The Prodigal Daughter.

An unexpected homecoming.

I stepped out of the automatic glass doors in baggage claim and was met with the familiar rush of heavy muggy air combined with the scent of exhaust fumes from the cars anxiously waiting to locate their person that they came to pick up.

Today, I was taking a Lyft instead of being picked up by my brother Albert. A dad of two young girls with demanding after-school activities, he always somehow still makes it work to pick me up whenever I visit my family in Houston. That’s just who he is – fiercely loyal, dependable, ever-dutiful son, husband, brother.

But today he was busy picking up both girls from school, fixing them snacks before the older nine-year-old went to gymnastics practice and the younger six-year-old to her first swim team practice.

I was relieved of the guilt I always felt in receiving a ride from him, knowing how busy he is, despite his insistence that he pick me up. I happily climbed into the back of the Lyft and made my way to my mom’s house, my home from eight until I left for college at 17.

When I arrived, the driver dropped me off at the curb in front of my mom’s mailbox. I thanked him, grabbed my bags and walked up the curved driveway to the front door. I knocked loudly. She has trouble hearing the door these days.

I hear the lock turn from the inside, and then a light scuffle as she quickly removed the long door security bar from the knob, rolled up the doormat so that she could open the door all the way.

“I didn’t see you!”

“Yea, the driver dropped me off at the curb so you couldn’t see me.”

Did she look even smaller than in February, just three short months ago? I shuffled into the house, the familiar scent of the house filling my nose. It’s not food, or cleaning products, moth balls, or anything discernible. It’s just the scent of my childhood home. I can even smell it now as I think back. It’s a scent I associate with her, permanently imprinted into my psyche.

“You must be hungry! I can make you some eggs or if you want to go grab some Indian food, you can take my car.”

She knows my ritual of hitting up a local Indian restaurant because I think the Indian food in Houston is better than Los Angeles.

“No, it’s too hot for Indian. I’ll take a look and see what I can find.”

I take my bags upstairs to my bedroom and set them down on the dresser and desk of my formative years. Then head back downstairs to search for a craving on Yelp.

My mom has already pulled out the two “good” mugs and set them on the countertop for me to use while I’m visiting. I remember her scolding me about serving a cup with a chip on it to a previous visiting boyfriend.

Image has always been big with her. But this goes beyond image. This is a respect thing. This is what loving care looks like to her. You always serve guests with the good tableware. But “good” is relative. My mom hasn’t bought any new dishes in decades except these two mugs. I can’t remember them existing prior to my husband Adam’s first visit to Houston back in 2015.

I wonder if she bought them because of him.

A month prior, Albert asked if I would be willing to take my mom to her next colonoscopy appointment. Knowing that he doesn’t often ask for support, I quickly and eagerly said yes. The appointment was tomorrow morning at six a.m. It was almost four p.m. I needed to make sure my mom took the SUPREP bowel preparation solution. Albert had already stocked her fridge with Jell-o and popsicles. Four cartons of bone broth were sitting on the counter next to the fridge.

“Ma, it’s almost four. You need to take this first mixture now and then drink these two water bottles.”

“What? Why? What for?”

“You’re doing a colonoscopy tomorrow morning.”

She frowns at me, then scowls.

[In mandarin] “Ahh, what’s the use? I already did it last year.”

“Yea, but they found some polyps and so you have to do it again tomorrow. It’s ok, I’ll go with you. But you have to take this stuff.”

Still resisting and grumbling, she begins to down the plastic cup filled with sour-sweet solution. She recounts how she couldn’t sleep the entire night last time as she kept running to the bathroom. Even with her short-term memory loss, this experience clearly had made a lasting impact.

“When are you leaving?"

“Where is Adam?”

“When are you going to see your friends?”

“Where are you going when you leave? Are you meeting up with Adam?”

My mom repeated variations of these four questions over and over every day of my week-long visit. On my second day, after having answered these questions at least two dozen times already that day, I heard my voice tense up as my patience was wearing thin. I took a deep breath and answered them again, with the resigned knowing that she doesn’t have the ability to remember anymore, and that I would have to answer them several more times this trip.

