My Mom Was a Girl

You were just a girl. I was born as the youngest of three. Somewhere in LA. I can't recall where you were born. I suddenly understand how little I know about you, and it seems like my responsibility. Place names are derived from past talks. Riverside, Encinitas, Reseda, and Oxnard. But these areas are yours, not mine. They create a patchwork quilt. I suppose you graduated from Chino High School.

I do not know much about you. And now I'm sobbing in the dark, big dogs stretched over my lap, since I don't know anything about you. I guess I've always wanted to know you. Now we're here, as far away as ever, and I don't believe it will happen. Knowing has nothing to do with names or places. Knowing is—

I'm not sure what knowing is. I believe knowing is like smelling the aroma of cherry or blueberry pie drifting from another room but never eating it. I am here, and you are in the other room. Our family never really got to know anybody.

When you're a youngster, you don't worry about knowing. These vehicle journeys are meaningless. You don't believe your mother will ever leave you. You remember that lengthy stretch in the California desert when the miles blurred together and you needed to pee very badly. How you returned to the vehicle and informed your mother you had peed forever is possibly a world record.

You messed up my hair amid the palm palms in California. You smiled at me sometimes and told me I was a nice guy. You stated you were proud of me. You reminded me that you loved me. Perhaps I choose to forget those things because it made the rest of it less painful. Maybe I simply didn't see that people are spectrums, not definitions.

Remember when you went to Los Angeles in the summer? The air conditioner in the vehicle was broken, it was hot as hell, and I had a Rand McNally flower strewn over my lap. I grinned, but I was already shattered pottery inside.

You taught me to grin through it all because you smiled through everything—things I still don't fully understand. You grew up near the barrio. White children despised Mexicans, and Catholic nuns kept you in closets, and you and Rosalinda were pelted with rocks for being who you were. You quickly learned that the world does not like you. The world does not even tolerate you.

And your brother Ralph. He received several beatings. All of you received some beatings since beatings were associated with culture, even if culture was terrible. Then Abuelo became too elderly to drink and fight, so Abuela began drinking.

You said you had to fight. So, I learnt to fight. Your lips spoke to ocean ships about peace, but you preferred conflict. And you told me about sitting in the old vehicle with your poodle and crying when Papa beat Mama. And how your mother got very intoxicated and walked through your checkout line at Stater Bros, embarrassing you so much that you sobbed.

When you arrived home at seven p.m., everyone had passed out. At fifteen, you returned home to find that everyone had moved away. You returned home at the age of twenty-three with a shattered collarbone. At some point, you just stopped coming home.

I don't believe you've ever truly returned home since. I believe you stopped coming home long before I came around. You said that you desired a house, but sometimes we don't know how to get what we want. We sometimes struggle to accept what we have. I wish I knew you. I had asked you questions, but we didn't. That was your generation, and it became mine. I recall seeing you weep in our broken-down Honda Civic outside the hospice hospital after your mother died. All those years, you had me persuaded that you despised her. I learned. Pain may range from a drop to an ocean.

Remember our excursion to the beach with Grandma and Grandpa? Redondo? It's difficult for me to iron the names. These were your names. They mattered more to you. History works that way, and I was only a passenger, learning your rules and ideas about our family.

Remember when I threw the ball to Grandpa, but he was so elderly that it merely hit him in the head? Then we took that photo of five-year-old me on grandpa's lap, and he was wearing a Goofy hat with those funny ears, and their old home was plagued with cockroaches, and they would sometimes fall from the ceiling, and you must have sobbed a hundred times for a hundred rubber band reasons. You snapped the photo of Grandpa admiring the ocean.

I didn't get it then. But you never treated your parents like they were your own. You stroked them as if they were arithmetic problems, unsure how to love them. Now I'm sitting at my desk on a snowy day, doing the same calculations.

It's as if I know nothing about your life or the lady within it, and no matter how I attempt to touch or feel you, I remain completely outside, like raindrops flowing off a tarp. But. I guess I'm OK with it.

People, it turns out, have said the same about me. That I am a bronze-cast thinking guy, useful for standing next to but nothing else.

I heard birds this morning, so early that I may have been dreaming, as if the birds were abuelo and abuela, and the pattern of their flight represented your love. They were free, and you were a girl, daughter, and mother. I wish I knew you.