MY MOTHER WASN’T PERFECT
When Carlos was a little boy he would hear the different Mami war stories and he got the impression that my mother was an unpleasant or bad person or that I didn't like her. I had to tell him otherwise but the real shame is that he didn’t ever really get to know her and that describing her accurately is just about impossible as she’s hard to pin down and oh so hard to categorize. For a speak-her-mind, simple, straight ahead person, she was amazingly complex and a quirky combination of so many contradictions; a complete paradox.
Our entire Mendez family line is full of brutally honest and plain speakers. My mother’s children get that from her. We sit around and get a perverse chuckle out of some of the preposterous things she would say or do. They may sound like negatives, but that’s just how our family rolls and to us these anecdotes complete the picture of a woman we dearly loved.
She was flamboyant, given to hysterics and melodrama and was a strong-willed personality with no subtleties to her. It’s tempting to ascribe this behavior to the fact that she was the baby of thirteen children and was, therefore, a brat. But that would be overlooking the fact that every member of the Mendez clan is this way. It probably had something to do with the fact that she had immigrated from Puerto Rico to the cold reality of New York City burdened with me, a forty-day old infant, speaking no English and having no real skills except those of a farm girl.
And it was from there that she began a life that was, in general, worthy of a soap opera: she agonized about having the scarlet letter of a twice-divorced woman who had married a much older man for convenience; that he was an alcoholic and would constantly and openly flaunt her regrets and life choices and the lose of her “true love”, her first husband; that she lived in fear of her second husband, my father; her kids constantly and chronically sick - one struck down with polio at the celebration of his fifth birthday, a campaign of sorrow that lasted a decade’s worth or treatments and rehabilitation; and then there was the constant bickering with her family over the child she had given away to her sister.
And there was lots more.
So maybe it’s no surprise that she brooked no nonsense or interference and that if she was right, It didn’t matter what you said, you would just have to get the fuck out of her way. That was my mother and this was only one of the traits that made her remarkable and something her children inherited from her.
She was conservative, prudish, and proper and, her judgmental nature made her acutely sensitive to and ashamed of the mistakes that chronicled her life. But she was on the polar end of the tight-assed spectrum. She was very outwardly and outlandishly bawdy and profane. I think she was an atheist but she was charismatic in the sense that whatever religion she might have had it was personal to her and certainly nothing to gab or pontificate about. Amazingly clairvoyant, she practiced a roll-her-own combination of Christianity and Santeria that dove-tailed with her well-grounded sense of in-your-face righteousness, common sense, indignation, and a definite personal sense of morality.
When I told her that I had to go to church and couldn’t be ready for the beach, she wasn’t having it. “You can go to confession.” “But what if I die before Friday?” She shot through church dogma. “You think God is going to send you to Hell because your mother made you miss church? Those are rules these pendejos make to keep people in line. Get in the car. We’re going to the fucking beach.”
Apart from her normal salty language, when truly upset or angry her profanity was honed down to a razor’s edge. In typical Spanish fashion she would invoke sacrilegious imagery. It wasn't normal cursing. It was time to clear out of her way. It was a maldición, designed to invoke the full wrath of the Lord. “I shit on the crack of the cunt of that whore, the Blessed Virgin Mary.”
She was practical in her politics too. She, of course, loved Kennedy and Eisenhower but apart from that she was almost indifferent to it. “What can you do for me?” was her formula. She had probably been raised PDP (the Puerto Rican version of the Democratic Party) but, here, she was, like her husband, a Republican and returning to the island later in life, they were solid PNP (Republican). I joined her after college and had difficulty getting a job. She marched off to her Senator and threatened him with the loss of the six votes in her household.
During that same time, the giant newspaper/television conglomerate went on strike. The union and the Puerto Rican Socialist Party picketed the giant facility. To circumvent the lockout, helicopters flew the newspaper out each day. We woke one day to hear that the helicopters had been destroyed that night. I was surprised to hear Mami’s response; “Good. You can’t mess with people’s livelihood.”
We all have lots of favorite memories. Some of them - like making sure you went out in clean underwear lest she be embarrassed if you were in a car accident - were right out of the Yiddish Mom Manual. But others were 100 per cent over-the-top Irma stuff: When I practiced maneuvers for hours making faces and trying to fool the mirror like they did in the cartoons, She wouldn’t just command me to stop. She’d have a faux panic attack. “OOOOEY, No,” she’d mock scream, moaning and supplicating that I cease lest my face be frozen in that grimace FOR EVER and she die of a broken heart!
Or prohibiting us from drinking out of the tap in the bathroom because it was connected to the toilet and, besides, “You don’t know who’s washed their balls in there.” She would tell us to eat our onions so we get a hard on (trust me, it’s funnier in Spanish as it rhymes.) When she cooked she’d have us fighting over the chicken neck - which she called the bicho (Puerto Rican for dick)- and we would all zealously compete for this grandest of prizes.
