I love December. I love Christmas. I love the cool weather and even the rain. I love the smell of fresh pine. I love the lights that are strung up on every corner that I turn.
And yet, December is also a month of mourning for me, a month of “what might have been”.
Thirty-two years ago, my father died. On a nondescript mid-winter morning, he collapsed at the basketball court and was dead even before we got to see him at the hospital. Serendipity, that his last moments were spent at a place he so loved. He had been an active basketball player since he was a young student and from all accounts, he never really grew out of it. Isn’t dying while doing something that we love considered the holy grail of life?
On hindsight, death is easy. He did not have to deal with the aftermath. Living was hard at pivotal moments in my life. So incredibly hard. When you grow up knowing that you are so different from everyone else, that your family is fractured, that there isn’t enough money, there is a huge chip on your shoulder. There is emotional and mental burden, unseen and unknown, that you carry in every step you take along the way. The absence of my father unwittingly shapes every move, every decision.
I will never know if the person that I am today will be who I am in an alternate universe where my father never died. I try not to think about it, because I know that as much as I mourn the breaking up of my family, I am also mourning the who that I could have been. I am mourning the confusion and feelings of being lost and lonely, which accompanied me for most of my formative years.
I was a teenager searching for myself, my identity, trying to figure out how I could fit in. And I had nobody to help me grow into myself. Grief was not an easy cloak to shrug off.
Over the weekend, we took the boys to watch Frozen 2. I didn’t read the synopsis and I wasn’t a fan of the first installment, we simply decided to go with dear friends and their boys. But the movie hit me hard as a mother, a fatherless child.
When Elsa sings of how she knows she is “not where I’m meant to be” and “there’s a part of me that longs to go” in Into The Unknown, it struck a chord in me. In my youth, I had dreamt of going places, of doing things. But how could I, when I had to graduate and get a job so that I could help my mother support the family? How could I, when I knew my mother relied on me and my presence? Where could I have gone?
And as Elsa embarked on in her journey of self-discovery, that moment where her mother’s voice led her to her epiphany was particularly moving. When the images of her late mother shone from the walls and she sang joyfully of being found in Show Yourself, it resonated.
You are the one you have been waiting for all of your life.
I grew up, I learnt how to feel comfortable with myself, in my own skin. It has been a hard-fought battle and it’s still ongoing. I can be prickly, I still doubt myself and my abilities, I can be hard to live with. But I know who I am.
Maybe to detractors, this movie is nothing more than a commercial endeavour. It probably is. But it is also a reminder to me, as an individual, that I am enough. And it also gently reminds me that as a mother, my connection with my boys will outlive me.
What I want my boys to take away from the movie is that they can still be brave and kind and empathetic even if they are scared and uncertain. And most importantly, they will forever carry my love with them even when I am no longer around. A mother’s love will never die, just like how my father is still in my memories after all these years.
Yannisms 