The Wind Beneath My Wings

Leslie C. Lin
February 2009

I became an aunt for the first time last year. My niece, Julia Megan Wang was born a healthy and beautiful baby in Washington DC in July 2008. As I listened to my sister Elaine telling me everything there is to know about this new life and how much she is enjoying being a mother, I couldn’t help but wonder, where did my ambitious, career-driven super woman sister go?

I wasn’t the only person who was surprised by this change of personality and new found motherly love, my sister also took some time to understand what it takes to be a parent. Before the birth of baby Julia, Elaine has been a small business owner who would travel several weeks at a time for work. Today, she leaves work at noon so she could take Julia to the park or mommy’s group in the afternoons. I would never have imagined that my workaholic sister had eventually become one of those mothers who couldn’t end a conversation without mentioning the name of her child.

But it wasn’t always like this. Elaine didn’t particularly care for children or even want children of her own. Having involuntarily become the surrogate mother for her three younger siblings 13 years ago, Elaine had always thought very little about marriage or changing diapers. She was very much focused on her career and would spend longer hours at work than most people. Her friends had no doubt that Elaine would be the last to marry, if she married at all.

Unfortunately, I was one of the reasons that Elaine wouldn’t have children in the first place. After our mother passed away 13 years ago, I, along with my other sister and brother and a house in Boston, were handed down to Elaine like a pair of socks. She was 19 years old at the time. I wouldn’t call it fun when a college freshman had to rush home after classes to cook dinner for her younger siblings or take them to the mall to exchange the broken calculator.

On the weekends, Elaine would take us out to dinner and movies. We would have Korean food one weekend, Indian the next, but Japanese was always our favorite. She subscribed to teenager magazines like the Seventeen and dressed us like American teenagers, buying tank tops and flip flops for us. Elaine encouraged us to watch sitcoms like Friends or Everybody Loves Raymond and songs with easy lyrics like the Wind Beneath My Wings so we could learn American culture. When she took us out to restaurants, she would wait patiently for me to muster courage and construct a sentence in English to ask the waitress for a fork.

In her spare time, Elaine learned to fix the broken toilet and managed the household finance. As the new mother of three children at age 19, Elaine didn’t have very much personal time or the luxury to live the life of a normal college student like most of her friends. It probably wasn’t fair for her, but I had always pictured of us from the movie the Little Women- the four of us made a happy family. I never told Elaine, but it was one of the happiest years of my life in the US.

Years later, my sister would confess that she didn’t particularly enjoy that year of child rearing. Like every other 19-year-old American college students, she wanted to go to parties or go on dates with boys her age. There were times when she dreaded going home to three kids or having to drive us around to our tennis lessons or attending parent’s day at my middle school. But she stayed home. She stayed home and coached me on my college applications and analyzed the pros and cons of each university that I was applying to.

My freshman year in college, my father’s business faced serious financial setbacks and could no longer afford our education expenses. Against my father’s request for us to drop out of school, Elaine insisted that we stayed in school and continued our education. She sought help and looked for resources to finance my college education. She believed that a good education for her brother and sisters was more important than anything else. She was 22 years old at the time.

Throughout my college years, Elaine taught me how to write impressive resume, the importance of doing internships, or how to prepare for job interviews. But she also made sure that I understood why it is important to take courses that are unrelated to my psychology major, courses like economics and accounting- think personal finance. She urged me to take courses in art history or anthropology so I could be exposed to different areas of knowledge. She was happy for me when I spent my junior year in Tokyo as an exchange student. Elaine wanted me to have the kind of college experience that she never had.

A few years ago, Elaine moved to Shanghai and wanted to “make it” in China. As luck would have it, she fell in love with a man who knew how much she had gone through and vowed to take care of her for the rest of her life. Taking all of her friends by surprise, Elaine got married at age 25 and moved back to the US. When occasionally I whine about not having her luck or meeting Mr. Right in Shanghai, my sister would say, “I know its cliché, but seriously, love comes when you are least expecting it”.

With the encouragement of her husband, my sister continued on to get her masters’ degree and became an entrepreneur with an education consultancy. We have always joked that we were Elaine’s first clients and guinea pig. After all, she was the one who saw us through high school and college.

Ever since my sister became pregnant with Julia in the end of 2007, we would talk on the phone more frequently than usual. And it was then, for the first time, that my sister didn’t sound like a fifty-year-old female CEO of a fortune 500 company. She actually sounded her age and seemed vulnerable for the first time. My sister told me how much she missed our mother when she now carried a child inside her. She wanted to know what kind of baby rearing tips our mother would give her. She doubted her ability to be a good mother to Julia while she continues working full-time.

A few weeks ago my sister called me and told me about this high school student she recently met through work. The girl told my sister that she was adopted into an American family from Columbia when she was an infant. However, her adoptive parents told her about the adoption when she was little. They also made sure that she grew up understanding her roots and being able to speak Spanish well; The family would spend every summer in Columbia. My sister was extremely moved by the story of this 16-year-old and said to me: As much as I am now grateful for being a mother and enjoys taking care of another human being, I wonder if I could ever love and go this far for someone else’s child.

But I wanted to tell my sister that she has already been loving someone else’s children more than they could ever have hoped for. She has opened more doors for me in my life than anyone else and made a much better person out of me. I have no doubts that Julia would grow up to become an intelligent, compassionate, and happy young lady. And guess what, I am already a little jealous of Julia and all the attention she gets from my sister!

Elaine, this is for you. Thank you for being the wind beneath my wings all these years.