#23 - Yeah, It’s Not Easy to Be a Mother!

It’s hard to be the mother of a 14 year old girl. The demands, the expectations. Most of the time we do fine. But when we fight, finding out that she and I share certain traits is not the most useful or comforting of discoveries. Like the stubbornness and the pride; the immediate silence into which we each take refuge.

I do not mind being her chauffeur, the role to which I’ve been reduced these days, that and the expectation to spit out money as she requires it and the provider of as many yeses as she needs to go about to the mall or the movies or wherever with her  friends.

I don’t mind the tedious waiting for her. I have my smartphone, my music and my e-reader to keep me entertained in my car while she takes her tap class or her hip hop or whatever interest she’s pursuing.

I want her to have fun and to enjoy the relationships she’s creating with other girls. I want her to have that sense of belonging and being with and like them, no matter how fleeting all these relationships will end up being.

Her insistence in being and doing like others is a strange phase, I think. I do not know when she will leave that behind in order to assert who she truly is. To acknowledge that the more unique you are, the better, quirks and all.

But the two things that bother me the most are these: to catch her in a lie, no matter how innocent, turns me inside out. I can’t tolerate that she thinks she has to hide the truth from me.

I also find that I can’t handle her intellectual laziness, and her lack of self-awareness about the privileged position she is in. The skill to read in three languages is not something we all have. When she asks me when she will stop taking her French lessons, I respond, “When I see you reading French books with no other purpose than enjoyment!” Her silence is her response. Lately, she even has stopped reading any of her English-language books.

The other day I was about to ground her by taking her phone away for a week. After many tears and end of the world drama, we finally agreed she would read a book in Spanish over the summer. She was so happy to have her lifeline back in her grubby hand! Now the task at hand for her is pretty daunting. I will admit to that. I had hoped we could do it together in the course of a year because it’s a fat book. She has committed herself to reading on her own and in Spanish, before the new school starts, the book to which I introduced myself to world literature: Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky.

I wish upon her a mind overflowing with unending questions and curiosity. Yeah, maybe it’s too early for her to wonder about the universe and our social past and to know the importance of questioning everything. But I can’t stand the idea that she will have no intellectual hunger, and that she won’t always have her nose in a book.

#22 - Unbreakable

I have not always been a good daughter to my mother. Now I’m as best as I can be. I’m probably not as affectionate as she’d like. I shy away from too much physical contact with her. But I can’t help that. I try very hard to be respectful of the biblical precept of honoring her. I have a bedroom just for her in my house. As much as I can I am generous to her. I probably could provide a bit more, but it would be a hardship on our household.

All in all she is doing fine in spite of the eight decades she’s walked this earth. She’s feisty and always keeps her spirits up. She can still walk on her own. She still comes and goes between Mexico, Texas and California.

What else? She’s a chronic smoker. Her diet consists basically of corn tortillas, Monterrey Jack cheese, wieners, Habanero peppers and Cokes.

Mind you, she’s diabetic, hypertensive and has glaucoma. But healthy eating has never been a concern of people from her generation and her peasant background.

When I give in and drive her to buy her cigarettes, I make it a point to ask her, “You know that this is what’s going to kill you, right?” She admits to it. “Well, as long as you know what you’re doing…”

She still scolds me as if I were a little girl and not this middle aged lady that I am. And it doesn’t help that I remind her of my age (as if she didn’t know). She will still tell me I spend too much, I never save enough, my tastes are too expensive, I buy too much stuff and I should curtail my preference for chocolate.

My mother is now hospitalized and I’ve been an extreme cry-baby, with bouts of prayers and tears that worry not only my husband, but me too.

I overanalyze everything, trying to find the possible reasons as to why I’m so emotional. Of course I worry about her leg wound and her pneumonia. But I know that these bursts of tearfulness have to do more with my story than with hers.

It might also have to do with the fact that since my stroke in 2008, I hadn’t been in a hospital and this just stirred all the painful experiences I had to go through. It might just be that.

But I then think of the shared history between my mother and I. I was born five years into her marriage and a miscarriage later. She was overprotective and probably overdid the “loving me to death” thing (I describe her love as a “sticky” love).