Over the last few years, my mom’s weight has noticeably dropped. Albert has been making appointments for her to see a geriatric doctor, planning the visits for when I’m able to be there as well. She had reluctantly begun to do the series of recommended tests that the doctor suggested, resisting every single one.

Her osteoporosis test marked her as “severe.” She refused the MRI and seeing the neurologist, arguing that even if they diagnose her, what good would that do? I had no counter argument to that.

She took a series of spoken tests during the geriatric doctor appointments. The first year, she scored a 17 out of 20. The second year, it dropped to 15. She had trouble remembering the year and a list of objects she was asked to recall, but her problem-solving abilities were still sharp.

She was prescribed Donepezil and managed to take it only a few times, complaining that the pill made her feel weird and not like herself. She wanted to just sleep all day and didn’t like not having energy. I quickly reached out to my brother and we agreed that this wasn’t the best medicine for her.

In her short-term memory loss, daily medication was difficult. We tried writing reminders on Post-it notes. She would just end up misplacing the notes.

This trip home, I bought a Vitamix blender to make her protein smoothies, as I noticed she has an easier time eating sweets. I went to the store and bought frozen wild blueberries, almond milk, dates, hemp and chia seeds for omega 3 and fiber, greek yogurt for calcium. I mixed in a taro-flavored whey boba protein I had brought with me. I made sure to add vanilla and maple syrup for added sweetness. She drank the smoothies without resistance.

I told her to leave the blender out because I would be using it each morning. And every morning, I would come downstairs to the kitchen to find the blender missing. I always found it in the pantry, the base and pitcher each wrapped tightly in plastic bags, secured by tape. Sighing deeply and lightly scolding my mom for forgetting, I would unwrap them.

It’s only now in my late 40s that a new realization is dawning within me of just how anxious a person my mom has always been. And that anxiety centers around all things protection – protecting her house, her things, but mostly, her family, children and grandchildren.

I used to exasperatedly complain about my mom’s obsessive-compulsive tendencies, her perfectionism around keeping her kitchen clean. She would angrily scold me if I made a mess of her countertops while I was cooking. I didn’t ladle oil out correctly. I cooked my vegetables too long. I wasted parts of the vegetables when I cut them. I accidentally got sugar on her counter and now was going to attract roaches. I couldn’t do one thing correctly.

She’s not as particular these days, but I think it’s because she doesn’t have the energy to scold anymore. Her age is forcing her to mellow out. But that protective compulsion still shows up, like her insistence in wrapping and storing this blender daily.

I remember the fights that she would have with my dad when I was around eight years old and wanted so badly to be a Brownie, wearing the brown uniform that many of the girls in my third grade class got to wear, collecting the patches that I coveted on the sashes they wore proudly over their chests.

This was my first yearning to belong that I can remember. To be a Brownie was to be like all the little white girls that lived in my Houston suburb. I wanted so badly to be like them. To eat hamburgers and fries for dinner like I imagined they must be having nightly, instead of the white rice and Chinese dishes my mom would lovingly cook for us.

I remember my parents yelling, my mom angrily putting her foot down because of some salacious story she had read in the newspaper about the dangers of Brownies getting abducted or abused by their troop leaders. This was the 80s after all, when child abduction fear ran high for parents.

My dad would be fighting back in my defense, wanting me to properly socialize and be allowed the life experiences I wanted to have. To adopt the American customs and to assimilate, in ways that he was struggling to do so himself among his colleagues. Even now, I can imagine his hope for my brother and me to become the fully assimilated and accepted all-American that he could never be due to his immigrant status.

I never became a Brownie, but I did join the Girl Scouts for a year in fifth grade. Perhaps that was their compromise. I remember feeling so awkward at every outing we had. I wasn’t friends with the girls who had been members for years together. So while they all sat together, I was left sitting with the troop leader moms, further cementing my status as an outcast.

“Ma, are you awake? It’s almost five-thirty. We have to leave for the colonoscopy in 15 minutes.”

My mom opened the door, hair uncombed and eyes half-shut with sleep. She nodded groggily and went to finish dressing.

It was still dark as I drove us to the gastroenterology clinic. We waited in the car until the receptionist unlocked the doors at six a.m. Within ten minutes, the entire waiting room was filled with patients and their loved ones. When we were called in, I followed my mom to one of the rolling medical beds. The nurse gave us a gown, some socks and a bag to put her clothes into. I stepped out as the nurse pulled the curtain closed.

