Do you remember the words told by your loved ones during the milestones of your life? I do. I still remember the last words Appa told me when I left the house to study abroad.
No, it’s not the variation of “love you” or even the much muted Brown parents’ version of love, which is “be careful“. Nope. Instead, he smiled, waved and said:
“Check your passport one more time!”
And then he (and my Amma too) repeated a similar thing the time I moved to Singapore to work when I told them I quit my job and came back home, and then when I moved to Melbourne and during every big and small life event that happened in between.
Even on my wedding day, both of them asked on seperate occasions where my passport was, with Amma insisting on keeping it with her until she could pass it to the celebrant.
They have said the variations of “don’t forget your passport” so many times that it could easily be the second most frequent thing they have said to me in my entire life. The first one is “goodnight“, which has been a daily routine in our non-English speaking household since… forever.
And it’s not only lip service. They genuinely are obsessed with the travel document.
The first thing my parents ask for whenever I visit home is to give them my passport so they can safely keep it and only give it back to me hours before I leave for the airport.
They keep all my old expired passports in a safety box which even I don’t have access to.
They also insist on me returning to Indonesia to renew my passports nine months before the expiry date; I don’t even need to remember the expiry date because they have calendarized it in their shared journal.
But I do; I remember the expiry dates and numbers of all my passports. And not only my current one but the last two passport details. Weird? Not really, since they trained me to. Memorizing passport numbers is non-negotiable in our household. I remember Amma’s disappointed face so clearly when she asked me for my passport number on the spot (for some appointment), and I fumbled with the answer.
Then the need to photocopy the passport. Many copies. Too many.
They will give three sets of fresh copies (with the latest entry chop page copied). One is to be kept in the backpack, another in the luggage and the last copy in a plastic folder beside the original passport.
Their unhealthy obsession with my passport has become some background noise in life for me. I had long operated on auto-pilot mode when they mentioned the word “passport”.
Until a few days ago, it struck me, what if “passport”, my passport specifically, is my parents’ love language for me?
The thought made my heart tender.
Tender enough to Facetime them while holding my passport, so they could see their love extension is well protected and doing good. But not so tender to admit I once ruined a passport into bits ━ in a washing machine.
Follow me on Instagram @KultureKween for more recent updates.
My parents do the same thing, it’s an interesting take, the love language part, one that I didn’t think of but makes a lot of sense. Nice one!