i. Email From His Mother - Two Women And Two Unconverging Lines
i. Email From His Mother
Momentarily, Jay Dobbs Youth lost the capacity to feel grateful, lighthearted, loved or cared, as he read the email that he just received from his mother. Disturbed, infuriated and exacerbated. He condemned himself for being affected as such, but he could not escape from being in the state of mind that he was in. When one feels anger, amygdalae, which are groups of neurons, act in such a way that his/her body’s muscles become tense. Catecholaminess, chemical compounds, are released inside his brain, and this causes to increase heart rates, raise blood pressure and increases the rate of breathing. The rapid release of additional brain neurotransmitters and adrenalines follow. Her writing felt as if to disrupt Jay D.’s peace and to prevent his conscious and subconscious from stopping overflowing these chemical compounds. The email read as follows:
“As a parent, I am genuinely concerned about your present situation and your future. I presume that there is a good reason why you decided to take a loan. But I wish that you had told me reasons why you needed to borrow money and how you got into such situation before you took the action. So that I could have made suggestions such as how you can take a loan at a low interest rate, how you should approach so that you could maintain a good credit score and how you can possibly avoid asking a loan. Was it absolutely necessary? Like your father, you seem to hesitate and resist telling me about your personal issues. As your mother, I’d like you to ask me to give you suggestions and advices.
That is what it means to be a parent. There is nothing shameful or wrong about asking people surrounding you to advise you. I encourage that you think once, twice and thrice and ask someone, someone else and yet another person before you make a decision. To be honest, after 57 years, I have difficulty following my own advice, but that is exactly why I encourage you to not hesitate to seek help when you need one.”
The tone of the writing itself seemed modest. The content also seemed rather reserved on the surface. Yet what he understood was otherwise. He was in a difficult financial situation. Given the average credit card debt in US, he did not have a tremendous amount of debt, but the amount worried him a lot because his venture had not come to fruition. Also he was in India; the debt was a tremendous amount in this country, and this and other problems made him feel like he had no promising future here.
About a year ago, he came to India; one of key reasons was to grow his business. He had a certain plan, but looking posteriorly, he felt that nothing went as planned. As a result, his revenue went down; his profit went down. Expenses only went up. He attempted to rectify the situation by starting new projects, but they all backfired. He initially found himself running out of cash. He then found himself just getting by. Finally, he found that he was in debt. He was not happy obviously. He felt tense and stressed. However, that was not what made him felt exceedingly upset now.
While his current financial situation was a major concern, it was his business problem after all. The survival rate of the new business in US was not great, although the survival rate of the new business in India was relatively high. Even subsisting ones often had many issues, typical one of which was the cash flow problem; that was essentially the predicament his business had. Ideally, any new startup, in particular, a small startup business should start operating using only the owner’s capital alone; the business should not take a loan though it is customary. Nonetheless, most startups including small business startups take loans. Since they do not generate sizeable revenues at the beginning, what pay off loans, that are cash, lacks; in other words, the cash flow typically becomes the major problem at the beginning of their operations. It was not that he could completely detach himself from the current business quandary. But at least he understood that it was a technical problem to be dealt with and the nuisance was very typical of a small business. His mother’s intervention was a different matter howbeit.
Her interference was a personal problem. As it was a personal matter, he was aggravated, and he could not employ his logic to gain the sense of normalcy. He could not analyze himself metaphysically and convince that he should be able to detach himself from the plague emotionally; this plague itself was an emotional one.
Several days ago, he received another email from his mother. In that, she told him she found out that he had a credit card debt; she expressed concern and asked why he got into such situation. He briefly explained the background while trying to not get vehement, but suppressing the emotional uproar was difficult. He kept credit cards for convenience; he also felt that he might need them later, which turned out to be the case. But he did not know if he could keep using the cards while he moved to India, so he used his parents’ address in Great Neck, New York for that. He still had a business presence on paper, but his business in US was a one-man operation; he used a business presence service to keep an address, but the service could not be used to receive personal mails. He had a few friends, but none seemed to continue keeping their addresses for many years; they were not very reliable in this regard. Besides, he felt slightly hesitant to ask this type of favor. He was not borrowing money from them, but he felt that any financial matters should not be asked as a favor if possible. Further, he did not extend his lease of his flat as he left New York City. It was too much money to be wasted if he would not be there. He thought about subleasing, but he felt slightly uncomfortable because he probably would not be able to go visit there to check periodically for some time. It was very possible that he would not be there at all for years. In the end, keeping the flat was not practical. It seemed that his parents were the only people whom he could ask to use their address just so that he could keep his personal credit cards. Subsequently, all personal credit card statements were sent to their address. According to his mother, she accidentally opened one of credit card statements and she found out about his debt.
