Recently I participated in a windows-and-mirrors event. This is an exercise that arranges the participants in two concentric circles. The inner circle seats people who answer questions and the outer circle seats those who bear witness silently.
It gives those in the inner circle a chance to share a specific experience and those in the outer circle a chance to learn. The windows-and-mirrors event I participated in was a group of Latinos discussing how our culture has affected our lives. We answered questions about how many generations of our family have lived in the U.S. and how we feel about our heritage language (for us it was Spanish).
Concentric circles.
It was a wonderful experience that gave me a chance to explain how I feel about being Mexican, and to do it in the context of listening to others talk about how they felt about being Puerto Rican or Honduran or Argentinian or Cuban (out of six, only two of us were Mexican).
But the most interesting thing for me happened before the event. A few of us had a windows-and-mirrors meeting to prepare the questions we’d answer, and one of the questions mentioned family. I said, “The question that stands out for me is the one that asks how our culture affects how we feel about our family. But my family isn’t a big part of my life, and I didn’t have a family of my own, so that question doesn’t really work for me.”
One of my colleagues gave a reaction like “Oh, no,” or maybe it was “I’m sorry to hear that” or maybe it was just “Aww!” Whatever it was, her comment startled me because she sounded sad. It was the biggest reaction I’ve ever received to saying that family isn’t a big presence in my life. People usually take that in stride, but she seemed to think my not being close to family deserved sympathy. Or maybe condolences? It was a remarkable moment for me.
I’m aware that I might be the only Mexican American in the country who isn’t family first. But as I explained in that prep meeting, my lack of strongly valuing family has its roots in my father’s choice — back in 1964 — to move his new wife far from their home town. Almost all my parents’ brothers and sisters stayed in Houston to raise their families. My parents were two of the very few who made their lives in another part of the country.
When I was very young, my parents spent a couple of summer vacations traveling from our home in California back to Houston. I have dim memories of grandparents and cousins and other relatives. There were many names and faces and each time I had to meet them all over again. I didn’t know my grandparents much at all.
Me age 13
But by the time I turned 12, those trips stopped, so I had no more chances to know my greater familia until I reached adulthood.
Instead, I grew up with two parents and a sister and that was all the family I knew. My father was distant and didn’t talk much. He rarely had conversations with me. When he wasn’t at work, he spent a lot of time on community activism or tinkering in the garage. He would sometimes be gone for an entire evening.
When I reached high school I appreciated the evenings he wasn’t home. My parents’ marriage wasn’t peaceful, but sometimes we got a little bit of peace when he wasn’t around for my mother to fight with. When they argued it was usually quite one-sided, my mother yelling and my father saying little. He would often say “Sígele!” a few times before walking out the door. Decades later he told me he thought leaving calmed her down. He had no idea my mother’s rage continued in his absence, with only me and my sister to receive it.
There were only two of us kids, and even though I was only a year older, a lot was expected of me. I don’t remember how old I was when it started, but by my teens my household jobs were solid. My mother needed me to be her masseuse who helped her fall asleep at night. She needed me to be her marriage counselor to whom she complained about my father in ways that were completely inappropriate. She needed me to absorb any amount of her emotional pain by not fighting back when she yelled at me for things beyond my control.
I even had to help her finish her sentences. It was like I was part of her brain, and every time she said, “What’s the word I want?” I always knew what she was trying to say. (Once I got away from my mother, I never read another mind again.)
My mother was deeply unhappy with her marriage and her life, and my job was to make it all better. Whenever she yelled at me and blamed me for something, I got so scared it felt like the world was ending. She yelled at me regularly.
Embedded in her years of complaints and rants was the message that family was not to be trusted; you had to protect yourself from family. She seemed to feel this way about her family as well as my father’s. I learned this belief, too, but only partly from what she told me. I also learned it from how she treated me.
I didn’t trust my mother. When I tried to lean on her emotionally she would get angry on my behalf that a boy had done that, or a girl had behaved that way. But I didn’t need her to get angry for me. I needed her comfort. I needed her to tell me I was good. I needed her help understanding the world. She wasn’t able to do much of that for me. (My dad didn’t even try.)
Worse, sometimes she would use things I’d told her against me later. By the time I graduated high school I had learned not to open up to her, not to tell her anything very personal.
Inexplicably, I gave trusting her one last try in my 30s. That night another relationship had ended painfully for me, and I said something about feeling like I should be married by now. She said, “Don’t feel bad about that. A lot of married people are unhappy, too.”
I almost pulled the phone away from my ear and looked at it, like a sitcom character. I couldn’t believe that’s what she thought would make me feel better. I couldn’t believe I’d tried to treat her like a mother. I couldn’t believe I’d let her disappoint me again.
I made it out of my mother’s physical proximity by going to college, but her psychological grip on me was tight until I reached my 40s. It wasn’t until then that I began to really communicate with my dad (by email), which taught me he wasn’t the monster my mother had convinced me he was. At that point I began visiting my Houston familia, and they were pretty cool, too. I realized how many lies my mother had taught me and how destructive they’d been.
But by that point — my early 40s — I’d made my life in Chicago, far from California, where my parents still lived, and far from Houston. My habits were set. I centered my life on friends and my then-husband. I was a friends first person and I still am.
Since then I’ve visited Houston many times (I’m 57 now), but it’s hard to really feel inside the inside of a familia when you didn’t grow up with them, plus you live three states away. I’m related to many wonderful people, but I didn’t grow up with them, needing them, relying on them, learning from them. If my father hadn’t taken my mother across the country, that familia could have provided a refuge for me when my parents were battling or my mother was raging. Instead, we were in California and they were in Texas.
Valuing one’s big familia above all is one of the quintessential characteristics of those whose people came from Latin America or the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, but I have a couple of friends who also don’t fit the usual description. The truth is: not all Latinos “do” family.
The windows-and-mirrors prep group ended up removing family from the questions, I think because it assumed we’re all close to family when not everyone is. I appreciated that because in a group of Latinos who are mostly close to either their family of origin or to the family they’ve created (with children), family is a topic even more painful for me than language.
