Remember Yourself: 2011.09.07

today i want to remember my mom. my mom's name is Jintana Chasombat. she was born in Thailand on April 20, 1952 and died in Hawaii on March 24, 2005. she was a beautiful woman, a buddhist.

she was mostly kind and gentle but i think she was a little bi-polar. her dad and mom were very important in thailand. my dad says my grandpa was the head of the thai faction of the communist party during the vietnam war. he was the director of agriculture for thailand and i guess it's not a stretch to think he could have led the communist party thru the jungles. he had 5 families that lived on seperate compounds and my mother was born into the main family, the recognized one. her mother (my grandmother) was the matriarch of these compounds.

they sent my mom to a convent for school. although her family was buddhist, they felt that the education afforded by the catholic schools was worth it. plus they were busy. on top of my grandfather's position, my grandmother was the treasurer of the city of udorn in thailand. it was very unusual for a woman to hold this position. so my grandparents were busy trying to support their people and they sent my mom to a convent to be raised. also, i should mention that a girl going to high school and college in thailand like my mom did was very unusual back then, too.

my grandparents were so busy one year they accidently visited my mom at the wrong school. everywhere they went, it was a caravan and they took the whole caravan up to my mom's old school. she said that hurt her a lot.

i'm not too sure about the story about how she met my dad. she says she was singing in a lounge. it's when she used to play the guitar but it's hard to imagine her like that. she was always sexy and could sing and she had a really high voice that could go low too but i just don't see her dad ever letting her do it.

my mom and dad met and got married and i was born 2 months later. (:

mostly when i remember my mom i remember her long jet black hair and her smile, her crinkly smiley eyes, the way she smells and how soft her skin was. we have the "smooth skin syndrome " (ehlers-danlos syndrome) in our family that makes our skin feel like velvet but her skin felt like soft jello. you could roll it in your hands and thru your fingertips...it was so soft.

i remember how much she loved my daughter! the first time we took elizabeth to hawaii we put her in one of those roller-stroller things and wheeled her across my mom's back porch so she could see her. she loved her so much. i remember wanting to have a baby early so that my mom could be in our lives. my family doesn't live very long and i'm so glad that i did. we got to be together for 11 years.

i remember my mom used to entertain my daughter like i couldn't. i never knew how to play because i never did it but my mom would come over and help and start to do fun things and then elizabeth and i could join in. my mom was my girl scout troop leader and then when it was my turn to be a troop leader, she helped me every week with our troop of 12. we even won 2nd place for arizona in cookie sales!

i remember she taught me how to make egg rolls and i taught a whole boys & girls club how to do it for "World Day". we rolled 330 egg rolls that day (veggie, pork, and banana) and everyone got to try each w/a variety of sauces. we won the trophy that year for best world day and i am proud of it and thank my mom.

i remember she used to cook thai food but she said she wasn't very good at it. she grew up very wealthy and she had 6 housegirls. she said that is why it was so hard for her when she came to america. she said raising 4 kids when you have a lot of money, a college education in the native language, and the help of 6 people is a lot easier than doing it all alone. i know she was right.

i remember i moved out when i was 13. i moved out because my mom slapped me about something over my dad. i remember i defended him and then she said, "well, if you love him so much, why don't you go live with him.". i said, "i will" and then she slapped me. my dad was outside and he heard it so he filed for custody. i remember my mom took it all the way to court then walked in and said i could live where i wanted. i was glad but i had no idea about what the future held.

my sister came to live with us too and we moved to japan with my dad's new wife to start a new life. then my little sister died of a heart attack about 3 months later. i remember my mom, when i held her, said that "it should have been you". my heart broke so much at that moment that i closed up tight on the inside to everyone, including God, and did not talk to her again for about 4 years.

i remember when i was 18 i got a call from the red cross that said my mom was going into a life-saving surgery and my presence was requested. i flew to her then and we reunited. i later found out that in her grief over my sister's death, she said "it should have been you (me)" because she said that she had always tried to prepare for my death. i have always been sickly with very serious heart problems and so she thought that if anyone were to die, it would be me. it still hurts me to type that but i do understand it now.

so i am remembering all this bad stuff and crying but i really do want to remember the good stuff. i remember that my mom was a champion of women's rights. she helped women to escape thailand and brought them out of the jungles and thru the airports and customs with her diplomatic passports to free them from poverty and a lifetime of prostitution. yes, these women became indentured servants and many worked as hostesses or whatever job they were given in japan and other countries in asia, but they were free of the jungles of thailand and my mom felt that was important.

i remember my mom would let anyone into the house if they had a message about God. i grew up listening to mormons, hare krishnas, jehovah's witnesses...if they came to the door with book in hand then she would listen. we lived across the street from a baptist church and she let us go. she didn't think it was important which religion we had, so long as we had religion. it was hard for me, christianity. it was so hard to hear that my mom was going to go to hell because she was buddhist. it wasn't hard for her to hear because Heaven is not where she wanted to be. she wanted to go to Nirvana.

and meet john lennon and fall in love like she should have here on earth. i imagine them there a lot in heaven together singing "Imagine".

"Jintana" is how you say "Imagine" in thai.

i remember my mom ... i remember so much.

i love you, Mom.