A Letter for My Mother by Nina Foxx

Author:Nina Foxx
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Strebor Books

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Sofia Quintero

Dear Abuela,

Every time Carmen says I look just like you, the irony hits me like a gnat sting between the eyes. After all, she’s your namesake, and me? We never had a meaningful relationship.

My most indelible memories of you from childhood aren’t the things that people usually recall when they speak of their grandmothers. Certain words ring in my head. Pendeja. Puñeta. Even pata just because whenever Natalie would come to visit, we’d hide out in your bathroom to gossip away from adult ears. You would pound on the door and yell at us to get out, suggesting that we were doing something untoward.

Looking back I realize that it was more than being only a year apart that bonded Carmen’s younger sister and me. I don’t think Nat and I ever named—at least not as little girls—what we shared. That was the knowledge that among the granddaughters, we were not favored. This awareness included the undeniably possible reasons why you would never dote on us the way you did Carmen or Magda and then later, Melissa or Krystal.

Our Spanish was too weak.

Our eyes were too brown.

Our skin too dark, our hair too curly.

Perhaps you might’ve overlooked one of these traits—Carmen is no more or less Afro-Latina than either of us. We could not, however, possess all these characteristics and expect you to take us shopping or remember our birthdays. Here at the age of forty-three, I sit here embarrassed as I write this to you for no other reason than I can only do so in English.

And yet today almost no one in the family can look at a picture of me with glasses and a blowout and not see you.

I often regale my friends with tales of your outlandishness, disrupting their anecdotes of sweet abuelitas who fit the traditional profile. They talk about the refuge that was their grandmother’s home, a haven for conspiracies kept from disciplinarian parents, repositories of affirmations and spoils, a garden of lessons from the sensual to the pragmatic. Then my turn comes, and I quip, “I learned how to curse in Spanish from my grandmother.” I pause for effect, then add, “Because she was hurling those words at me.” And once I had their gasping attention, I’d follow with a secondhand story that exemplified your tart tongue and brassy behavior—my favorites being the ones that involved Ma and you butting heads.

Something shifted when I became a teenager, and I wonder if maybe you began to see yourself in me. I remember the day you called me to come over to your house. It was the day after my fifteenth birthday. La quince is a significant birthday for a Latina unless, of course, she’s very Americana like me. Even if my parents could have afforded it, I wouldn’t have wanted a quinceañera. As much as I crushed on boys, the affair seemed too much like a boda, and I had long decided there’d be no weddings or children until after I graduated college. I already knew that if there was any money to spare, it had to go to my education.

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