Mother's Day 2020

Mother's Day 2020

May 10

As Mother's Day approaches every year, there are advertisements celebrating Mother's Day both inside and outside restaurants, shopping malls, and traditional media reminds people again and again every day for fear of people forgetting. On the day of the festival, there were many people supporting the elderly and children in flower shops, restaurants, coffee shops, shopping malls, and tourist attractions. They happily brought their mothers out to celebrate this annual festival for her.

This Mother's Day is an exception.

The Wuhan pneumonia suddenly emerged, and Australia closed cities and provinces, closed the country, and strictly prohibited crowd gatherings. In addition, the epidemic mostly broke out and spread in nursing homes from the beginning, so the nursing home where my mother lived was under full closed management, and visits from relatives and friends were prohibited. We haven't seen her for a while. Although we can have a video call, we can't help but feel a sense of dismay at being so far away from each other. Activities to celebrate Mother's Day have also been greatly diminished by this year's gathering restrictions and the catering industry that is limited to takeaways. In addition to Christmas, which is a universal celebration, Mother's Day is the most celebrated holiday in Western countries. The capitalist-style extravagance and pomp that brought joy and family fun have disappeared because of this pneumonia. For many people, this is a necessary and inevitable anti-epidemic measure. In the early days of the epidemic in nursing homes in Wuhan, China, and in Italy and the UK in Europe, there were almost no reports of elderly people dying from the disease. The tragic world of life, separation and death unfolding before our eyes is the most frightening. I remember that in the early days of the epidemic in Wuhan, a woman used a gong on the balcony of a high-rise building to tell the world that her critically ill mother could not be treated. This way of expressing herself really made me burst into tears.

Separation is heartbreaking, and it is even more unbearable to see a loved one dying and being completely helpless. I read a report many years ago. During the civil war between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party, the people were in dire straits and refugees fled in all directions. The author somewhere saw an old man begging on the ground with the words "The United States aids the Soviet Union and I am helpless." The author said with emotion that the person who could write about the living environment in such a concise and concise way must be a scholar. If it were not for famine, war, and desperation, he would not be begging in order to survive. Compared with the words "The United States aids the Soviet Union, I am helpless", the woman who beats the gong for her mother on the balcony of a high-rise building and calls for help feels even more miserable and helpless. shocking.

Today is Mother's Day. Let me just talk about my mother.

My mother was a beauty when she was young, with beautiful and delicate facial features and a neat row of white teeth. To this day, I still often think about the past, "I wonder what it was like back then...". The result of "thinking back to those days" is: if my grandmother hadn't been under a lot of pressure, she wouldn't have married my father. But this marriage, which was ordered by their parents, ended up with "sixty years of quarreling, and everyone said it was a good marriage." They now live in the same nursing home. They argue and quarrel when they meet, and when they disappear for a while, they cry out to look for each other to make sure that the other person is still there by their side, as if the left hand is comforting the right hand or the right hand is stroking the left hand. The Book of Songs "Zhi Zi" Isn’t that what it means to “hand and grow old together with your son”? Two lives are like two streams of water from different sources, in parallel time and space, suddenly surging and communicating at a certain time and place. From then on, I am in your life and you are in my life.

Compared to other sisters and brothers, I am a particularly grateful mother. The decisions she made about me have impacted my life:

When I graduated from junior high school, she resisted the pressure from my father to make me an apprentice and insisted that I finish high school. If I hadn’t gone to high school, I wouldn’t have been able to continue studying during those years in Germany in the 1980s.

Around the time of the conflict between China and Vietnam in 1977, I soon became a military personnel of the right age and went to military training in the community more than ten times. My mother was worried that the authorities would one day drag me to a military camp farther away for training, which would no longer be easy or even possible. Will come back again. She worked hard and tried her best to raise enough shipping funds for my plan to flee to the angry sea. In the end, despite many twists and turns, I was lucky enough to escape and start another stage of my life.

Mother's Day in 2020, for many people, is still a day of being locked down in cities and communities. Fortunately for Australia, the curve of virus spread and spread has been flattened, and the lockdown measures will soon be lifted. I hope that in the near future, various places will be able to eliminate the virus as soon as possible and no longer have to live in fear of being ravaged by the epidemic!

Happy Mother's Day to all the friends and relatives who read this article.