Natural Consequences
Mother’s Day 2025 started at 6 AM with an email from a colleague questioning some calculations I put in a conference paper, the first that I would publish after moving from California to Hawai`i as a new professor. As I frantically jotted down numbers with Ellie’s marker pen on the back of last month’s insurance bill, Ellie was, to my surprise, stripping off doll Moana’s outfit without making a sound. Ironically, I found myself distracted by her silence.
The night before, I tried to put on the kapa skirt that I spent a whole semester making for her, a project for the Hawaiian fiber arts class that I was taking. It had been an anticipated moment even though I had been pretending otherwise. I recruited her to the kapa making process as much as I could think of: the trip to the beach when she brought me buckets and buckets of ocean water to soak my wauke (the bark of the paper mulberry trees), the collection of African tulip flowers on a stroller walk which were boiled to make a natural brown dye, the gathering of the kukui nuts in the neighborhood which were burnt into soot for ink making, the banana tree leaf stem from her school yard cut for printing. I even brought her with me to a kapa pounding session. I wanted to pretend that whether or not she happily received the gift didn’t matter, because of how much went into the making of it. I wanted to be that cool mom, unbothered even when misunderstood, patient enough to wait for love to return.
Maybe she saw through my pretension. Or maybe she just wanted to find out on TV if Peppa Pig was going to have a baby brother or sister. I didn’t manage to put the kapa on her. It kept falling off, and when I tried to tie the belt over her body her arms kept getting in the way. Just as she was trying to run away, my husband joined in trying to help immobilize her so I could tie it on, which only made things worse. That was when I had to stop the whole thing, as I was afraid we would rip it apart, a piece of work so dear to my heart.
As I was wrapping it back up, my husband laughed and commented on how mommy spent the whole semester making the skirt, and how Ellie refused, putting the word “NOPE!” into her mouth. It was the way we joked about her usual prideful insistence on her own opinions, even though she didn’t say it explicitly that night.
That laughter echoed my own voice that I had been trying to neglect. Since first joining the class as the only one not originally from here, I had felt uneasiness among my classmates. Questions constantly lived in the back of my head, signaling my own foreignness to the people and the land here. Am I the kind of mother who just can’t stop talking about her child? Am I “that mom” who performatively devotes everything to her child and beggingly longs for a loving return? Am I painting a picture of that perfect mother that I yearn to be, while everybody else already sees through my imperfections and mocks me behind my back?
Ellie was clearly tired that night and needy at bedtime. She asked for water several times after I said good night. For the last time, she requested a hug, my chin on her shoulder, tucked in just the right way so that my hair wouldn’t tickle her, before she finally settled down.
On Mother’s Day, I wondered: should I give it a second attempt now that she seemed to be in a good mood?
Why not.
I closed my laptop and proposed, through my maternal instinct, that if she put on the kapa skirt and let me take a picture and a video of her for my final project presentation, she could have a date for breakfast. Philosopher Rousseau would condemn me for using a materialistic bait, and for ruining her lifelong dietary habits centered around sugar intake.
She agreed, like Rousseau would have predicted over two hundred years ago.
So I put it on her, and it looked absolutely beautiful. The skirt turned into a full-length dress on her body, and the solid texture of the kapa created a puffiness just beneath the belt to give the look of class and sophistication. She raised her arms and slowly turned around, pretending to be a mannequin model on a rotating stage.
“All done!” She suddenly dropped her arms and started walking away in the middle of the video.
“The date, remember? The sweet date!”
She ran back to the center of my frame immediately, putting on the fake smile again. The video ended with me rushing over to cover her nipples because of the skirt falling down.
*
I first heard about Rousseau in school, for his work on Émile, a world-renowned educational bible. But it only recently stuck with me, after I heard a casual philosophy podcast where the host used her mother as an example. Her mother is a pediatrician and often comments on how some parents use materialistic strategies to make their kids bend at the doctor’s office, a familiar scene to every parent.
As a scientist, I get that. You want to teach the child not to stand underneath the apple tree, not by beating her up if she did that, but by actually letting her feel the hit when the apple drops on her head. But who is there to take the consequence of a child going through the consequence of nature – in my example, the kid kicking her mother for letting her get hit by a goddamn apple? The mother it is.
Once, Ellie sneakily threw some trash paper behind the couch. I pondered the natural consequences in this situation and found none, so I let it go.
