One quiet morning, Mami and I were rubbing butter between our fingers to make biscuits. Breaking the silence she told me –
“Don’t ever let your children do something that makes you hate them.”
I looked up at her form my wobbly stool, floured fingers still. She looked back at me and I felt a heaviness, as if this moment had the potential to carry more than just biscuit making. Then, she smiled at me, and the tension broke. We went back to being Mami and Alu in the kitchen and the weight dissolved.
It’s hard to say what really happened. With memory everything is personal, and without the perspectives of other people who shared in the experience, you end up in an echochamber, amplifying the truth you feel to be real. I have no way to know for sure whether Mama hated Vina. It’s a truth I’ve created by putting together the bits and pieces that rise to the surface, the way I’ve chosen to make sense of the past. I don’t think it was always that way – From the beginning, Mama wanted better for Vina, something different from the burden of tradition. The moment she stopped fighting destiny was the moment, I feel, that her resentment truly set in. And, in a small way, one I’ve chosen to ignore for too long, it was the day she began to hate me too.
In those days, I made the mistake of thinking that her stories, the ones that poured from her after we left Lala’s home, were a never ending source of connection, a way to draw us, as her children, closer to her. What we didn’t realize is that each story, no matter how beautiful, was a warning. There are cautionary tales too, and Mama, weaver of words, built a protective web around herself, slowly shutting us out. She spent so much of her life fighting, running from expectations. I’d like to think it was the realization that for all her struggle, she built a cycle fated to swallow us too, and that this bitter pill was too much for her to swallow.
Home Sweet Home 