I get my insomnia from my mother, and she gets it from her mother, who gets it from the cigarettes that the doctor suggested she take up to ease her stress. It's imprinted on my brain, the New Year's all three of us spent awake and alone in the same room: my grandmother watching TV, my mother reading the Quran, and I tooling around online. We hate to sleep or sleep hates us; the phrasing varies on the day. I wander around the house at 2 AM to take a food break from reading something and, in Indonesia, my grandmother is drinking tea; in the Philippines, my mother hangs around on an online message board for Indonesians.
The reason my grandmother stays up all night is because she has no time to sleep, and when she does have time, she puts her children first because no one else will. My grandmother married at seventeen and was widowed a handful of years later with three children to raise, and two of them still babies. (It was her best friend, and not my grandmother, who told me how my grandfather died. "He was shot in the stomach," she said, "and then his adjutant was shot and he died quickly, he was lucky. But your grandfather, he was lying there in the middle of the battlefield and the bullets are still going dor! dor! dor! and all your grandpa's friends gathered around him and said, 'It's fine if you want to go. We'll take care of your family. Go if you must. They'll be okay.'"
And so he went, and all I know of my grandfather is the black and white portrait over the dining room table, eternally fresh-faced and young.)
Whenever I asked my grandmother how old she was, she says, "Seventeen," as if life stopped when she married my grandfather. I wouldn't know her real age until she died and I calculated it from the headstone.
No man took her seriously because she was a woman and young, and no woman trusted her because she was a widow. Unattached young women bring only trouble, they said. I heard her husband didn't even die but ran away, they said. Did you see her at market the other day, how she flirted and laughed, they said they said they said. And my grandmother, what could she do? Her husband's friends followed through on their promise to him and helped to support her, but it was hard and nothing was ever enough. She has lived to see her land colonized twice, she saw it gain its independence, but for all the promises Sukarno is making about this brave new world, she's still buying sandals for five and selling them for six by the side of the road, just for the extra cash.
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To my discomfort, I realize I don't know my grandmother's name. That very thing that is unique to an Indonesian, that we don't even take the names of our fathers or our husbands, I don't know what my grandmother's is. She has always been Mamah, for as a small child she was the doting maternal figure in my life, and I went with her everywhere. I helped her bake butter cookies, and jellies from coconut milk and packaged powder. I went with her to market and I went with her to get her pension. She would with me as I watched my cartoons, watching them with me, smoking her cigarettes and picking at the scars on her legs.
My mom I called Ibu, meaning mother, and it was more function than intimate signifier.
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The reason my grandmother stays up all night is because she has no time to sleep, and when she does have time, she puts her children first because no one else will. My grandmother married at seventeen and was widowed a handful of years later with three children to raise, and two of them still babies. (It was her best friend, and not my grandmother, who told me how my grandfather died. "He was shot in the stomach," she said, "and then his adjutant was shot and he died quickly, he was lucky. But your grandfather, he was lying there in the middle of the battlefield and the bullets are still going dor! dor! dor! and all your grandpa's friends gathered around him and said, 'It's fine if you want to go. We'll take care of your family. Go if you must. They'll be okay.'"
And so he went, and all I know of my grandfather is the black and white portrait over the dining room table, eternally fresh-faced and young.)
Whenever I asked my grandmother how old she was, she says, "Seventeen," as if life stopped when she married my grandfather. I wouldn't know her real age until she died and I calculated it from the headstone.
No man took her seriously because she was a woman and young, and no woman trusted her because she was a widow. Unattached young women bring only trouble, they said. I heard her husband didn't even die but ran away, they said. Did you see her at market the other day, how she flirted and laughed, they said they said they said. And my grandmother, what could she do? Her husband's friends followed through on their promise to him and helped to support her, but it was hard and nothing was ever enough. She has lived to see her land colonized twice, she saw it gain its independence, but for all the promises Sukarno is making about this brave new world, she's still buying sandals for five and selling them for six by the side of the road, just for the extra cash.
+
To my discomfort, I realize I don't know my grandmother's name. That very thing that is unique to an Indonesian, that we don't even take the names of our fathers or our husbands, I don't know what my grandmother's is. She has always been Mamah, for as a small child she was the doting maternal figure in my life, and I went with her everywhere. I helped her bake butter cookies, and jellies from coconut milk and packaged powder. I went with her to market and I went with her to get her pension. She would with me as I watched my cartoons, watching them with me, smoking her cigarettes and picking at the scars on her legs.
My mom I called Ibu, meaning mother, and it was more function than intimate signifier.
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