She was very racist. She took great pride in being a “Mendez” and the fact that they were all white-skinned and fair haired, “Castilian” don’t you know. (Dark-skinned, her pet name for me was “negrito”.) But she didn’t spare “Americans.” She thought them dirty, their women whores of easy virtue. And, of course, she had come from a prim and proper old world agrarian culture and had landed in some of the hardest ghettos in this country, so that’s what she knew and nothing could ever change her mind, even years later when she moved to Florida.
She had been a peasant girl but was probably one of the wiser, wariest persons that I knew and yet, her ignorance was at times monumental. She could be horribly brutish and cruel or amazingly tender and considerate with a temper that was mercurial, both hot and cold. And tactless; I bought her a Christmas present bracelet. I couldn’t have been 12 or 13, maybe even younger but she threw it back at me, said it was the wrong color. It was silver and she wanted a gold one.
One of the running crises in our lives was the old man drinking and going off to spend his check and not coming home. One Saturday, he came home and she was ironing, steaming mad. He was in a cheerful mood, buzzed and so drunk he could hardly stand up. He came over to her to give her a kiss and she stuck the iron out. He was so drunk he walked right into it. She held it there until the pain registered. He finally recoiled but not before she left a full imprint of that iron on his chest.
When my sister got a divorce, she waged a pretty hateful vendetta against her ex-husband, talking crap to his children with whom she now lived and even physically defacing the family photo album by cutting him out of every photo. “Mom,” I would kid her, “you just made him that much more pronounced.” She’d just launch into one of her character assassinations. He had been exorcized from the family and was never rehabilitated even after his death.
While my mother was no shrinking violet, to the outside world her persona was completely different. Her demeanor in public was nowhere indicative of who she was. She was a chunky, but slight, not tall, but pert, little person. Her voice was very demure, soft-spoken, especially if it was in English because she lacked confidence there so she wasn’t her normal pushy self.
She had had a pretty rough life and was grateful to be here so she was obsequious to things “American” as the place that had given her and, most importantly, her children, an opportunity to prosper. She had dedicated her life to them and put up with all manner of abuse for them. She was their champion. The last thing in the world one would ever want to do would be to mess with her kids.
We were at the Medical Center in Jersey City, there because I was sick. We queued in the charity line and then got into another line. While we were standing in this line, this rather tall “White” lady came up, pushed me aside and said “get out of the way you little spic.” My mom didn’t miss a beat. She reached up behind her, slid up her back and at the nape grabbed a handful of hair, dragged her down to eye level and smashed her fist into her face, her glasses disintegrating.
When my mother got angry she lost all ability to speak in English. The only thing that came out of her mouth was her trademark profanities “I will kill you motherfucker. I will split your fucking face!!!!” She continued pounding on this lady while the whole charity ward erupted into Third World bedlam; Puerto Ricans, Blacks and every other ethnic group in the world, an operatic chorus screaming “Kill the Bitch!.” It took forever to calm down my mother down. That puta had touched me.
While my mother was hugely moralistic, she was also very Machiavellian. We went to court. My mother made me lie. I forget what the lie was, but I remember being forced to tell some sort of lie, probably, that my mother never touched her, and now that I’m a lawyer. I realize that the judge probably didn’t buy it. But it was also obvious that the woman had hit me first and had been a racist; so my mother walked. I’m sure that in my mother’s eyes the woman was lucky that the only thing that had happened to her was a few bruises.
She was spontaneous, uncannily perceptive and clairvoyant. Because we are very family oriented and living in a place where we hardly knew other, our family was almost tribal. We socialized within our group on just about every weekend and usually it would be at the nicer home of some other family member since we lived in a tiny apartment. But one weekend, for whatever reason, we were in Hoboken with all the aunts and uncles jammed into the living room. As she was getting ready to leave Tia Blanca looked in her purse and couldn’t find her wallet. My mother - her only hesitation was asking Tia if she “was sure” - confronted one of my cousins.
He was in his late twenties, early thirties but she snatched him up out of the sofa by his collar and said “Come here.” She slammed him up against the wall right over the spot where he had been sitting and told him to give the wallet back. We were stunned. Everyone in the room was incredulous. She had no proof that he’d done anything or that the wallet was truly missing. But my mother, in an instant, had decided that he had taken my aunt’s wallet. She didn’t back down. She said “give back the wallet or I’ll split your face. You better give it back.”
He looked at her. He started crying. He reached in his pocket and pulled out the wallet, gave it to her and ran out of the room. We sat there marveling at her. That was my mother. She could be brutal and she was hard to understand and she was so often right.
