On this the threshold of your first of many future special days,
I want to be the first to wish you a happy Mother's Day and tell you a bit about my mother and that special status that you, too, shall soon share.
Irma Mendez de De Jesus was the thirteenth child born of the
union of Mario and Porfelia Mendez.
They lived on a family farm in Utuado, but she ultimately moved to Aguadilla. (You've been there.) They were moderately comfortable by PR standards because our grandfather was actually a property owner but they were by no means well-off. Those of us that knew my mother can see her resemblance to her mom, especially those vibrant eyes, something we've all inherited from her. One side of the Mendez clan is blond like him and the other is brunette like her but they are all very "European" and fair looking.
My grandmother died while talking to my mom and this had a profound impact on her. She was the baby and they were very close (as we in matriarchal societies are anyway). This, and the things that happened in the rest of her life left her with a pretty histrionic personality.
She got knocked up by Pepe, a man she would for
the rest of her life openly call her “one true love.” They married but soon divorced because he was a philanderer. Unable to fend for herself, she relinquished her daughter to her sister and, although she couldn't speak English and had no education to speak of, she followed her family and the rest of the cinnamon hoard to New York City.
She arrived in New York in 1946. And, Oh yeah, she was toting me, a 40-day infant. She was running from economic privation and from her abusive second marriage to Domingo, a young island man. He followed her to New York with nothing more than his barber's skills and the main accoutrements of the young Latin “macho”: brashness, good looks and an arrogant confidence. A snappy dresser, he was a singer, dancer, musician, and gadabout who played the guitar using a comb, his hand having been crippled in a machete fight. He had a mercurial and violent temper and a willingness to act out on this anger. He did so with society in general and with Irma specifically.
By the time the dust settled, she had married Armando, a much older man who was nonetheless "steady" and had the security of a job as a postman. Like Irma and Domingo, Armando was also the product of their rural and backward country. But unlike them, he was much older and spent his formative years in the mother country as a homeless child. Like Domingo, he was armed with chutzpah. A family friend and distant cousin of her sister's husband, he had sought out the young woman, charmed her, and ultimately convinced her to marry him.
She was very quickly saddled with four more children and a host of dysfunctional life and poverty problems: an alcoholic husband who squandered their money and hated her kid, family squabbles about the abandoned daughter, a child who contracted polio at a very early age, another stricken with chronic asthma, poverty, ghetto life. Her life was over-the-top the color purple.
But while she had plenty of melodrama in her life, she also had an indomitable
spirit. A plain-spoken, vivacious woman with a quick wit, she fluctuated between crying the blues and fighting the fight. She was both tender and tough, complex and simple, bawdy and righteous, meek and brazen: and she was our champion.
And it’s within the backdrop of that story that I learned about being a parent. Parenting is a cycle of "them" becoming "us" (and vice versa). It seems that this whole process of development of the self becomes entangled in the crunch of living in the vortex of the lives of the people we call our family. While all that I’ve learned I credit to my mom, it was a lesson late in its realization: it wasn’t until I had my kids that I came to understand how the parent molds the child and how, in turn, the child teaches the parent.
When one becomes the parent the cycle makes the turn from one's inner centered self-development to the altruistic act of helping another. Zack's birth was a
"Trinitron," instant-on, 100-percent, love event, experience. I credit his birth with putting me on the path to making me a full and loving person. I've beaten myself up for the times I've let him and Carlos down. I should. But, I've learned that the only way to come back from those mistakes is to keep on going and, hopefully, let love cure your ills.
My mom was constantly looking for something horrible to happen. She was seldom disavowed of her paranoia. Because she was strong-willed and because of these events, she had a tendency to be overly protective. Naturally, I resented her: She meddled in my shop-lifting, my gang activities, my relationships, gave me curfews, made be study, do chores, etc.
As the oldest male in an Hispanic household, I was privileged to act like a turd and did so. It wasn’t till Zack was born - when I cared for someone so much that I thought my heart would burst, when I needed to clothe and feed his helpless little ass, when I started truly worrying about all of the mundane shit, when I became his champion - that her heroic status became clear to me and that I started trying to make amends to her for the rotten shit I had put her through.
Dysfunctional families and communities, economies, etc. might make it worse, but it seems to affect everyone. The people that loom largest for us are the ones we spent our early life with, the ones we have shared all of our important first moments with, at a time we were "less significant." But, that part of the development of a child, the development of self and the first ones we react with are our parents and siblings, the ones we are most comfortable with, the ones we think we understand the best, the ones that disappoint our expectations first, that make us do things that we don't want to do, etc.
I had a rough childhood and somehow my mother had become the foil for my self-pity. With Zack's birth I came to realize that she was who she was and was no better prepared for dealing with all of the problems in her life merely because she was my mother.
These weren't the superheroes of my infantile ignorance. They were people. My mother was a peasant girl living in New York. My stepfather was a homeless unloved child born within the Spanish empire. It’s only when you have children of your own that you realize how much your parents loved you and that nothing that you ever do could diminish their love for you. There's a corollary to that: It’s only when you are a parent, now trying to read this stupid life manual and, naturally, fucking up along the way, that you learn to forgive your parents for whatever horrendous things they did or you imagined they did. You realize that the gravity of their “errors” is the exaggerated status that you’ve given them. They are the gods in your universe and it’s hard to believe that they can have feet of clay, until you walk a few miles in their sandals.
I stopped blaming my mother for all of the issues that I had going on with me and started giving her credit for loving me, for being my parent, for having the guts to make me tow the line, for climbing the hills with the heavy loads and bringing all of us along, on her back. From there I grew to understand the same thing about my father and then I even grew to know the same thing about my stepfather. And when I feel guilty about how I acted, I take comfort in knowing something else I learned from being a parent - my mother knew I loved her even before I started making amends with her and that nothing that I could ever do would diminish the love she had for me.
Zack is an adult now and soon you two will start the cycle running anew. Both of my kids know I love them and I know that they love me. We get so wrapped up in our universe that we forget what we only learn later, when we have our own kids, when we experience true unselfish love - theirs and ours - that there is no one in the world that you love as much as your kids. That is the lesson our kids teach us and that we learn as parents.
Had you asked me who I was most like when I was a kid it would have been my real dad. That's because anyone who saw me would say I was his spitting image. We are both dark and my mom had the fair Mendez look. But it's only recently that I've come to see how much I look like my mom, especially around the eyes and how much of her and my step-father's ways I've subsumed. All those years of watching my mom toil away at constructing dresses and making things translated into my love of the arts. From the old man, I got his love of gadgets and his meticulous ways. From both of them a sense of moral indignation if I am right or something stands to me corrected. And, I guess that is our greatest legacy - the things we give to our kids and that our parents left with us - that we are set out on our paths and with a little guidance, sometimes from beyond, they guide our way.
[Some of this was pirated from previous comments I’ve made about my mom and about parenthood.
My Mother Wasn't Perfect
You might also want to check out The Day Dona Irma Died a beautifully written piece by Kathryn and The New Year]
