What I carry under my skin are memories that have grown from fragmented roots; roots infected by a family history of forsaken children and deserting parents.
My father did not raise me. From the time I was 7 years old until I was 18 years old, I saw him only a handful of times. This eventually changed-but this story is not about me; it is about them-my mother, her mother before her, and her mother before her. Three generations of women with only scraps of their histories known.
My mother does not know who her father is. And her mother left her to raise her brother and sister when she was only eight which means my mother was virtually alone in the world by the time she was eight. An eight year old left to care for her siblings in a home with dirt floors and barely a roof in Tijuana, Mexico. Whenever my mother would tell me that story I thought, “How could her mother do that?! What a horrible parent!” and I wept for my mother. But, then I thought, “actually, who could blame her?”
My mother’s mother was raised by her father’s mistress. It takes a minute to unravel that which sounds like it came from a novela’s storyline. My grandmother was raised by her father’s mistress- this is what we were told. She never even met her real mother who died giving birth to her. All we know about my grandmother’s real mother is that she was from Puebla, Mexico- an indigena who was also a curandera. Nothing is known about this woman who only left, as evidence of her existence, the indigenous features on the faces of the members of my mother’s family.
And we know very little about the mistress who raised my mother’s mother-she was also a curandera, from Guanajuato, Mexico who was banished from the town because no one trusted “her ways.” So she fled to Mexico City, Mexico… al D.F… with the daughter she inherited from her lover’s dead wife. The lover, my grandmother’s father, left the raising and nurturing of his daughter to his mistress. Indeed, my mother’s mother only had a part-time father and he died when she was just a child. That’s three generations of women without fathers.
So, when my mother’s mother at eighteen gave birth to my mother, she had virtually raised herself and had had only a mistress and her family as guardians. She had met a man in college, a professor, and the story is, he was married. She became pregnant with my mother and consequently fled to Tijuana, Mexico after my mother was born…born in a ceremony led by the doula, the mistress, who performed uno de sus encantos una de sus ceremonias una de sus cosas de curandera.
I couldn’t really blame my mother’s mother when she had the other children and left them all to raise themselves. How was she to know what being a parent really meant? How was she to know that she was supposed to stay with them and raise them herself? She did what she knew-what she had to-she went to work al otro lado, to survive, and let them raise themselves, parent themselves, just as she had raised herself and parented herself.
She died when I was born. And the family history died with her. What remains are the gaps, the void, the emptiness, not only in the family history, but in the parentless and grandparentless people left behind.
Truly, both parents and grandparents are nonexistent in my mother’s lineage. My mother’s mother did not know a mother’s love, or she didn’t feel she did and only had a fathers love momentarily, and my mother does not know what it is like to be taken care of, for someone to tend to her to worry for her to see her needs are met. She, just like her mother before her, does not know what it is like to sit and have someone tell her a story about when she was a child, to sit and inspect an elder’s face wondering what of their face she will inherit. She is almost without her history–her roots are a mystery.
It is this fragmentation which frames my family history; a cycle my mother interrupted.
A single mother at twenty five, she dedicated her life to providing me with the opportunity to grow new roots – roots devoid of disease and strengthened by resolve.
She cared for me every day near or far–she sacrificed her self– she was both father and mother to me when she had to be–and she even forced me to entrench my self in my fathers family–and then she taught me to forgive and eventually allow my father to be a father. A thoughtful caring father.
My mother demanded I recover what she, and her mother before her, had lost…that I have what they didn’t have and what so many take for granted… parents.
estoy desgranando 