Ten minutes into the movie, my eyes were brimmed with tears. It’s a Japanese movie (is it some kind of subliminal racism that if I came across an oriental movie while browsing through the channels, I will wait to hear the language? I’ll quickly move on when it’s Korean or Mandarin, but stay at the channel if it’s Japanese) entitled Birthday Card. Everything about the movie feels like a slice-of-life anime, except that it’s acted by real people and real places.

The film follows a life of a little girl who lost her mom to cancer. So the ailing mother prepared her birthday cards until she was 20. There is a scene when the girl stopped her mum and told her that she just wants to be a side character (the girl loves to read, so she relates herself to books).

And her mum, of course, would bounce to that statement and told her, like any reasonable mom would, that she can be anyone she wants.

As weirdly as a junior schoolgirl would, the girl exploded to her mom and asking a series of questions that I think a junior schoolgirl would never ask, “do you be what you want to be? Are you happy with your life now?”

I’ve long thought about kids, and sometimes my imagination runs wild that I would find some infant being abandoned somewhere and I take him/her under my care. Sometimes I thought I may really adopt. It’s probably a romanticized thought brainwashed into my mind when I saw a rom-com movie in which it ends with the guy adopted an Indian boy whom he met while he’s soul-searching after a painful break-up.

A friend of mine told me that kids are a watered down version of our ideals. I, too, thought that kids are the product of our legacy; the nurturing shaped by our ideals and conception translated into their being.

But kids, and their parents aren’t the same person nor one is doomed to carry the legacy or the burden from another.