”
“You don’t know, do you?” She laughs. “You’re just like your father.”
“I’m getting better!”
She tracks the cost of groceries, scribbles prices in a notebook, makes the rounds to three different stores to get the best deals possible. She cuts tubes of toothpaste in half to scrape the dregs from them, sets bottles of cooking oil upside down over a funnel and drains out every last drop.
“Little by little. Little by little,” she says cheerfully. And she quotes a Japanese proverb: Chiri mo tsumoreba yama to naru. “If dust piles up, it becomes a mountain.”