She now says she had no idea what she was doing; she was young and uneducated, with no one to guide her as she walked into the tangled grounds of motherhood. And I was not easy to handle. I’m told I cried all night and slept all day. As I came into toddlehood, I went into my Tantrums Phase no holds barred. A fellow merchant told her to spank me every time I through myself to the floor kicking and screaming. She obliged.

It seems I was also a witness to another of her four miscarriages. She was on her own with two little girls and no idea what was happening to her. It seems I asked about the blood and she didn’t know how to respond to my curiosity.

Then my sister and I had to go through our “Abandonment Issue.” Of course, we were not abandoned by our parents. We were left with relatives for some months while we waited for the green cards to come to the States and reunite with them. But what kid can process that information? All we knew is that Mami had left us, abandoned us.

And this is only the beginning of a complex relationship between two women, mother and daughter, both strong, tough and proud (me probably too much). A scarlet thread binds us irreparably. This wiry unbreakable material is made up of her “sticky love,” my deep need of her, her blood, my wails, the hardship she suffered and my joy of finally being able to acknowledge that I love her too.

#21 - I Just Can't See It!

Three married couples gathered around my kitchen table. By now, it’s an old table with cheery hand-painted sunflower tiles.

Initially, I thought I could offer some coffee and pastries and enjoy the camaraderie that we had been building the times we had gathered before this Sunday afternoon.

I should have known better. Soon enough, on the table there were two bottles of fine tequila, a pot of coffee for me that I should not consume alcohol and an assortment of foods, mostly leftovers from the week.

After that time flies. Some of the adults drink unrestrained; a couple of them wait or start spacing out the sips they take from their caballito glass.

There is much laughter and jokes. The youngest of the couples stand and dance to a nortena song and then to a couple of salsa tunes, without stepping out of the breakfast room. I so wish I could just “up and dance” but I sigh to myself grateful for the high pleasure of being alive.

In our minds there is the awareness that when morning comes we’ll need to be at work. One of them convinces himself to call in sick and raises his caballito to everybody. The other two males remember that for one reason or another they don’t work that Monday. The women, well, they’re women and know they can handle a bit of a hangover and function well on a just a few hours of sleep.

So the party continues happily for everybody. The two kids are entertained watching The Perks of Being a Wallflower in the movie room. My daughter’s sixth time!

Before calling it a night well after a midnight, the two bottles of tequila are practically gone. One of the women proposes we take turns singing what she calls “tequila songs,” which I understand are songs you request or sing when you’re drunk remembering a “love gone done you wrong”, you’re probably resentful, hurt, still have feelings for him or her; it’s that unforgettable love that you can admit to through the song. The only completely sober one, me, raises her hand eagerly and says, “I’ll start.”

At this point I YouTube every song chosen in turns while the “singer” is busy looking up the lyrics on a smart phone.

So the musical “soiree” starts with José Alfredo’s “Maldición ranchera” sung by Amalia Mendoza which I sing with no shyness and to my heart’s content with the good Amalia. We each sing four or five songs.

While I’m actively participating and singing with everybody, in the back of my mind I’m thinking of the tequila I’m not drinking and my coffee mug that I raise to clink against the five caballito glasses that are raised regularly.

In my country alcohol is deeply ingrained in all our customs. We become happy, outgoing and extroverted when we drink our liquor in the right measure. But we rarely know how to stay put in that right measure. When we pass that point we become stubborn, despondent and even aggressive, we cry for that lost love. We become pretty silly and pitiful.

So ingrained is alcohol in our culture that I’m sure any of us can mention dear ones lost to alcoholism. My mother’s three brothers are victims of alcoholism. My uncle Jorge died from that; my uncle Humberto had the same lifestyle (though he died of brain tumors). And my uncle Ezequiel is in his sixties and a drunk.

But we’re not like that, of course not!

So there we were happy and cheering each other with our selected songs. Sometimes the faces of people from work would pop into my mind and I would wonder, “Do white folks get drunk like us? Do they take turns around a kitchen table, YouTube a song (say by Patsy Cline of Johnny Cash) and sing their heart out loud and very off key? Somehow I just can’t see it!

