Motherhood

My host mother always touches my hair. She looks at my face, brings half of my hair to the front, and fixes the curls with her fingers. Her fingers twist the strands and they coil into singular, smooth curls. She plucks any loose hairs hanging from my clothing and places them on a roll of tape she keeps on the counter to not dirty the floor. My host mother also prepares food and fixes it on my plate before feeding herself. She holds the food up to my adult lips and feeds me. Every night at dinner she tells me “더 먹어”¹ and “많이 먹어².” Additionally, she frequently touches my hands, my arms, my face, and my hair. She fixes my clothing and straightens up my appearance. 

The way a mother touches and grooms her child is something I had never realized I lost. It never occurred to me that I no longer had this. I felt foolish as a grown woman to feel the want to be groomed by a mother like a newborn pup. 

The fluidity of what it means to be a mother is much more complex than what I thought before arriving in Korea and meeting my host mother. I realize my own mother’s love is primarily shown through acts of service rather than physical touch. The way we love is different; it is not that I feel a lack of love from my own mother, but there was an absence of physical affection through neither fault of our own. The curls on our heads resemble one another, although mine are a bit tighter. Tears would silently roll down my round cheeks when she would brush it. Neither of us knew back then that you are not supposed to brush curly hair. The cold, metal pins of the large bows she would place on top of my head would scratch my scalp and give me headaches. This was when my mother still had time to touch me. 

It makes me wonder if this is one of the bigger cultural differences, or if this is simply how my single-parent household needed to be. My mother taught me how to protect and nurture myself when she could not physically be there. Perhaps there was no more time for her to fix my curls, hold food up to my lips, or straighten the neckline of my shirt, so she taught me how to do those things on my own.

However, in Korea, I witness mothers show love so differently from my own mother at home. I feel an embarrassing tinge of jealousy when I watch a child’s eager hand reach for their mother’s as they walk downtown, and the mother’s hand is equally as eager to clasp their child’s. I watch with wide eyes as a mother and daughter exit a hair salon, the mother’s hand resting on

[Featured Image by Wendy Owens]

top of her daughter’s freshly washed head before she helps her climb into the backseat of their car. From a distance, I observe how my host mother and my host sister — her real daughter — interact. Sometimes I try, unsuccessfully, to remember the very last time my mother brushed my hair. 

After months of questioning what a mother’s love looks like, a pattern started to reveal itself. I found understanding that whether it is through physical touch or acts of service, a mother’s love is shown through their hands. 

It is shown through the hands whose fingers weave through the knots in your hair, hands that wipe the crumbs from your lips, hands that lift your arms to clothe you with fabrics that do not irritate your skin, hands that remove the heavy bags from your back, and hands that hold yours as she clips your infant fingernails. 

Love is also shown through the hands that form carpal tunnel from years of typing at work, making her left ring finger so numb that it turns purple; hands that learn how to write “happy birthday” in a new language. They are the same hands that picked up dust from the nursery floor as they crawled quietly beside your crib to not wake you. 

While the love shown through some mothers’ hands may be more visible, much of their work goes unnoticed. The invisible acts of love are not seen or felt by the child, but nevertheless, the mother’s hands still do the work. It took me having two mothers to recognize invisible acts of love are no different, nor less worthy, than visible touch.