Showing posts with label family. Show all posts
Showing posts with label family. Show all posts
Commemoration (not for sensitive readers)
Ba muoi thang Tu, or the thirtieth of April, is how today is being simply referred to in the Vietnamese community. It marks 35 years of the fall of Saigon (NOT Ho Chi Minh City, dammit!) to Communism. It has been 35 years since the following iconic images occurred.
Depictions of fleeing, desperation, brutality, fear. 35 years of this. It has been 35 years since my parents met, and 35 years since their college education were jeopardized.
I was born after the napalm settled. My father did not die escaping by sea, no matter how close he came to that. I still get to reunite with my father even though 6 years of my childhood was without him. My entire family is safe, mostly. I am lucky. I want to commemorate those who were not.
Today
don’t want to forget today. Today is Tuesday, not quite Hump Day, yet passed the dreaded is-it-really Monday. It has no special alias, just nestled within the week.
But today is very exciting for me, and the below illustration will provide the supporting reasons.
Holding My Breath
I have exciting news coming up that I cannot disclose just yet because I don’t want to jinx it, but it’s been consuming me so much that I have to let some out before I explode.
Let’s just hope that it comes along with MrKP gifting me one of these beauties from Tiffany’s. Please wish me luck!
Oops!
In my previous post about my parents' anniversary, I inadvertently left out the part about my intention for a gift to my parents was to take portraits of them, with my mom wearing her classy dress. Now my explanation about the dress should make more sense :-(
Eesh...that's what happens when you try to blog at work. Hopefully, you got my drift. Or just look at the pictures. I will try to blog about the events surrounding this dress soon!
Anniversaries
MrKP and I have barely survived celebrating two huge anniversaries: our first wedding anniversary and my youth group's 30th. Tomorrow marks another significant anniversary in our lives: my parents' wedding anniversary.
I had fun plans for them, well, it will be fun for my mom and me, at least. My mom didn't get a chance to wear this classy dress to our anniversary party because:1) my dad didn't have anything equally classy to wear that was also comfortable enough for him to play pool at Dave & Buster's
2) she bought this dress since it was such a steal before I decided that the theme colors for our party were blue and green
With her svelte figure, she would have looked like a brunette version of the model.
My plan was to tote along my new baby yesterday and take some nice classy portraits of the 'rents with my mom wearing her classy dress, as an anniversary gift. MrKP was going to be the clown to diffuse my dad's misery during this process, and BroKP (who also has the same initials) was going to get a nice frame for their favorite picture from this session as their gifts.
Well, things took a sharp turn on Saturday. My dad was reverting back to his old self, and my parents's dynamics are now like this picture from our anniversary party, minus the playfulness, and my brother's fedora.
Instead, on Sunday, the KP clan, minus my dad :-(, took my mom to Cheesecake Factory for a late dinner. Where we toasted her an awkward "Ummm...Happy Anniversary, Mom." At least she was comforted by the fact that she had all her children there. As for my dad, after giving me a few disgruntled exchanges, he took off to his friend's house, probably sipping cognac and yakking about everything but my mom. He reverted back to his old self A LOT during the planning of our wedding. It was not a good feeling to be in the midst of planning your wedding and witnessing how rocky your parents' marriage was.
After 32 years, surviving 6 years of which being separated as a result of The Vietnam War, they still test their marriage. Marriage is hard work.
Baby, Baby...
...brother, that is. I only have one sibling, and this is him. Adorable beyond belief, no?
I really do consider him my baby. Because he is almost 10 years younger than me, and because I've fed, changed, bathed, burped, slapped errr...disciplined, and pretty much did everything else for him except to breastfeed him, which my mom didn't do for neither one of us anyway. Hmm...maybe that's the reason for our defiant and sarcastic streaks, because we weren't offered the boob! But I digress.
Due to an unfotunate course of event called the Vietnam War, my parents were separated for 6 years. When they reunited, I got the sibling that I've always asked for. And he's all I've got. We were inseparable, mainly because my dad had the 5 feet rule: at no given time was I to be apart from him for more than 5 feet. A teenage girl with a rambunctious toddler stuck to her side, at all times, fun times. 
But the time did come when we have to be apart. I did "leave" him for 2 years, during my "dark years". I rebelled against my dad and left home (yes, 19 years old, unmarried and checked myself into the college dorm was considered running away in my parents' world, cops were summoned to my boyfriend's house and everything. Of course, the cops tried to stifle their snickers when they found out how old I was at the time.) But I digressed once again.