#20 - My Daughter at the Piano: My Duty as a Mother

To my daughter again

Last week I was pleasantly surprised by listening to my daughter playing the piano. This was unexpected since given our schedules I really don’t get to listen to her. I even had to tell Husband to put the TV on Mute so I could listen to the sweet sounds.

My daughter takes piano lesson since she was four or five. I acknowledge this is more about me than her. I will explain:

On one of our trips to Washington state for the apple harvest, we ended living in a cute small mobile home close to the beautiful residence of our kind and affectionate employers. They, the Sorensens, were four like us. Their youngest, Kelly, a boy of about 10, would come to us when my mom made flour tortillas and he would eat them with butter and jelly (!). Oh he devoured them! That is until it occurred to us to have him eat one with hot and spicy salsa. Kelly’s eyes overflowed with tears but he never gave up. Mrs. Sorensen asked my mother to teach her how to make those tortillas.

Her daughter, about 14 and whose name I can’t remember, studied piano. One day she taught me how to play “Mary Had a Little Lamb” on three keys on the lustrous black grand piano they had in their living room. I was 12 and captivated by the then unknown and strange instrument and I would drum that little song, surely even in my sleep.

Once walking around downtown Wenatchee I felt myself pulled inside a music store, interested as I was in repeating on one of the pianos the little song our employers’ daughter had taught me. A very nice man, who I know suppose was the owner, came to the piano, took those three keys and using practically the entire keyboard played “Mary Had a Little Lamb” again transforming it to my captive ears into a marvelous symphonic experience.

The piano became a secret and impossible dream to me.

Almost three decades later living in San Antonio, in the laundry room of our apartment complex I saw an ad about a piano teacher Nancy. When I called her and told her of my interest but that I didn’t have a piano, she suggested we start on an electric keyboard. So I bought myself a cheap one and started my classes with Nancy who kindly would come to our apartment to teach me my class.

From Nancy I heard about a Hispanic neighbor whose name I can’t recall either. His apartment was a bazaar. His reduced space was filled with exotic and exquisite things he had for sale, among them a dark and tall upright piano that, let’s say Francisco, sold to me in installments.  He sold it to me for $500 and accepted that I pay him $50 each month.

I expected him to tell me to take the piano as soon as we established the terms of our agreement. I had to wait the 10 long months.

The most symptomatically neurotic thing about me was the day MY piano was brought down from his second level apartment to ours (I don’t recall how it happened). When the piano found a wall to stand against, feeling I-don’t-know-but-feeling-it-most-deeply, I sat on the floor sheltering myself under its keyboard and I cried my little immigrant heart out, touching its wood as if it were the skin of the most desirable man on earth (let’s think Pedro Infante).

That piano is still with me. But I do not know how to play it. I took classes here in Dallas with a couple of teachers for three or four years (not much in the world of music). Reading music is extremely difficult for me. Visually, it’s very hard to give value to those dots on paper.

From one of the tuners, I know this about my piano: it’s made with Honduran mahogany, its keys are actually ebony and ivory, the strings are copper and it turned 100 years old in 1997. Its former owner was either a vegetarian or did not play it much; apparently the skin of carnivores emits some type of oils that stain the keys; this given the condition of my piano’s keys back then that were a nice pearly white. He also said that because of the extension of its strings, in order for a piano to sound like mine, we would need a grand piano (the strings are set diagonally). Another tuner valued in $2,500.

I have never considered selling it (not even during hard times). It will be for Valentina. And since she takes lessons she, more or less, has taken ownership.

Valentina takes lessons very reluctantly. And I know I shouldn’t expect her to fulfill my frustrated wishes so I can live them vicariously. But when I read that learning music helps kids to better assimilate and understand the hard sciences, I decided that she could expect me to find ways to help her understand math.

And it’s only because of this that she studies piano. It’s my motherly duty!

#19 - Big Questions and a Small Comfort

I am an avid NPR listener. When I moved a lot, the first thing I looked for on the radio was for an all-jazz and classical music radio stations. So when I moved to Dallas I immediately found 88.1 and 101.1.