One Friday night I had finally convinced Mami to let me go to a CYO-sponsored basketball keep-the-inner city kids-off-the-streets event. She made me take Eggy. We stopped at the five and ten and I got caught shoplifting. They brought us to the manager’s office and from there made us go to our parish and give confession. But, not to worry, I told Eggy, we’re still good on the time table. We’re getting home at the right time. Mami doesn’t need to know. I coached him all the way back and assured him everything would be okay.
There she was. Waiting for us at the top of the landing. We froze in our tracks. Eggy’s eyes - he was always the most nervous and melodramatic of any of us - dilated like the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland. “Someone told me,” she said....(We were isolated. We lived on the top floor of a walk-up tenement. We didn’t know any neighbors. We didn’t have a phone. It could never have happened.)....that you two got caught shoplifting at the five and ten.”
Eggy collapsed. He started blubbering. “It was Junior!” I didn’t have time to think. “Eggy, Eggy, don’t listen to her, she’s just making that shit up.” But by then, I had confirmed what up to that point was just a wild thought of hers.
It was so hard to convince her even when she was wrong.
The weather in Jersey City can be brutal. In the winter we would hide in the halls from the cold and in the summer it was respite from the heat. Mostly we would hang out, read comics, play cards or chess. My mother was a very suspicious person. She had some sort of demons. I suspect something very bad happened to her as a young girl, and certainly horrible things seemed to follow her throughout her life. And, since we lived in a ghetto she was always vigilant, keeping tabs on us and mostly in a kind, caring, and benign way.
But this day she was being suspicious of what we were doing. She came out two or three times and kept opening the door very quickly like she was going to catch us doing something. Finally, she called me upstairs and asked me: “What are you two doing over there, sucking each other’s dicks?”
All I could do was just look at her. I don’t know how old I was, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t know - the chicken neck thing aside - that people did that. But that was something she had contrived in her mind. I didn’t know what to say. I just said “no” and walked off but I couldn’t figure out how she had arrived at that in her mind. I went out there and Walter asked me what she had asked me. I made something up.
We were not truly poor, at least by the standards of my friends. We had two parents. The “old man” had a great job. But he frittered a lot of it away on drinking and we had a large family; money management was, as is demographically typical, not the best. At Christmas, they’d go to the Pep Boys and gorge on toys for us, all on horribly predatory credit rates. They’d finance this and that the same way. They were always badgered by creditors and we moved constantly.
But she worked her ass off to make sure we had everything we needed. She would cover as best she could her inabilities to make it all happen. If we went to a restaurant and we wanted to try the shrimp she would tell us that we wouldn’t like it rather than we couldn’t afford it. And she shielded me especially because, as the step child, I was usually last in line for things and only begrudgingly given that.
I joke often that my mom sold our souls to the Catholic Church and it’s true. She and all of her siblings were Protestants but she wanted her kids to have a good education and their schools were the best. She went to the nuns at St Mary’s, probably because it was only a block away and struck the bargain; educate them and they’re yours. That’s how we became of the one true faith.
Our school had found itself foundering in a “neighborhood in transition”. What was once an Irish, Polish, and Italian community was now turning “urban” and, typically, we were in the vanguard wave of invading Puerto Ricans. The school was in its first wave of transition too. Parents who had moved away still sent their kids to their alma mater. In those days teens all dressed to the nines. We knew the latest haircuts (like the Peter Gunn or the Water fall), shoe styles (Thom McAnn, Floresheim), and what fashion was cutting edge. Everyone wanted to be the first with the latest.
My mom, who was a world class seamstress would, at least twice a year, take in extra work so she could take me down to Rubenstein’s, the fanciest clothing store in Jersey City. She’d toil well into the night sewing cheerleader uniforms or wedding dresses to make sure I could compete with my classmates.
I discounted it when my mother became terminal. It was an impossibility. Unfathomable. She was a rock. No way. Here was this lady we had witnessed go through every tempest, weathered but unbeaten. The one who inspired us to our greatness. Who gave every one of us the confidence that we were special. “You were born,” she'd remind me, on Easter Sunday. And, even though it is a movable feast and never falls on the same date (mine did on my tenth birthday but will never again), “your father, too, was born on Easter Sunday. How special is that?” And, she'd say, I was born under the veil. Oh yeah, and on the day of your birth there were 16 earthquakes in PR! She never missed a beat. We were the stars in her heaven. And we believed it.
When she died, I still refused to believe it. I left her there on her death bed and never acknowledged her passing. Still don’t. I didn’t go to the funeral and don’t have a clue where she is buried. But that’s irrelevant. She gave each of us strong portions of everything she had.
(Ed Note: This is a postscript to a piece I wrote for my daughter-in-law for Mother’s Day about two years ago. I had intended to take parts of that and incorporate into this but didn’t want to tarnish what had been a special gift to Krista. So, if you’re interested in reading the original piece - yeah, I know, this is already “War and Peace” length - click here.)
