This article was first published in the Winter 2024 edition of Flame, the magazine of the University of Toronto’s official student newspaper, The Varsity. Read the full piece here.

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My mother taught herself the language of love. It took me years to understand her.

In 2017, I finally visited my mother’s childhood home in the Arun compound in Lhokseumawe, Indonesia. The compound, a gated community housing employees of the state-owned liquefied natural gas (LNG) company, had been mostly unoccupied since its last LNG shipment in 2014. If it weren’t for my mother, I would have probably avoided entering the housing complex altogether. Who knows what lurks behind its forest? The Arun compound my mother knew was reduced to skeletons: its streets empty, its houses abandoned. The only visible signs of community life were the street vendors camping on the rim of a football field.

My mother left Arun in 1994. After twenty-three years, she still remembered every turn, roundabout, and junction by heart. Our route was my mother’s old house, her elementary school, and her middle school. My mother treasured these places, and by observing them, I wanted to learn more about her. I assumed that her commitment to motherhood, her sacrifices of becoming a housewife for fifteen years, is linked to this specific time of her life.

When we returned, my mother uploaded photos from our visit to her Facebook album. To many, her post probably resembled ads of abandoned houses sold for renovation. She named the album “Throwback: My Childhood Neighborhood.” The caption read: “Everything changed, but all the beautiful memories are tucked neatly in my heart.”

Despite the tough times my mother had been through, I deeply respect her for never complaining about her childhood to her children. In some ways, I believe that motherhood was her attempt to disconnect and preserve what’s left from the past. But I still wonder what motherhood actually means for her.

When I asked her this question, she gave a bittersweet smile and said: “It’s weird—it feels a lot like searching for a lost sense of warmth.” And when I asked my mother what she remembered about my grandmother, she replied coldly: “I don’t remember what it felt to be loved by her.”