And then at work a woman whose intelligence, wit and humor I admired, Joyce, mentioned 90.1. Since then, I’ve made of NPR my constant driving companion. I cannot say I know about politics or politicians, but I’m guessing NPR tends to be more of a liberal then a conservative radio station. So be it, I thoroughly enjoy their reporting and the human slant they give to their stories and their tendency to be inclusive of all peoples.

So, lately I hear a lot about the imminent “sequestering” and the immigration reform. The other day I heard that this sequestering deal will impact “everything,” even things like the Head Start program whose vision is “to be the untiring voice that will not be quiet until every vulnerable child is served with the Head Start model of support for the whole child, the family and the community.”
This is something that for always will baffle me about this great country and its generous people. I’d like to know how is it that the most powerful country on the planet still has these basic questions and indecisions about how to care and provide for our children, who in my mind should be our top priority? And let’s add our elders to that mix, can we?
I know economic problems and issues, inflation and crises will always come and go. Debates will always tend to divide us instead of uniting us. But in my silly mind, our children and our seniors should be a topic we should have solved a long time ago. At least that is my thinking (perhaps of no value).
I guess I’m thinking as a mother and as a daughter. Since I became a mother, everything I do is oriented towards providing for my daughter to the best of my abilities. Most of the monies I make are thought in relationship to her needs and wants.
My mother was a widow shortly after turning 49 and never remarried. From my father’s Social Security fund she began receiving less than five hundred dollars a month as soon as she qualified to claim those benefits. She is now 80 and that is all she gets. I think she is amazing in her mastery to make do with that.
As her daughter I feel an obligation to help her. But it’s an unmet obligation, given that I do not have any monies assigned to her from my monthly income. I feel I should, but my own commitments make it hard to do so.
I believe being born in a Latin American country has to do with this feeling of commitment toward her. In my culture you are taught that somehow you are indebted to the two people that gave life to you. I seem to take that seriously and since I can’t really fulfill that debt, it’s a source of guilt.
I find comfort in having a bedroom that is my mother’s, with lamps, a night stand, a dresser and a mirror, a nice walk-in closet, and that there’s no doubt whatsoever that if anyone stays the night there, they’re sleeping in Marga’s bedroom instead of a fully furnished guest bedroom. And that atlong as she is in my house, she’s in her house and that I will cover her needs in the best manner I can, no questions asked.
This is a source of a small comfort for me.
But as a nation, where do we find comfort when so much is at stake by this new word, sequester, being thrown around in the political realm?
So that is why I wonder how this powerful country still rethinks on how to care for its children and seniors. Shouldn’t at some point all that power serve minimally for this purpose?

#18 - My Second Mother

In fifth grade in California, my English and home teacher was Mrs. Debbie Moore. This grade was when I became an unrepentant reader and a devoted music lover, and Mrs. Moore played an important role in my life. So in that regard, I am indebted to her. Thank you, Mrs. Moore.

My first books that I bought for me with my father’s money through a book catalog provided by Mrs. Moore were Harriet the Spy and Sara Crewe. That is all it took for me to be forever smitten by the written word.

Music. Mrs. Moore decided to play some songs on her record player giving us the lyrics to those songs and asking us to underline the components of sentences, like verbs, nouns, adjectives, etc. Two songs stand high and clear in my memory from that class. The first one is The Sounds of Silence with Simon and Garfunkel. Oh, it was beautiful, poetic, poignant and I loved it. The other one was You’re so Vain with Carly Simon. I just fell in love with Carly, the song was witty, sassy and plain cool.

Pretty soon I was investing one hundred percent of my allowances in books and music. That is how I discovered jazz all on my own, specifically Louis Armstrong, as well as classical music via a two-record collection that had a bunch of pieces by different composers. That collection helped me know how beautiful this music is, no matter that I do not listen to it that often.

Curiously, I would buy some records recommended to me by my mother. Like very old Mexican folk songs by the Dueto Amanecer or the Hermanas Padilla that I still treasure and some were my daughter’s lullabies as a baby.

From "Simon and Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits” long play, I claimed one song as my personal anthem in English, I am a Rock. I felt that everything about that song defined who I became as a sullen and lonely teenager. “I have my books and my poetry to protect me. I am shielded in my armor…I am a rock, I am an island, and a rock feels no pain and an island never cries.” There, all said.