A few days later I found a whole pile of scraps there, and the natural consequence? My anger. My voice instantly raised, and I ordered her to clean it up. As she tried to crawl under the couch, her head got stuck.
What should I do now? “You can get your head IN, you can get your head OUT,” I said firmly while my brain’s eye searched for my phone to dial 911.
She started to panic and wanted to use brute force to pull herself out. “Wait. No. Stop.” My words were useless. Then I remembered I was in a similar situation once as a kid, where my foot was stuck in a small opening between glass railings in a shopping mall. I forgot exactly what my mother said, but I later felt proud that I was capable of following her instructions and getting myself unstuck. That was also the moment I learned that listening to Mom works.
“Look at my finger!” I pointed my finger to the side of her head so that she could only see it if she turned her head to a certain angle. She turned and slid her head out.
I exhaled with relief when she started to cry.
Great, now there was that natural consequence: crying after throwing trash behind the couch. She sat on my lap as I repeated to her, “Throw trash in the trash can, if you don’t, you get your head stuck.” How natural was that?
Her cries turned into choked sobs. Eventually she was calm enough to repeat my words, and I let her go.
As soon as she stood up, I found a patch of wet pee on my pants. She followed me as I ran to the bathroom. One moment I was the authoritative figure telling her to do this and not that, and the next moment she was watching my naked butt under the running faucet, washing off her pee.
Thanks Rousseau, that is the natural consequence of letting a crying toddler sit on you.
*
Against my inner doubt, I gave the speech I prepared for a long time for my final project presentation.
“I got my inspiration for this piece from my previous brief experience with kapa making, especially the experience of pounding. It reminds me of the act of caretaking, more specifically, motherhood in the early years. The repetition, the touch, the feeling of being drained, and the power of carrying on. Every pound leaves a mark, just like every touch on the baby. Though individually it seems like nothing, but over time, it builds towards a meaningful relationship.
My daughter just turned three years old. I always find the first three years of one’s life an interesting time. She will no longer remember much when she grows older, but for the parents, those are memorable years. So, I want to give this to her as a present, and as a carrier of the care and love that went into the first three years of her life.”
The professor and my classmates congratulated me on the completion of my piece, as they admired the picture of Ellie wearing the skirt, faking a smile, ready to jump to the sweet date at any moment.
After my presentation, I walked around the exhibition hall. A Hawaiian student with Japanese lineage made a kapa kite, as she wanted to bring back the playfulness of kite flying. One classmate made a kapa map of her hometown, taking plants and fruits from the east side of the island to print on her kapa, while another made a wall-hanging kapa that told the story of her grandmother, starting from the ocean and ending on the moon. Another student focused on carving tens of different ohe kapalas (bamboo stamps) to experiment with traditional Hawaiian printing on kapa. Finally, a pair of students from the Department of Theatre made a mu`umu`u dress with a silky texture, a result of countless hours of pounding and softening. We studied each other’s work, touched them, held them under the sun, and traced the fibers with our fingers.
It was a class difficult to end, because we had all connected through the rhythmic pounding of our kapa. Whether or not I stood as a foreigner at the very first aloha circle didn’t seem to matter anymore. By being part of this class, I offered a piece of myself, and they had chosen to look after it with care.
*
On Mother’s Day, after I got the picture and video for my final project presentation, we went to Sherwood Beach. The wind was wild, and the tide was high. Ellie and I played in the water for an hour, and she yelled at the ocean for that whole hour. It didn’t matter that her words didn’t make sense – “JAMAICA TOURIST INFORMATION HELLO!!” – because it seemed that the sound of the ocean could absorb everything, every crazy act of the child and the mother, and every natural and unnatural consequences of our behaviors.
That night, I worked on drafting an email in response to my colleague’s questions while Ellie was getting ready for bed. She asked me to help her put on doll Moana’s dress, and I said I was busy with other things.
“你在做别的事情的时候still love我吗?” (do you still love me while you do other things?) she asked in her bilingual mode.
I turned to her and said, “Yes, I do, every second, very much.” Meanwhile, in the back of my head, I said, “Fuck you, Rousseau.”
Cover photo by VD Photography on Unsplash
About the Author
Siqi Li teaches physics and conducts research at the University of Hawai‘i. She is also an emerging writer whose work explores motherhood, culture, and nature. Her writing has appeared in HerStry.
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