My Mother Was a Girl

And I was a boy

Photo by Sophia Simoes on Unsplash.

You were just a girl. Born the youngest of three. Somewhere in LA. I don’t remember where exactly you were born. Now I realize how little I know about you and it feels like my fault. Names of places pieced together from old conversations. Riverside, Encinitas, Reseda, Oxnard. But these places are yours, not mine. They form a patchwork quilt. I think you graduated Chino High School.

I don’t know much about you. And now I’m crying in the dark with heavy dogs draped over my lap, because I don’t know much about you. I think my whole life I wanted to know you. Now, we are here, far away as ever, and I don’t think it will happen. Knowing, of course, is nothing to do with names or locations. Knowing is —

I don’t know what knowing is. I think knowing is like smelling the scent of cherry or blueberry pie wafting from another room and never tasting it. I’m here, and you’re in the other room. Our family never really knew anyone.

When you’re a kid you don’t think about knowing. Those trips in the car don’t mean anything. You don’t think mom might one day not be there. You just remember that long stretch in the California desert where the miles blurred together and you had to pee real bad. How you came back to the car and told your mother you peed forever, probably some kind of world record.

You mussed my hair beneath the palm trees in California. You smiled at me sometimes and told me I was a good boy. You said you were proud of me. You reminded me you loved me. Maybe I chose to forget those things because it made the rest of it hurt less. Maybe I just couldn’t understand that humans are spectrums, not definitions.

Remember that trip to Los Angeles in the heat of summer? The AC in the car was broke, and it was hot as hell, and I had a Rand McNally bloomed messily across my lap, and I smiled, but I was already broken pottery inside.

You taught me to smile through it all because you smiled through it all — things I still only kind of know about. You grew up cerca del barrio. The white kids hated the Mexicans, and Catholic nuns locked you in closets, and you and Rosalinda got rocks thrown at you for being what you were. You learned fast the world doesn’t like you. The world doesn’t even tolerate you.

And your brother Ralph. He took some beatings. All of you took some beatings because beatings were kind of synonymous with culture, even though culture was shameful. Then abuelo grew too old to drink, and too old to fight, and abuela started drinking.

You said, you gotta fight. So I learned to fight. Your lips talked ocean ships about peace, but you loved war. And you told me how you used to sit in the old truck and cry with your poodle when papá beat mamá. And how your mother got real drunk and came through your checkout line at Stater Bros and embarrassed you so much you cried.

At seven, you came home to everyone passed out. At fifteen, you came home to everyone moved out. At twenty-three you came home with a broken collar bone. At some point you just stopped coming home.

I don’t think you’ve ever really come home since. I think you stopped coming home long before I came along. You said you wanted a home, but sometimes we don’t know how to have what we want. Sometimes we don’t know how to accept what we can have. Boy, I wish I knew you.

I wish I’d asked you questions, but we didn’t ask questions. That was your generation, then it became mine. I remember watching you cry in our broke-down Honda Civic outside the hospice facility when your mother died. All those years you had me convinced you hated her. I learned. Sometimes pain is a drop and sometimes it’s an ocean.

Remember that trip we took with grandma and grandpa to the beach? Redondo? It’s hard for me to iron the names. They were your names. They meant more to you. History is that way, and I was just a passenger, learning your rules, learning your opinions of our family.

Remember when I tossed the ball to grandpa, but he was so old it just bonked him on the head? Then we took that picture of five-year-old me on grandpa’s lap and he was wearing a Goofy hat with those silly ears and their old house was infested with cockroaches and sometimes they fell off the ceiling and you must have cried a hundred times for a hundred rubberband reasons. You took that picture of grandpa watching the ocean.

I didn’t understand it then. But you never touched your parents like they were your parents. You touched them like they were math problems, wondering how to love them. Now I sit at my desk on a snowy day, trying the same math.

It’s like I know nothing of your life, or the woman inside it, and no matter the ways I try to touch you, or feel you, I am utterly outside, like rainwater running off tarp. But. I think I’m okay with that.

People, it turns out, have said the same of me. That I am a bronze-cast thinking man, good for standing next to, but little else.

Just this morning I heard birds, so early I might have been dreaming, like the birds were abuelo and abuela, and the pattern of their flying was your love. They were free, and you were a girl and a daughter and my mother. I wish I knew you.

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Hey, I’m Roman. I’m working on my debut novel, 20xx, a work in magical realism. I write on Substack.