Kintsugi

Explanation:

Kintsugi: the art of precious scars.

Kintsugi (金継ぎ, "golden joinery"), also known as Kintsukuroi (金繕い, "golden repair"), is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum, a method similar to the maki-e technique. As a philosophy, it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise.

As a philosophy, kintsugi can be seen to have similarities to the Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi, an embracing of the flawed or imperfect. Japanese aesthetics values marks of wear by the use of an object. This can be seen as a rationale for keeping an object around even after it has broken and as a justification of kintsugi itself, highlighting the cracks and repairs as simply an event in the life of an object rather than allowing its service to end at the time of its damage or breakage, and can be seen as a variant of the adage "Waste not, want not".

Kintsugi can relate to the Japanese philosophy of "no mind" (無心, mushin), which encompasses the concepts of non-attachment, acceptance of change, and fate as aspects of human life.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kintsugi

The following is a collection of random pieces of my soul, memories, thoughts, feelings, events. They are not in a chronological order; some may be subjective as to how real events have happened. Some names and places have been changed so that some people won’t be affected by my writing. I grew up in communism, in a communist country and the ways of my family still bear the scars and dogmas of communist living. I don’t try to find excuses or place blame on anyone.

I wear my scars with pride. I know that I am broken, but I learned to love myself this way, I am still working on it.

She was crying…

I always found her crying in the morning when I would wake up.

She used to sit in her kitchen, quiet, on her own, standing, leaning on the old Vesta stove. Tears were falling down her cheeks, almost naturally, no sounds, deep in thought, looking through the window across the room. An unspoken pain constant in her eyes, troubled gaze, aged beyond her years, dark hair greyed before it’s time. Her eyes blue as the clearest summer sky, her wrinkled but still beautiful face, a scar on her neck from an old thyroid surgery, her kind glow in the morning sun. Her ragged house clothes and the smell of fresh boiled milk, her, alone in this big kitchen, weeping, unaware I was there, is how I remember my grandmother. I was 3 or 4 or 5, don’t really know. But I used to sit for minutes watching her, asking myself “why is my mother crying?” What monsters troubled her, and what can I do to stop it? To me she was the only mother I knew, she fed me, bathed me, taught me things, told me stories, put me to bed, hugged me, loved me. I was heartbroken when I realised I actually had a real mother and she was juts my grandmother who chose to raise me and care for me when my mother didn’t, or couldn’t..

She would instantly smile and quickly wipe her tears when she saw me. I would always ask why is she crying and she will always tell me she is absolutely not crying, she just had something in her eyes.

To me she was warm and kind and all-knowing. She was the best cook in the world, taught me how to sow and knit clothes for my doll. She thought me to be clean inside and out, to be tidy to respect and demand respect, not to lie, to always question that what is too good to be true and to listen, really listen when I’m spoken to. As no one really heard her when she spoke.

To really see people and not judge, as everyone has a story and we all have a future. She was a stay at home wife and mother to my step grandfather and my mother’s teenager sister. That was it. No big academic titles, no career, no big accomplishments. To most she was nobody. To the ones she loved, she did not really matter. To me she was my guardian angel, she was enough, she was everything. Most even said about her she was mean and selfish, a bad mother and a self-centred wife. Including her 2 daughters thought that. I never saw that side of her. In my eyes, the more I knew her as I was growing up and understood her and what she was going through, she was a warrior, a strong woman, who was hiding the fact that she was being abused mentally and physically. I just wish I knew then what I know now, to make her life easier, behave more, love her more, hug her more and tell her it’s ok to cry. Even angels have broken wings. A big part of the woman I am today is because of her and her upbringing. She was tough and kind at the same time, it’s hard to explain. She did her best to raise me as an independent woman, and maybe erase and redeem some mistakes from the past through me. Maybe she never really raised me because of how much she loved me, maybe she did it to buy her forgiveness from my mother, for never raising her (like my mother thinks). It doesn’t really matter; she was the best mother I could have asked for when my real mum did not care enough to do it. My mum and my auntie were never in agreement or in a close relationship with her. My mum still says she does not understand why I loved her so much. She doesn’t need to.

My grandmother came from humble beginnings, a poor family but a hardworking one. In turn she taught me to be thankful for what I had but never settle, never stop wanting and working hard for more. And most importantly, never let a man decide what I can and cannot do. That I should constantly be in a competition with just myself, no one else.

She had a sad, unfulfilled life, full of illness and pain, where not many people understood or loved her, I was the only grandchild that actually respected and loved her. She left this world hastily, falling ill with brain cancer and in a lot of pain.

A little wicker basket is the only thing I have left from her. When I was very little, she used to dress me like Little Red Riding hood and put my yarn and homemade sweet treats in the small wicker basket. Found it by mistake in my mum’s house, my grandmother had kept it.

In her last days in the hospital I went to see her and she was convinced she was going to get better, we never told her the truth. She had a big scar on her head from the brain surgery and she was ashamed people saw her like this. She was admiring my blue scarf. I took my scarf and wrapped it around her head like a stylish turban and she was so happy. She used to love clothes and shoes and looking nice. She asked me to leave her the scarf as it had my scent on it, and reminded her of me. I would have given her years of my life, never mind a scarf. A few days after she died, and I asked my auntie to leave the scarf with her and take it to her eternal resting place as she really loved it.

A few months after I visited my mum and she gave me the scarf back, I was mortified and heartbroken. She had taken the scarf off my grandmother in the hospital and washed it to give it back to me as “it would have been a waste to leave it with your grandmother; it’s such a nice scarf”.

I now cherish this scarf a lot and wear it as often as I can. It is as blue as her eyes and soaked with as many tears as she cried alone, in her kitchen, every morning, before I would wake up.