8/21/22

Yesterday was one of my sister’s birthday, Paola’s twenty-third. We went down to San Diego to celebrate. I had told her I was planning on spending the whole day there and meeting up with them for dinner, but that she could come along if she wanted. She decided to come with, invited a friend, and we spent the day down south. After a long day, we met up with our family for dinner.

Our family had showed up at the restaurant first and then I had to use the bathroom, so I didn’t pick where I was sat. I was disappointed to see that they had left me a seat next to our mother. I had a headache, and I was tired from being out all day, I didn’t know if I would have the energy to be so close to her and listen to her talk. I ordered a coffee right away, got back up pretty quickly to take of my contact lenses since I remembered that after a while of wearing them, they irritated my eyes. I needed to get into a better mood quick.

My stepdad recently received a green card. After near thirty years of being in this country without any papers, he finally had legal permission to work and be in the country. So this was his first time in many years visiting San Diego and he had driven them down, so my mom had permission to drink. She had one, then another in short order. After she stopped trying to hover over another sister, Yvonne, and her youngest, she relaxed more. We talked about my stepdad’s status for a while and then Yvonne brought up that our grandmother had been calling her youngest by her eldest’s name and couldn’t remember the difference between her two daughters, roughly four years apart, despite being reminded repeatedly.

I pointed out that sounded like a sign of dementia and that she had already been hospitalized once for a stress related panic attack. She had temporarily forgotten something like everyone’s names and didn’t know where she was, I myself don’t remember the details because I had minimized my involvement… But I’m remembering it happened after a brother of hers back in Mexico had suffered a stroke. I talked then to my sisters about the importance of finding healthy ways to process trauma and to deal with things like grief and stress, but didn’t feel it was my role to walk my grandmother through that. Yvonne wasn’t too sure about the mixing up of names being a sign of emotional distress and mental health, but I pointed out the ongoing pattern and my mom, who was seated to the left of me and listening, agreed.

She then took over the conversation and told us that it was just so that the previous night she and her mom had been having a difficult conversation. My sister was impatient with our mom and kept interrupting her with questions, or maybe she felt she was guiding our mom along a conversation. Eventually, mom was able to explain that she felt her mother would be depressed today. They had talked the prior night about how grandma had really messed up one of her youngest siblings, a half-sister named Alejandra. Alejandra was young enough that she was born into my great-grandmother’s alcoholic era, after my great-grandfather had passed and after La Bocha, as they called her, had given into despair and began living from bottle to bottle, man to man, had walked out on her eldest children and would go on to birth, but not mother, several younger half-siblings. Alejandra’s father was one such man, neither wealthy nor educated, but he had wanted to take responsibility of his daughter.

My grandmother decided that she would not permit Alejandra to go live with her father. She threatened to sue, to involve every legal recourse at her disposal to keep Alejandra with La Bocha. And permit me this aside, I forgot to ask when this was all happening, but, based on the threat of legal recourse, I have to imagine this is after my grandmother had attained some sort of establishment within Mexico City and had friends to call on, so by this point my mother was already born. At least, from the way my mom was telling us, it sounded like she had been there to hear my grandmother’s rationalization. My grandmother had decided that her sister could not go with her father because, having already lost her husband, my grandmother figured that La Bocha could not bear the loss of a daughter. So, to spare the mother’s feelings, my grandmother damned her sister to live with an alcoholic mother who beat her and exposed her to the hard life of an Indigenous alcoholic woman in the metropolis of Mexico City. On the outskirts of society, Alejandra was made to suffer untold horrors to spare her mother’s feelings.

It seemed my mother and I were on the same page of what else was being discussed at the table last night. I said something in a very academic Spanish, using bigger words to convey exactly what I meant and to hide from what I was feeling. My sister said something like, “Grandma couldn’t have known.” To which I responded that, “Me parece que esta familia tiene un patrón de poner en alto los sentimientos de un adulto, y especialmente poner esa carga sobre el bienestar de los niños a su alrededor.” My mother agreed with my sister that she will always prefer that a child go with its mother, but that in this circumstance, Alejandra should have gone with her father and that my grandmother should have allowed La Bocha to suffer the distance rather than subject Alejandra to living with a parent who was mentally infirm. She told us she placed that blame squarely on my grandmother, for fighting so hard to prevent Alejandra’s father from taking her. Yvonne protested we seemed harsh, but I said, kindly, that at a certain point it does fall to older siblings to do their best to protect their younger siblings. It isn’t fair, I said, it’s just birth order and responsibilities.

Then, the issue my mom had been dancing around. In discussing this pernicious pattern in our family with my grandmother, she let us know that she had told my grandmother she also saw that in effect in how persistent they had been that I should see and visit my father, be left alone with him, despite my protests to the contrary. We did not revisit that topic in full last night, but when she said that I remembered giving up asking my mom and grandma to stop sending me to my dad’s. Every time I did, they would point out that he gave us money and bought me toys. For a price that was too much for me to talk about then. I couldn’t overcome their concerted effort to keep me going to his place, I didn’t have the language back then to explain that he was molesting me. And, since they simply ignored me every time I said I didn’t want to go back, I kept having to be alone with him.

It is with a bittersweet sensation that I reiterate that it only happened once. Sweet because it did not go further than that, did not happen more than that once. Bitter because it should never have happened. Last night, I simply looked ahead as I heard my mom admit some fault, saw that she was trying something. I don’t know what, I didn’t and don’t currently have the heart to hope. Yvonne didn’t let the silence linger and asked my mom what she hoped to accomplish by having these conversations with grandma. My mom said she wanted our grandmother to grieve, to accept the ways that La Bocha was a horrible person, because since her death our grandmother had done the opposite and was sanctifying the poor woman. I interjected that this felt similar, “Ella tiene que santificar a su madre. Si admite las maneras en que su madre a fallado, tendrá que ver también las maneras en que ella también fallo como madre y abuela. De hecho, nosotros emos hablado eso mismo e…”

I stopped myself as I realized what it was that I had been admitting. I had said the same thing about my mother and our grandmother in our siblings group chat. My sisters had been complaining that our mom couldn’t recognize our grandmother’s faults, couldn’t accept that my sisters needed and were asking from space from our grandmother, space our mom would not allow them to have and would pester them about needing. I had said that exact thing, that our mom could not accept that we were distancing ourselves from our grandmother, could not accept us holding her accountable, because to do so would be to accept that the things our mom had done as well were sufficient to cause harm, to justify distance and possibly the end of a relationship. My mom looked over at me as I let my sentence die mid-thought, but I did not match her gaze. I had told myself I didn’t want to talk about us, about my mother and I, while celebrating my sister’s birthday. A waiter interrupted and I did not pick the topic back up, nor did the opportunity present itself again that evening.