Carly was another thing. I would religiously buy as I could any of her albums. I told myself that I was practicing my English and perfecting my pronunciation, improving my immigrant accent (yes, by then I was a young adult).

My mother was never really inclined to identify with any phase I would be living through in my teenage years, but I felt Carly understood everything there was to understand about me and the depths of my feelings, my conflicts and my needs. I like to think and say that I was nursed by Carly, that she somehow became a second mom to me, my true confidante.

I still get excited when I hear anything about Carly, I know she is a grandmother. I know the names of her two kids, Sally and Ben. I hope they’re a lot like their mother. I imagine they had a great and privileged childhood.

Sometimes I imagine writing a letter to Carly where I tell her how much her music means to me; how much she and it helped me when I was my most neurotic. That sometimes I imagine the child I was, and that as “a bunch of flowers” “I set her moving to her sweetest song.” Ay, Carly, that odd little girl sure loves you!

#17- Then and Now: La Gurmia

For La Flaca

Today I think about my sister María Irma, younger than me by almost a year. Along with my mother, Irma is one of the most hard-working women I know. Old-age is beginning to impose itself on my mother, but in her most mature and productive years, she was like Irma is today--totally dedicated to the cleanliness and comfort of her home.

My mother still calls her La Niña, being that she is her youngest child. My dad would call her La Gurmia or La Garrapata (The Tick) because in the orchards she would practically attach herself to him with her bucket picking peaches from the ground and asking him to rattle the branches so she could fill her bucket with the fallen fruits, something she would do, fast and furious to everyone’s admiration.

To me she is La Flaca, not because she is really skinny, but –let me explain- because any regular size woman next to me can be considered skinny.

Anyway…

La Flaca has a magical and child-like soul, a soul she keeps alive and luminous, and with whose imagination my sister transforms reality into a much nicer and gentler place, a resource that I have never been able to call mine. I surely have shown myself to be way more neurotic than her.

I think I have mentioned it before: As little girls my sister liked to play what in Spanish we call “comadritas” (“pretend”), game that apparently was beneath my mutism and emotional indolence. To compensate the lack of a playmate, from her kitchen my mom would become her Niña’s “comadre.” My sister would make ample use of the pecan tree in the front yard. As she would climb it, in her imagination and magical thinking, the first branches would become the rooms of her house, the kitchen, the living room and the bedrooms would be those higher branches up there (I still scratch my head).

When la Gurmia (maybe eight years old) would tire of living and interacting with her imaginary family, she would go visit her “comadre.” Sometimes she would go into the kitchen, seemingly crying and saying: “Ay, comadre, comadre, your compadre has left me and gone to Hawaii with his secretary. Pour me a glass of wine?” Surprised, my mother would respond with a barely-veiled seriousness and the anecdote would later be the reason for much laughter between her and our dad.

Another more remote image comes to mind: Irma and I are smaller still and we are playing with our uncle Ezequiel in Guadalajara. I think our uncle is trying to take a nap. My sister decides she is a nurse and the man in bed is very ill. She’s come to give him his shot. Without anybody realizing it, she sticks a real needle to the bottom of the poor “sick” man, who quickly straightened up and carried out the scene with us, asking me, his wife, to pay the nurse.

Such is my sister. My sister, now in her fifties too, lives in California with her sick husband. Two of her three kids are now married, one of whom has given her two beautiful grandkids. And my sister continues to be such a hard-working woman who never stops. She has two income-producing activities. The main one, as I understand is in a retirement and rehabilitation community. Irma is a supervisor there and responsible of making sure that the residents have a dignified, humane and kind experience in the center.

I say that my sister keeps her soul child-like and magical because last time she was here, Marga (our mother) told me that one day a lady resident, Molly in her 90s, was very upset and about to throw a tantrum because she was not allowed to smoke in the community’s dining room. When my sister became aware of the situation, she invited the old lady to go out with her to the patio. As they sat together, my sister pulled out an imaginary “carton of cigarettes”  and started “smoking,” asking the lady to go ahead and take one, telling her that nothing beats a smoke after dinner. With her face lit up, the old lady smiled and took one partaking of the game and expressing her gratitude to my sister.

With a woman like my sister near, who wouldn’t?