When my mom was finished changing, I opened the curtain again. She was sitting on the bed in her hospital gown, looking even smaller and more frail than she had a minute ago. I could feel her anxiety, though she didn’t voice it. I helped her put on the long socks, scrunching up the sock like she had done when I was a small child, and gently pulling them over her toes and up her thin, pale legs.

This was the first time I had ever helped my mom dress, or anyone else for that matter. The feeling was foreign and strange in my hands. As someone who has never had human children, I have never before had to dress another human body besides my own.

I sat with her until they were ready. Two nurses came by with the anesthetist and told me that I could wait for her in the waiting room. My mom smiled and nodded at me to go. I felt a resistance leaving her side, knowing her fear of doctors and procedures and wanting to stay close for moral support.

I quickly left to grab a coffee at the nearby Starbucks. Then realizing how hungry I was, I found a doughnut shop nearby that sold kolaches. I picked up a bear claw, a red velvet and blueberry cake doughnut for us. I scarfed down the kolache as I drove back to the clinic.

Within 20 minutes of waiting, I received a call from the receptionist that my mom was done and was coming out of anesthesia. They had found two polyps this time. Thankfully, she didn’t need to do a colonoscopy for another three years.

I walked back to where my mom’s bed was. She was lying on her side, curled halfway into fetal position. Her eyes were shut but her lips were moving, barely audible. As I watched, it seemed like she was talking to someone in her dream state. I wondered if it was my dad.

I placed a hand on her leg to help her ground as she was slowly coming back. In time, her eyes opened. She whispered something to me that I couldn’t hear. Her mouth was moving but no words were coming out. I put pressure on her leg to let her know I’m there. After a few minutes, I was able to hear her say that she needed to use the bathroom. She kept repeating this request but the nurses told me that while she’s still coming out of anesthesia, she needed to stay put.

She looked like a small child to me, curled in the bed. So thin and frail, like she barely weighed more than a feather. The nurse brought us a bedpan just in case. My mom took one look at it and decided she could wait.

For someone who barely took up any space with her physical body, it was astounding to me how powerful her will, and stubbornness, still is. And it was also now becoming very clear to me that my mom needed someone more present to care for her at this stage of her life.

A few days later, as I was sitting on my bed, I was feeling into a tightness in my chest. It felt like a large knot in the middle of a long rope in a tug-o-war battle that was happening between two sides of me.

I had been having conversations about my mom moving in with Albert and his family. These conversations had started almost eight years ago, when Albert purchased a new family home that had a garage apartment with a complete kitchen and laundry. This was to be my mom’s apartment when she was ready to move in with them.

Every time the subject was broached, my mom would complain about the noise in the area and that she never could sleep well when she spent the night helping Albert care for my nieces when my sister-in-law was out of town.

We both heard what she wasn’t saying out loud – she wasn’t ready to give up her independence or the home that she had lived in for the last four decades. The home that she built with my dad.

So we had patiently waited until now, when her weight loss can no longer be ignored. When our fear of her falling and shattering bones can no longer be ignored. Both of us are trying hard to convince her that she really needs to have consistent care now, even if she thinks she can still manage living alone.

During every conversation, she grows silent. I see her anxiety and fear. She would rather die than to be a burden on us in her need for care. Aging is no fun, so ma fan – such an inconvenience – she would say.

On Sunday morning, I got dressed and decided that I wanted to go to church with my mom. She was scheduled to play piano that week for worship service. When I went to her room to tell her, she was already dressed and ready to go. I made a mental note – she has no trouble remembering responsibilities when others are counting on her. Her memory is on point when she is needed.

As we arrived at the church that I had attended as a child and pre-college teen, my mom’s friend Phyllis greeted us. We walked into the sanctuary of the church, my mom putting her bag next to the piano and gesturing for me to sit in the row behind her. I had not been back to this place since my early 20s. I was filled with nostalgia as I heard my mom beginning to warm up.

Phyllis sat with me as my mom practiced, sharing with me how she purposely keeps my mom’s mind active by giving her this responsibility to play for worship twice a month. She shared how concerned she is for my mom’s wellbeing. How much she and their mutual friend JoAnn treasures her friendship.

