Love and Bullying and Love Again

It was a gentle night that February the 14th. I had pulled ripped painting jeans over fishnet stockings to pick up from the local Cantonese plagiarist establishment for myself, the boyfriend and baby. I don’t tend towards wearing fishnet stockings as a statement accessory, but keep them on hand, rather, for their functionality. A sturdy pair of hose will confuse a body into the illusion of warmth when the striated nylon tendons press into the skin, and this was my goal in the late winter evening.
‘Dragon Wok’ is a half a mile from my apartment, a distance which is perilous to travel except by car, should the ground hold even the thinnest film of snow. Even without the icy slick, a biting cold blows across the river, trenchant enough to render a warm person incoherent with expletives in a matter of seconds. And so I ran full tilt across the parking lot, and entered the glass- enclosed establishment kicking and cursing.
I mention the glass enclosure because the interior of the dining area more closely resembles a backwoods conservatory or a lumberjack tea room than a purveyor of fortune cookies. It is a thin ten feet of hallway bordered by only two rows of booths, and the plate glass windows bend overhead, exposing all of the customers’ frustrations with chopsticks to the light of day. Wood accents that line every inch of exposed wall hearken less to a Zen monastery in the Himalayas and more to a Buddhist retreat camp in the Pacific Northwest.
An order was placed to a distinctly American woman in a stained maroon sweatshirt. An uncomfortable vinyl chair was occupied in the waiting area of this restaurant- in- miniature. Thankfully, no one was staring at the angry punk girl craving pot stickers. Well, almost no one.
A mother cast immodest protective glances at me over the shoulder of her teenaged son, the back of whose head looked appropriately bedraggled with shame at his not being asked on any dates this Valentine’s evening. She was a mother in every sense of the word; comfortable sneakers for chasing the wayward child or mess, jeans which zipped over her stretch marks, a Mickey Mouse jacket to make her a walking monolith of wholesomeness.
She glowered at my swinging leg, certain that my harlot eye had fallen on her son. Her son, whose Technicolor plaid trousers were tighter than any pants in my closet, the hues of which matched his hair. Her son, whose thin- brimmed fedora was tilted on his head just as delicately as his utensils were balanced on his left hand. With only a few years of experience, he could have easily outdone me on any dance floor, could have turned more men’s heads in any cocktail bar, could have been the belle of any ball and left me weeping into the window dressings in defeat. Still, his mother glared at me.
While waiting for my wontons, I began to wonder why she would consider me any sort of a threat to her son, whose sexual orientation was roughly as subtle as a fog horn. To start, I pondered the occasion. This mother had taken her son out on Eros’ annual ritual holiday, to a restaurant which is likely not to exist on Google Maps. What cause would she have to take him away from his friends and boyfriends, apart from the drama that infects post- adolescent existence? And, for that matter, why would he agree to her company on this night for any other reason?
This new possibility disturbed me, the possibility that I had reminded her of a character in some school day soliloquy told by her son through a mangled wad of tissues. I started to imagine, or perhaps I only half- imagined, that her eyes were darting from me to him, and her pursed lips were carefully whispering “My God, is that girl one of the ones who did that to you?” The deed itself did not matter, what mattered was that it had caused harm to her own. Bullying can take many forms in the moment of crisis, but takes only one form to the protector, to the Amazon Warrior Mother, and that is a call for retribution and defense. To wit, this mother’s hands grasped her elbows, and she leaned forward over the table with such intensity that it looked as though she were ready to vault the table and tear at my throat with her panther- mother paws, should her son affirm that I was one of the guilty.
And I asked myself; when the time comes, will you be so ready? Will you have prepared your little girl, and yourself, for the vicious attacks of the misunderstanding or the deliberately cruel? Will you have taught her to value herself for herself? Will you have memorized her list of emergency contacts such that she need only dial ‘M’ for mom? Will you have risen above the standard “when I was your age” defense, and come to terms with the circumstance of her generation? Most of all, will you love her for who she is, rather than how her hair is colored or what sort of drama she bemoans and survives?
In that moment, while gathering packets of duck sauce, I issued myself a warning: either be prepared for the sake of the next generation, or be just as out of touch as the last one. And the warning played out in my observations. Either I will become the outmoded mother who doesn’t understand the lifestyle of her own flesh and blood, or I can try to be the worn- out mother who, in spite of gaps in empirical understanding, will protect her offspring come what may. I hope and I aim for the latter: it’s exhaustion that I can live with.