An odd thought occurred to him though. He generally disliked the idea of fate, chance and luck, but he felt like his mother’s having found out about his credit card loan enabled her and him to have some communication. Also partly due to his mismanagement, he had not made a business credit card, and subsequently, when he desperately needed to borrow money, he ended up borrowing against one of his personal credit cards rather than borrowing against a business credit card, which would not have let his mother to find out about his financial situation. But he still did not feel like asking advices from her in the future. It was not exactly a matter of her intelligence, knowledge or sagacity. She was relatively well read, and he also felt that she had more real life experience than most people. But, somewhere, he felt a certain distance between them.
He disliked suspecting another possibility, but he could not help. Perchance, she did not accidentally open the letter from the credit card company; she just opened it intentionally. But even assuming that it was not the case, as he re-read everything she wrote, he found himself profoundly annoyed.
He had no scholastic interest in psychoanalysis, though he never disliked the academic subject. Even so, from time to time, he submerged himself into deep thoughts and attempted to analyze where he came from, who he was and what rose in his future. He often did this when there was a disturbance of negative thoughts; it was as if he suffocated from such solicitudes but tried so desperately to breath.
Apparently, Japanese women are awfully popular worldwide; his mother was Japanese. She was not a Japanese American; she was born and grew up there. He was not so convinced whether there are more men who adore the most common western idea of the beauty, the tall blonde hair, fair white skin, Swedish fashion model like woman than men who adore the petite almost fragile cute Japanese woman, but it is a statement of the fact that Japanese women have gained so much popularity over the last two or three decades. Not in a vulgar way, he found that they were not exactly his type. That did not mean that he loved that typical Swedish or Danish blonde, slender model like look; in fact, that was not exactly his type. He also certainly did not mean that he disliked Japanese women. But somewhere in his mind, he felt that having the company of a petite fragile cute East Asian girl did not give him immense satisfaction. Love, romance or whatever it is called or however it is expressed, whether it is an illusion or not, a figment of imagination or not, should be about two powerful forces colliding each other, one of which, he hoped, would be him. Does this have to be the ultimate definition of love or romance? No. But, he felt that that was the definition he embraced.
Mother is one of the most significant and influential persons in one’s life. Given, it is absolutely normal for him to have a very strong feeling toward her, both positive and negative. This was undoubtedly the case with Jay D. Subsequently, if the mother has a distinct cultural background such as being an Indian, Russian, French, Ethiopian or a Japanese, he develops a strong persuasion toward that culture and women of that culture. Jay indeed identified his mother as a woman of a distinct culture, Japanese. It is not uncommon that one speaks of his favoritism toward women of a certain culture. Some say that they favor platinum blond and blue eyes like Scandinavians, while others say that they favor darker completion. It is, however, uncommon that one speaks of disfavoritism as if it were an immortal sin. But following the logic that one develops very powerful persuasion and consciousness toward his mother, it should not be uncommon that he develops such feeling of perturbation if he has the mother of a distinct culture.
Jay did not dislike physical features resembling his mother. In fact, there were many Japanese women and East Asian women that he found very attractive physically. But he resented certain ideas that the culture represented.
He took a deep breath and gathered his thought. Why all of a sudden, did he start thinking about his mother’s cultural and ethnic background? There were a number of reasons, but the main reason was that, when he attempted to apply objectivity, he found that it was one of the most characteristic aspects of her. But regardless, one thing was clear; there was a chasm between him and his mother.
Several days before this intercommunication took place, incidentally, he was recalling his college days; he was reviving the memory of someone he had a crush on. Like many such matinees, the ending was not exactly a happy ending. He did not have a bitter memory though; it was a bittersweet memory. Over all, he had a fond memory from those days. There were sad days and difficult days, but interestingly, he could not recall painful, dreadful or despairing days as days that left unhealed wounds of mental torture and torment. As he recollected some supposedly agonizing days back then, he could only smile. And this one matinee was a big part of the beginning of his formative years. But having reestablished the remembrance of the affair in perspective, in the end, as far as its ending was concerned, he did not experience a fruitful ending, so to speak. That was not all; he felt as if he ought to acknowledge that it was a symbolic event in his life. He did not reach what he longed for or what he felt he longed for. When he recalled this affair again as he read his mother’s emails, he could not refrain from comparing two different distances. One distance existed because his mother’s affection toward him, motherly love, did not seem appreciable to him. The other distance existed because his infatuation toward a young college girl he met was a mismatch. ”Why is it that I have not met or do not meet someone with whom I can develop a meaningful, lasting and ever growing relationship?” He did not like being sentimental, but he had to ask this question.
