Mom (As a Filipino Businessman) | The Dreamweaver

I was work at the barbershop finishing a customer who I had to seat in one of the hairdresser chairs as my barber chair was being serviced.

I was having a hard time shaving my customer’s neck and chin as the hairdresser had didn’t have a headrest and was quite low to the ground, forcing me into some very awkward and physically challenging postures in order to finish the shave.

As I was wiping the gentleman’s face clean, my mother walked into the shop in her usual disguise—my 1970s-era Pierre Cardin powder blue three piece suit (the one I wore at my bar mitzvah in June of 1976!) with the blue patent leather and suede loafers—as a Filipino business man.

Mother donned this disguise every Friday afternoon when she came to the barbershop for me to shave the few grey wiry hairs that grew beneath her chin.

When I returned from the front desk after taking payment and seeing my customer off, I returned to my barber station only to find my mother had already settled into the hairdresser’s chair I was working at when she arrived.

I waved her over to the barber chair and she sat down disgruntled for the inconvenience of having to walk across the salon.

After I finished work that evening, I went home to my parent’s flat on Washtenaw, where I had recently moved back to after my divorce.

Exhausted from a full day of work, I went straight the back of the apartment and into my teenage-year’s bedroom to get undressed and ready for a shower and dinner.

Just then my father came in and started to move some furniture around, which I thought was quite strange. Asking him what he was doing, he simply said he was making room.

Then he left momentarily and came back with a dolly and proceeded to remove my great-grandfather’s mahogany high-boy dresser out of my room and into the adjacent kitchen.

I ran out of my room and confronted him asking why he was taking my dresser and what he was doing with it. He told me to go back to my room, that my mother would be in shortly to talk to me about it.

Confused, angry and tired I went back to my room and just as I sat down on my bed my mother came in, now back to her normal state of being clad in a tattered blue housecoat and hairnet but still wearing the face makeup that made her look like a Filipina.

I asked her why she had my father remove the dresser—my dresser—and she said because it had once belonged to her grandfather and I responded angrily that it belonged to my great-grandfather who had left it to me in his will. She coldly apologized and walked away and I followed he out of my room and into the hall where I grabbed her by the arm turning her toward me and started to raise my hand.

She recoiled and begged me not to hit her as my father looked on in dismay.

Then I woke up.