The stories I never heard

The stories I never heard

“I suffered from a miscarriage when your father and I first go together. I was bleeding for three days and still your dads mother and father made me work. They hated me because I wasn’t from that town.” My mother began to pull at her sleeve and could no longer look me in the eyes. I could see her eyes begin to water and her voice began to shake. I tried to ask her another question but my voice began to shake and I too was having difficulties to keep the tears back. Finally, after about 5 minutes of silence where we were both trying to hide the fact that we were crying I looked at her and asked her to keep telling me stories about what else she went through. She began to tell me that my father finally got home and was able to take her to the hospital. She said that shortly after waking up the doctor said if she had come in a couple of hours later then she would have not made it. I tried to remain calm as I asked her how she could have just stayed there and allowed herself to be treated like she was less than a dog. Why she didn’t speak out against her in laws and why she didn’t do anything to protect herself. I could begin to feel my whole body heating up and instead of her being upset she looked at me calmly and said, “Women in Mexico have no say. It wouldn’t matter if I did speak out they would have just hit me so I had to keep quite.” That is when I really began to reflect on how different my life in the U.S. is from my mothers who was born and raised in Mexico.

Then my father walked in after a long day of working and asked what we were talking about. My mother quickly answered “About your family”. My father then said okay what do you want to know. I asked if he knew how difficult it was for my mother to live at home with his mother and sisters, and about the bad way they would treat her and the things they would tell her. He looked at my mom and looked at me and sighed. He said that “I did know and I regret that I didn’t help her more.” My mother put her arm around him and just smiled and said “it’s okay we got through it”. I looked at my mother and father looking at one another as if they had for the first time that they have met and I saw all the love despite the pain they had endured.

I continued to ask my mother questions about her experiences but with every question I asked she would answer with responses that I thought were just absurd. She realized how frustrated I began to get and she held on to my hand and looked at me and said “I know things aren’t perfect here either, but that is why you must give a voice to those like me, and I am so proud that you as my daughter is always very vocal about her feelings on issues that no one wants to talk about.”  For the first time in my life I was surprised at what my mother had to say about me because here I was a 20-year-old millennial born and raised in LA who knows that I have every right to disagree with everything and be vocal about it. However, I had just always thought that my mother was a 56-year-old traditional Mexican woman that just agreed with all of her traditions in her culture.

We continued to speak about issues ranging from abortion, to machismo in Mexico and the more we spoke the more I realized that I was exactly like my mother. Now I truly understand why my oldest sister says that my mother “May seem like a soft-spoken woman but in reality, she has more to say than anyone would every know.”