Part of my Being

 

     When I was six years old, my mother left me in Mexico to pursue the American Dream. This story affected my life as a women, as a kid and as a human being. My mother was everything to me because she had divorced my father when I was three. I was about to turn seven years when the most important person in my life had to move away from me. She had worked as hard as she could in Mexico to support me and my two brothers. When I was four we moved to another city to start from the beginning. We moved to a big house, to a horrid and murky house where we tried to make a home. My mom started working long hours in two different jobs. The work absorbed all her time that we needed a nanny. We survived for three years living with the ghost of my mother because she was never really there, but she was being the best mother she could.
      But she finally reached the point of exhaustion, working long hours and not having enough money to support her three children, so she decided to move by herself to the U.S. I was an innocent six year old girl who loved her mother more than her own life. Before she left, she gave the three of us a choice: stay with my grandmother or move in with my father for a year. In that moment of my life I didn’t know my mother was not going to be with me and my grandma if I would have decided to stay. My two brothers wanted to go with my dad but I wanted to remain with my grandmother. My mom leaned down to me and whispered in my ear with her sweet voice “You go with them, take care of your brothers, they’ll need you. Then she told me a small lie, “I’ll stay here with your grandma”. That was the last time I heard my mother’s voice for ten years.
      When we moved to my dad’s house I started to assume responsibilities that a seven year old should not carry on her shoulders. I had to learn how to cook, how to clean the house and how to shop. My dad lives on the coast, and the coastal people eat a lot of fried fish. When my dad went to work he asked me to make the lunch. That day he wanted fried fish. I automatically answered, “I don’t know how to do that, I’m afraid of getting burned.” “Don’t worry, you will learn today, you are a women now,” he explained. That was the beginning of the oppression that I suffered for more than half of my life.
      After living one year with my dad, me and my brothers had to go back to my grandmother. I love my dad but I was glad to go back to live with a female. I felt so happy because I thought everything was going to be okay with her. After a couple of months I regretted it. My grandmother who took the place of my mom for nine years was not what I was expecting her to be. Like all Mexican women she was raised in a patriarchal society, where we aren’t allowed opinions or rights. She taught me how to improve my cooking skills and she also taught me to keep my mouth shut.
       I spend my puberty in solitude. I didn’t have anyone I could trust and I didn’t have a mother. I did not have a mother to tell about my first love, I did not have a mother to be able to sing to at mothers’ day recitals and I did not have a mother to whom I could tell how I was doing my first days of school. Those nine years were the worst that I experienced in my life. After ten years of not seeing my mother I learned a lot of things that I know are going to be useful to me my whole life. Long years later the waiting came to an end, she was there, in front of me. That is the most special moment that I will have in my life. I still remember when I saw her again, it was a sunny day of october, on the crowded streets of New York. I couldn’t recognize her at first sight but once I found her between people who walked from one side to the other. I remember her with short hair and much older than the lady that I was seeing at that moment. I started to cry since the moment I saw her. The thing that I remember the most from that day is my mom’s perfume, it smelled like love and peace. That was all I needed to forget all the pain and suffering that I have came through the time she wasn’t with me. Since four years ago I started to be again my mother’s little girl. If I would have to describe happiness I would say… being with my mom.