Suddenly, my church auntie Flora burst through the door, hastily apologizing for her lateness. She spots me sitting in the pew and suddenly stops, her jaw dropping. I flash her a giant smile, and greet her with a big hug.

“Ellen!! You’re back! Oh my goodness, I’m so happy to see you here with your mom!”

“I know, it’s been too long!”

Flora looked the same as the last memory I have of her, probably sometime in the late 90s or early 2000s. Her hair was a bit thinner, but her face and vivacious energy were exactly as I remembered. Emotion began to rise within me as I saw her and my mom jokingly teasing each other.

Flora sat down next to me as my mom and Phyllis were chatting about the worship plan. She told me how much she loves my mom. And how she has seen her change over the years. That my mom has good and bad days, but she sees how she needs care now. And that she knows how stubborn my mom is.

She shakes her head with a pained, wistful expression on her face as I saw decades of friendship and sisterhood, life and loss, being remembered.

My distance from Christianity also distanced me away from this home of church aunties and uncles. Once upon a time, I had been deeply involved, even leading prayer groups and teaching Sunday School when I was in high school and during the first years of college. To be back here felt like a homecoming that I am only able to make now, after the last seven years of conscious healing work I had been doing, much of which was focused on religious trauma.

But today, I was here for my mom. Watching her light up in the presence of her oldest and dearest friends in a community that had brought her safety and comfort as a young mother of small children, while still new to Houston, broke my heart open. This was the community that had stood next to her as she buried her life partner. That had seen her nest become empty when her sole focus in life – my brother and me – had left for college, and in my case, chose to make a home for herself much further away in California.

In my mid-20s, I needed to be far away. To discover who I was. I needed to be allowed to make my own mistakes instead of having an anxious, over-protective mother telling me what decisions I should make. I needed to find my way on my own.

As a child, she had made us matching outfits out of the same fabric she bought at the fabric store. Back then, I was so proud to be her mini-me. I felt so special, like we had a bond that was just ours with our matching uniforms. A private club that my dad and brother weren’t allowed in.

When I entered middle school and puberty, our relationship began to change. After I left for college in Austin and got a taste of being on my own, our relationship became too painful, too restrictive, too suffocating. I felt like I was her biggest disappointment. I was too willful. Too wild. Too fiery. Too uncontrollable.

I was the “bad one.” The one that no longer wanted to go to church. The one that quit her cello. The one that didn’t listen to her, that wouldn’t. The one that took the wisdom she offered and threw it back at her, refusing to receive her love, no matter how insistent she was to give it.

I became the one that she didn’t know anymore. And maybe, the one that she didn’t want to know out of fear of what she would discover.

Being back in this church and witnessing my aunties and uncles excited to see me again, hugging me tightly and beaming at my mom, who was beaming right back at them, I realized that I was being called back home. This time, to be a caretaker for my aging mom so that she could stay close to her beloved church family, in a home she had worked so hard to make for our family, and in the familiar natural surroundings of the trees and bayous peppered with white egrets, blue herons, little red-eared slider turtles, red-faced ducks, and the occasional alligator.

This trip home brought me to an insight that I wasn’t ready to receive until now. That supporting my family will be more rewarding than anything I could possibly create in my life.

I want my mom to be held in peace and safety by this home when she takes her final breath, whenever that will be in the future. I want my brother to feel the readiness of support that can only come from a sibling who is close by. I want to know my sister-in-law. I want to watch my nieces grow up and go through all the changes that were so torturous for me. I want to be there to support them through it all, and to remind them constantly of how powerful they are, and how loved.

As I felt that knot of resistance in my chest begin to loosen in this recognition, I sat on my bed feeling a new and different frequency flowing in.

Joy.

A bittersweet joy that can only come from a decision to sacrifice something you love out of a greater love for someone else. In this case, someones.

Logistically, I still don’t know how this decision will play out. But just sitting in the frequency of this new decision feels life-changing and big. It feels revolutionary.

I’m learning to let go, to not clutch, but to hold everything with more space and lightness so that the energy can move and fill and go where it needs to.

I am allowing this energy to carry me forward, trusting in the unfolding of time and plans.

As long as I continue to ride this current of joy, I know I’ll be exactly where I need to be.