I wouldn't trade those awful years for the world, for I grew up to be myself and my parents grew to value me as myself as a result of those torturous years. Except for the part where my baby bro was abruptly left to be by himself. I cried in my dorm room almost every night for the first week that I was there because I missed his chubby cheeks singing along with me to the tunes of Amy Grant and Wilson Phillips. But I kept on reminding myself that he's 10 now, he doesn't need me any more, I need me! When I moved back home years later, after our own little Vietnam War in the family has subsided (but this time the Commies lost), I interviewed him for a school project.
Me: Tell me a sad time in your life.We both looked away.
Bro: I don't have many, but....I guess the time when you left home....yeah...that was sad...
Me: [choking] Please elaborate.
Bro: Well, you were always there...and then, you were not. I was never without you.
My heart jumped to my throat. Just like it did when my family was in the process of relocating, and I couldn't find him during one of his numerous impromptu hide-and-seek games when he first began to walk/run, because he climbed into the mounds of moving boxes and stayed there. Or when he fell into the deep end of the pool at 7 and neither of us knew how to swim yet. Or when I was the first person to witness his one and only seizure when he was 12, a congenital disorder which affected nothing if he takes medication twice a day until he was 18.
He's 5'11 now, I'm 5'1 for awhile now. He looks like my dad, I look like my mom. I sound like a mouse, he sounds like a frog. Can you imagine if it was reversed? This is us at the family portrait session that my friend photographed, when we attempted to express sibling rivalry. As you can see, I failed.
In one more month, I will be there when he graduates from my alma mater, receiving his Bachelor's degrees in both Chemistry and Math, with Phi Lambda Upsilon Chemistry Honor Society, Phi Beta Kappa and Magna Cum Laude honors. And once again, my heart will probably jump to my throat. But I will swallow it, and scream at the top of my lungs in my mousy voice, "That's my baby brother!!!" He's used to it.
Dear Diary
I used to keep diaries and journals when I was younger. I enjoy jotting down poems, ramblings, crushes, conversations, screenplays, anything that was relevant to me at the moment. I covet little notebooks with pretty covers, from leather bound to miniature lock and key, just as long as they were pretty.I had many of these little notebooks. Since whatever was relevant was also spontaneous and sporadic, so these little books were never completely filled and did not have any chronology to the entries. It was always entertaining to open one of them up to try and guess during which period of my life was each random entry made.
Sadly, I was not the only one who found my pretty little notebooks entertaining. My overbearing father apparently snooped through every corner of my room ever so often to read what was inside these notebooks, even the ones with the lock and key because I never locked them....spontaneity simply cannot wait for tiny keys which would break after 5 turns. How di
d I find out that my dad was a sneak? It was a completely horrifying and humiliating experience. Not the most horrific and humiliating experience, however, because life with my dad was too full of them. He read the one-line declaration of when I was no longer his innocent little girl, went out and bought a pee stick and made my mom test me. He didn't stop there. No, he shoved the phone in my hand and demanded that I call that bastard boy over so he could give him a piece of his mind!I felt so betrayed by those pretty little things, because my dad did all this immediately the day after I scribbled that declaration with lots of exclamation marks. No one knew! It was between me, my boyfriend, and those pretty pink pages. Since I couldn't destroy my father for the betrayal, I ripped out all the pages instead and dumped them in the school garbage bins (of course I couldn't risk having my snoopy dad sift through the trash cans at home, and I know he would have too!)
Ever since I tearfully trashed my random musings and memories in my school garbage cans, I haven't been able to trust again. I haven't kept a journal or a diary since. The most that I have chronicled my life consisted of short descriptions next to checklists on trips, or summaries of events on our wedding website, and lots of pictures (I always have my camera in my purse). I didn't want to be ridiculed or to have whatever is pertinent to me to be used against me.
But, I miss not being able to record my life and myself. How I wish I had documented my "dark years", my jobs, my relationships, my friendships, my wedding planning. Memories are gratifying, but my brain cannot fully accommodate all my murderous tendencies toward certain bosses, so-called friends, boyfriends, relatives, even myself at one point or another. Or can it store all the trivial things that make me snort out loud when I laugh. So if you happen to read this blog, please know that I am slowly opening up myself to trust again.
Oh, by the way, I didn't throw away all of my diaries. I saved this little gem. And it is the only one that is actually completely filled. I figured its cover would trick my dad into thinking that it belonged to my brother, and not me. In fact, I took it from my brother in the first place :)
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