It Wasn’t That Big of a Deal
Around 2000 or 2001, my mum’s neighborhood held a karaoke competition as part of the Independence Day celebrations. We had moved into that neighborhood only three or four years earlier, and Mum wasn’t a socially active person back then, so I thought, I wanna make friends with people my age in the neighborhood. So I signed up for the competition.
I chose “Bintang Kehidupan” by Nike Ardilla. I think it was because there weren’t many options on their karaoke machine (for both Indonesian and Western songs), so I picked one I was already familiar with. As I finished singing, I saw Mum at the bottom of the stage stairs; her face was red. Just as I reached her, she took my hand and dragged me back to our house.
When we were finally inside, she snapped at me, telling me that I had embarrassed her, that I shouldn’t put myself at the center of attention since we were quite new in the neighborhood, and that we didn’t wanna create any drama. I tried to argue with her, but she cut me off; she didn’t even wanna listen to me. So she grounded me; I couldn’t leave the house for a couple of days. Oh, I won the competition, third place. The people who ran the competition came by our house and gave Mum my trophy and a few gifts.
My life in junior high and high school, of course, was full of detention, rollerblading, basketball, and skateboarding. I was always trying so hard not to be the center of attention, just like Mum told me, but trouble always seemed to find me, or, to some extent, I was the trouble itself, strolling through anything I could put my hands on. No one really wanted to listen to me, either before I made any trouble or after. It seemed like they didn’t give a single fuck, so the troublemaker label was given to me automatically. I kinda liked it back then, though; it felt like a rebellion against some fake stability.
Then I went to university with my own money. Since I was paying for my own education anyway, I chose one of the oldest and biggest art universities in Jakarta, just to show my parents, especially my mum, that I could afford it. Only four semesters in, I dropped out; I chose to work overseas rather than spend my time trying to learn something and get my degree. A few years later, I tried a different university with a different major. I thought maybe I could finish this one, but I dropped out again and chose to work overseas again. I don’t have a degree at all, only a diploma, and to be completely honest, I regretted my choices back then. And I’ve been learning my lessons ever since. But hey, my parents got my point; they acknowledged and validated me, my capability, and my ability to do all of that by myself.
Did I feel some satisfaction because of that? Not really. Nobody really listened to me or saw me the way I’d been wanting them to. I chased my parents’ (especially my mum’s) acknowledgment and validation for years, and I still had a thirst for it even a decade after that.
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My grandparents and parents showed me that love is supposed to be earned, along with acknowledgment and validation. When it was only my cousin and me, I was always behind her in getting their love and attention. It felt like a competition every single day, to be honest. My cousin is a school-smart person; I’m more of a street-smart person. You get what I mean? She’s everything my mum wished I was: clever, good grades, a good and feminine attitude, very submissive, never talking back to our grandparents or her own parents. I’m the complete opposite, even today. I didn’t quite understand why these differences could turn my mum into such a scary person whenever I couldn’t do what my cousin did. She would call me names, compare me to her, then cut me off completely.
Then last year, the realization came to me like a flood of unfinished business and slapped me right in the face. One of the biggest national media outlets covered me because of my second book release. I shared it in our big family WhatsApp group; my aunts and uncles said congrats and wished me good sales and whatever. For hours, I waited for my mum to say something about it, but then she posted something else in the same group and said nothing at all.
That was the first time any national media outlet had covered me as myself, not as part of some established company, startup, or whatever project I used to work on. It was my own personal work, my second book, and she said nothing that day, or for a few days after.
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When I confronted her about it, she said it wasn’t that big of a deal, but that she’s always proud of her children; she never thought she needed to say it out loud, and she always puts my name in her prayers anyway. That’s what she said. I was furious when I read her answer. For her, or for anyone else, maybe it’s not that big of a deal, but it’s a big deal for me. After years and years of hard work, standing under other people’s flags and working for other people’s companies, I finally got recognition for my own work. That’s a big deal for me. And she’s my parent; I wasn’t asking for a big celebration. I asked her why she couldn’t just say congrats to me, even if maybe she didn’t feel like it. Again, her answer was: “It wasn’t that big of a deal.”
That day, I told her I finally understood the why and what behind her attitude toward me since I was a kid. I told her that everything she had done to me, and to my siblings when they were kids, was never okay, but it is what it is; those days are in the past now, and there’s nothing we can do about them anymore. Then I told her that I’m not gonna chase her validation or acknowledgment anymore; I’m completely done trying to be the first daughter she wished she had.
Did it still hurt when I remembered it? Fuck yeah, hurts like hell. As I listened to “Somewhere Right Now in the Future” by Boards of Canada, I knew I had to do something about this trigger, so I could learn to ease it better the next time it surfaces again.
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So what did I learn from those experiences? After countless sessions with my psychologist and psychiatrist, plus countless hours learning about shadow work while trying so hard not to self-diagnose, I arrived at two things: “the abandoned/orphan child” and the “mother complex.” When I brought these two findings to my shrinks, they were like, “You didn’t self-diagnose, right? You were just collecting insights and knowledge, and comparing them with your own experiences?” I said, “Yeah, that’s why I’d like you to conduct a new session with me, so we can discuss this further; maybe we’ll get a new diagnosis based on this.” Since then, we’ve been doing exactly that, diving deeper than we have in all these years.
To some extent, I still don’t fully understand what my mum did, or how and why she did it; it doesn’t really matter to me now anyway. I feel like I need to learn all of this for my own sake, so that when the trigger appears, I can handle it differently, and I won’t hurt the people around me because of it.
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It’s been a long, beyond exhausting journey to finally hear my own voice and let go of old wounds, but for me today, it feels something like what Alana Davis said:
“And I’m beyond your peripheral vision
So you might want to turn your head
Cause someday you’re going to get hungry
And eat all of the words that you just said
I am what I am, I am 32 flavors and then some.”
It took real courage for me to finally accept myself, wholly, fully, no matter how much damage I’ve been carrying all this time.
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