Mum likes to eat fish head.

My Chinese tutor and I are slowly working our way through a year 4 reading book during my weekly sessions.  Most of the lessons in the book are magazine or newspaper articles that send some sort of didactic message.  This week the story was called "Mum likes to eat fish head" and I thought it terribly apropos seeing as this Sunday is mother's day.  In the story a little girl from a poor family noticed that every time the family ate fish, her mum would put the fish head into her own bowl and then serve the rest of the of fish (the fleshy bits) to her children.  The little girl would cry out "mummy, you love the fish head"!  The little girl thought the fish head must be the best part because her mum always took it for herself.  She once asked her mother for the fish head, but the mother declined, giving her daughter the fleshy part.  Once, when the girl's grandmother came to visit, she brought a fish for dinner.  After cooking it, the grandmother placed the fish head in her own bowl and gave the fleshy bits to her daughter (the girl's mother) and to the girl.  The little girl cried out "but mummy likes the fish head"!  The grandmother smiled, but did not give the fish head to her daughter.  The young girl grew up and had her own family.  Once she had her own children she realised her mum had not actually liked the fish head.  The mother took the fish head because it had the least amount of meat.  She took the inferior part of the fish and gave the children the best part, to nourish them and help them grow strong.  The girl now put the fish head in her bowl and gave her children the good part of the fish.  She would sacrifice in the same way her mother, and her grandmother did for their children.

The story got me thinking about mothers in general.  The little girl for her whole young life thought her mum was taking the best bit of the fish for herself, but really the little girl did not understand.  The mother was sacrificing to help her children grow strong.  Mothers do things like that all of the time; they do things to help family at their own expense.  My mum gave up work to raise my sister and I.  She made the ultimate sacrifice, putting the lives of two others ahead of her own for so many years.  She neither blamed me for taking away her freedom nor accused me of forcing her to sacrifice.  She took on the unpopular role of rule enforcer, making her often the one I resented when I could not go to a friend's house, or to a party, or get that new pair of shoes I "desperately" wanted.  But really I should be thanking her later in life - NOW.  Whenever she was in my eyes the one curtailing my fun, she was really sacrificing my adoration for her in order to make me a better, stronger, more moral person.  In many ways it must be harder to say "no" in the aim of nurturing a better child but practically making the child angry, than always saying "yes" and be the mum that every child loves.  For this weekend where we are thankful to our mums....I'd like to say thank you to mine, for "pretending to like fish heads" so that I'd grow up to be a better, stronger and more self-aware person.