I save my worst contempt for my mother. My father who has never played any kind of role in my life, who has never tried to contact me and who practically flinches every time he sees me, this man I have absolutely no feelings about. It’s my mom, the parent who in her own way tried, for whom I have all the anger and resentment.
I met my mom when I was almost 8. Like many Salvadoran parents she had left me with relatives when I was still a baby and went to the U.S. in search of opportunity. When she brought me to this country and away from everyone I had ever known it seemed good for a while. She made me food when I came home from school. She served it on a TV tray, and I sat in front of the TV watching cartoons in English. This lasted a few weeks. Then she disappeared into all kinds of jobs. By the time I was 10, I often made myself dinner and tried not think too much about the different men in my mom’s life.
Something happened in June of 1986 while I was in El Salvador. When I came back my mom and her husband where living somewhere new. A year or so later she tried to kill herself. I woke to her being wheeled out of our apartment. I visited her in the psych ward. While I was still in high school, she moved back to El Salvador, and I had to figure out life for myself from that point on.
A decade ago, she lived with me for a year because of some mistake she made, which is not worth going into here. At one point, she asked me how I got to be such a good cook, and I told her that since she wasn’t around a lot when I was a kid, I had to learn to cook things for myself. She said—and I swear that this was not a joke—” You’re welcome. Without me, who knows how you would have turned out.” I exploded. It’s one thing to never have gotten any kind of apology for abandoning me and leaving me an unprotected child twice. I accepted that she was no different than a lot of Salvadoran parents, as Óscar Martínez points out, for whom those kinds of choices are obvious and don’t need explanations, let alone apologies. But it was another thing to have her take credit for all the things that I did through my own grit and a lot of luck. I screamed at her, and we didn’t speak for a couple of days.
But if I think hard about it, it’s difficult to picture becoming who I have become in El Salvador, regardless of my grit and all the luck in the world. She brought me to this country, and everything else that happened after is the consequence of that action. My mom must feel all that contempt. And for doing the thing she thought was right, which was undoubtedly the right thing to do. I imagine how my children might feel about me some day and I wince. “In this world/it’s just us.” Well, it is, and it isn’t.
