Su Wu on Mother’s Day
Writer, poet, and curator, Su Wu shares her musings and memories of mothers and motherhood.
Su lives in Mexico City with her partner, the artist Alma Allen, and their four-year-old daughter Isa and two-year-old son Octavio.
How does your Mother inspire you?
My mother is a mystery to me, and it is my fault; I’m afraid of falling into a sadness that I can’t bear to look at too closely. Instead, I fill the narrative with details and fragments of things she never told me, everything she should be proud of and everything that hurt: the whole motherhoods she did not lead, and all it took everyday to insist her life was her own.
Can you identify something your Mother passed on to you?
I think my mother thought of brilliance in a certain way, not least of all because it made her life possible once, to be a child chosen from the English-speaking colonies for college abroad. (She graduated from Harvard with a degree in mathematics, in the first year the college conferred degrees on women. And which, yes, makes my brilliant mother one of the first Asian women to ever graduate from Harvard.)
And I am not smart in this way, not like her; not composed. But I don’t think this is my mother’s true talent anyway, and certainly not what she passed on to me, which instead is the very big gift of complete and utter foolhardiness. I mean, a confidence verging into faith that I can run wild into the unknown, into a streaming hail of arrows or toward the bewilderment of another country, almost certainly unprepared, and that it is the get-going that matters most. The crucial thing is to set off, on any project especially, and she made sure I was free to let my mind wander. Of course, this impracticality is probably what I am passing on to the babies too, a certain immunity to disillusionment and better reason.
Did you think about Motherhood before you had children - and if so, has that changed since having children?
I thought meeting my children would be like meeting any other stranger, that I’d love their faces and secretly note their turns of phrase, the strange ways they did things. But I remember having a thought the first time I saw Isa’s small teeth, and I haven’t shaken it; it’s only become more so with time. They are growing apart from me! They were born with the stuff inside them to grow apart. This has been the steadiest truth of motherhood, a near-daily reminder: That my children are beings unknowable and not mine, not owned by me or by anybody else. This still makes me almost unbearably happy.
Do you have any thoughts on Mother's Day itself?
For much of my life, my mother would leave before I woke up on Mother’s Day and go sit in silent protest outside Lawrence Livermore Lab, in a small group of women against nuclear proliferation. It didn’t work, obviously, but isn’t that sort of what makes it the most fitting celebration for Mother’s Day? An effort done not for how it will turn out, but without expectation of return? Happy Mother’s Day!
