Autobiography of a Legend

The Mother That Stumbled Into My Life

Just like my dad, I don't hate my mother.

As I've been given time to grow up and understand who I am, why I am, who I am, and the lengths that others have gone to in order to make sure I got to those places, I think I get it now. My mother made perhaps the hardest choice a mother can make to give me up so I wouldn't follow after my father. She did what she thought she had to do in order to prevent what must have looked like the end of everything. The ninja didn't learn about the Green Ninja prophecy until I was already a child, but my mother seemed to know about it either before I was born or just after I was born. Given that I only remembered very vague things about her before I met her, I must have been super young when she gave me up.

That doesn't mean I don't resent her for what she did. I grew up without my mother in a school of bullies, told to be like my dad but always failed to even get close to what he represented. My mother wanted me to not fight my dad, but put me in a place where I couldn't escape from who he was. I'm not saying that leaving me with Wu would have been better, but the fact she abandoned me altogether instead of finding some other way... hurts. It still hurts to this day.

It took me years to be able to feel that connection to Misako that I know the other guys feel to their parents. Whenever I met Ed and Edna outside of trying to steal from them, I was jealous of how they looked at Jay, and even more importantly how Jay looked at them. They all cared about each other, loved each other... they were there for each other. If I'd known that Jay was blowing his parents off earlier, I would have forced him to go and talk to them. He was throwing away a relationship that I never got to have. But I was never jealous enough to actually say anything, and when we would leave talking to them, I would instead just feel... sad.

My mother tried for a long time to get me to see her as a parent. It was hard, given that she wanted to drop back into my life and have that sort of connection without us ever having truly met. She didn't know anything about me. Sure, she said she always looked in on me when she wasn't busy researching and cared about me, but... but looking at me from afar and claiming you're helping me by leaving me alone in the world isn't parenting! It's abandoning me saying you have something better to do! It doesn't matter if that better thing was helping me, you still left me. I never got to know what it was like to have mothers praise you, or teach you how to manage your rooms, or scold you for doing dumb things, or even saying that they love you. My mother had never told me she loved me until that day. She wouldn't have ever gotten the chance to say it.

Looking Misako in the eyes in that museum was a feeling completely different from when my father rescued me from the volcano. With my dad, it'd been a feeling of relief, happiness and joy seeing that someone had come to rescue me. With my mom, I just felt... angry. When she tried to say she was happy with how much I'd grown, something in me felt like it'd snapped. Something told me that she wasn't allowed to say that. I wasn't holding it together well to begin with, but the second Misako said she had a reason to leave, I couldn't take it. I stormed off, leaving her behind and trying to figure out how to deal with all the anger I now had inside of me.

I eventually wound up at the bottomless pit my mother had dragged the new Stone Warrior exhibit out of. Looking at it didn't make me feel better, but I wanted to be far away from Misako. I didn't want to talk to her after she'd tried to tell me she had a reason to abandon me. She found me, of course, but it wasn't like I wanted to talk to her. She managed to get me to listen long enough, though, for her to tell me about the Overlord.

It was strange to hear that the tale we in Ninjago knew by heart about the First Spinjitzu Master was only half the story. It was almost like hearing that your favorite bedtime story was written to be about, like, class divide? Okay, that's a random example, but my point is that I somewhat understood where she was coming from with what happened. The Overlord was the embodiment of all evil, and that evil was now reflected in my father. She knew that one of us would be going down in that final battle, and if she could prevent it she'd save her family. I somewhat got it.