I love my mum, but I try to be the mother she wasn’t

I distinctly remember last Mother’s Day. I cried that day. I was in trouble for teaching cellmates a Chinese song about loving one’s mum.

While every moment with our mothers should be a time when we are grateful for their unconditional love, we do need a particular day to reflect on motherhood and motherly love.

I live with my mum and my kids, so each day, I play the roles of mother and daughter. One day, my daughter will be in my place, and I will take the place of my mother.

Journalist Cheng Lei (centre, aged 9) with dad Chu-yong and mum Hua in Hunan province, China, 1984, right before Chu-yong came to Australia as a visiting scholar.

There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for my daughter. There isn’t a moment when I don’t feel lucky to be able to be there for her. Even if being a mum to a teen means being exposed to hurt on multiple fronts. She is as teenage as they come – a hormonal cyclone interspersed with childlike glee. Each day brings tiny tragedies and triumphs, angsty tears and uproarious giggles.

Because of the more than three years I was away, she’s had to grow up without me. There is nothing I cherish more than the moments she needs me, the chats we have about how she sees the world.

Mum, meanwhile, is withering and receding before my very eyes: her formerly loud voice is muted; her hands, big and strong from having worked the lathe in a factory, are wizened; her characteristically large strides, shortened. She is now thin because of diabetes and walks slowly, gingerly. She forgets things and has trouble hearing, seeing, chewing.

I’ll never know if she is the same mum she would have been had I not been locked up. It must be an accelerated ageing express that she got on – and I’m bewildered at the change.

When I was in grade two and pushed into a ditch by a school bully, she had a word with him and even threatened to give him a belting.

Cheng Lei (aged 17) with Hua in Brisbane in 1992.

After we came to Australia, she worked the afternoon shift at Peter’s Ice Cream, so for four years, I only saw her on weekends. She was busy then, too, teaching Chinese at schools and in homes. Her idea of fun was solving maths problems with my dad.

I have an atypical mother – one who shows Asperger’s symptoms and has a hoarding disorder. She’s not at all like stereotypical mums that I saw in laundry detergent and chicken dinner commercials, who were warm, gentle homemakers. Intellectually, I abhor gender stereotypes, but on an emotional level, I wanted a mum like that.

I try to be the mother I wanted her to be. To be someone to confide in, to not judge and lecture, to not jump to conclusions, to not worry unnecessarily. To be interested in the kids, to encourage and calm them, to intuit their emotions. To bake sweets for their friends, give styling tips and shop for friends’ presents with them. To be someone fun and interesting, someone they want to hang around with.

Cheng Lei with her mum in Milan earlier this year. “Just as she’s not trying to be any type of mum, I am not expected to be any type of daughter.”

I collect mother figures in my life. There is my godmother, not officially such, but it’s how I see her. She is eccentric and speaks in long tangential riddles that sparkle with wit and worldly wisdom. She is more protective of me in some ways than my own mother. I treasure the mums of my friends who love to natter and make me a cup of tea and ask me, “How are you feeling?” and give me a hug.

I have girlfriends who are also daughters and mothers, who share with me their dysfunctional family stories, Christmas dust-ups, sibling injustices, bizarre estrangements, and we swap our own teenage rebellion acts. These reality checks are invaluable.

Maybe my mother’s difficulty around emotions has made me stronger and more able to get through times of hardship. She’s never been one for whingeing, for moping.

Maybe her aversion to expression has made me more articulate. Maybe her inability to show affection has made me more tender with my kids. Maybe her apathy has given me more freedom in the choices I make.

In Chinese culture, filial piety carries the notion of absolute obedience. There are stories about an adult son who cuts a chunk of his thigh to feed his ailing parents, or selling oneself to pay for the parents’ burial.

Being a good daughter in modern-day Australia is much easier on the flesh, but Asian culture still brings its own pressures.

My mum has never held me to any convention. Just as she’s not trying to be any type of mum, I am not expected to be any type of daughter. I am just accepted as her daughter, and she loves me in her own way.

Instead of getting her a present, she’ll never use (and probably ask me to return), on Mother’s Day, I will do something she loves: the kids and I will spend the day with her at her junk stall in Oakleigh market.

Some things are deeply uneasy in our relationship, but it is not hard to figure out why this will truly make her day.

Cheng Lei is a journalist and mother of two. After being detained in Beijing for three years and two months on bogus espionage charges, she was released and returned to Australia in October 2023. She came to Australia at the age of 10 in 1985.