We're celebrating Mother's Day this year by honoring our own moms here at NBC10. The second story in our My Mother series is from NBC10's Vai Sikahema, whose mother has given him one remarkable life journey.
Our immigration to America was piecemeal.
My parents came first. As a six year old, I was left with two younger siblings in Tonga with our maternal grandparents. Passage to America would come as it was afforded. For me it took a little more than a year. For my younger siblings, three-and-a-half full years passed before reuniting with us.
In the year before I joined them, I never once heard my parents voice nor did they hear mine. Telephone service was non-existent in our village, much less electricity. The age of digital pictures and the internet didn't exist either. So for over a year, my mother couldn't see how much I had grown or how much I had changed.
Our only communication was through letters, and the packages my mother would send filled with candy.
Well before my passage was secured, my mother sent a package that contained a homemade green Hawaiian shirt that she had lovingly sewn for me to wear on the trip. I learned later that she did it so she could easily identify me once we disembarked the plane. This was in the day when only a ladder was rolled up next to the plane. The door opened and you walked down the ladder and across the tarmac to the gate. She wanted to make sure I stood out in the crowd
The Hawaiian shirt came early enough that I wore it to the Immigration Office in Tonga for my passport photo. It was the first time I was ever photographed. I was 7 years old, wearing the green Hawaiian shirt my mother made for me.
As a father of four, I'm fully aware of my obligation to encourage and support my children's interests, even if I don't understand or appreciate a child's particular interest.
When I was a young boy, my father taught me how to fight. His dream became mine -- to be the heavyweight champion of the world.
My mother, however, didn't share our aspiration. She loathed fighting. But because she loved me, she traveled with us to dingy gyms and smoky dungeons where I fought in Golden Gloves tournaments.
Yet, she never once saw me fight. She would stay in the motel and pray.
And when I returned from my matches with my father, she would lovingly caress my sometimes-blackened eyes and silently weep.
Once I entered high school, she never openly discouraged boxing, but she strongly encouraged me to play football. She somehow learned that the top American colleges offered scholarships if you excelled at football. No one knows less or cares less about sports than my mother. Yet she rightly figured if I could excel in boxing, then surely, some of those same skills could be transferred to American football.
How she came to that conclusion is beyond me. Perhaps it's just a mother's protective instincts for her baby.
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She didn't just save my life; she provided me with a life I could not have dreamed possible.
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