Overturned Bucket: Love, Loss and Redemption by Rose Spader

Author:Rose Spader [Spader, Rose]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-01-19T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

THE PROMISE

A few months after that happy gathering at Aunt Gregoria’s house, my mother became pregnant with her twelfth child. She was nearing menopause and had five living children. Of her eleven previous pregnancies, six had resulted in death. Jose Emilio, named after my dad’s deceased father, died before his second birthday. Then Beatrice and Carolyn were born. Next Ildefonso, named after my dad, was born unhealthy and lived only about eight months. Then Ernest and Tony were born, then a miscarriage, and then Eulalia Priscilla, who lived about six months. Valentino, born on Valentine’s Day, was her ninth child, and he lived about one month. After Valentino, I was born, and then baby Lenorcita and now, this pregnancy—her twelfth! I know little of how my brothers and sisters died. Mother did not talk about it and I never asked.

With this new pregnancy, a pregnancy she thought could not happen, and the weight of her promise to her brother, Mother did not look to her alcoholic husband for help. Neither did she rely on her children. Mother did not consider asking support from her mother. She did not need her mother’s harassment, and she knew, without question, that Grandmother Gertrudes would take her son Frank’s position and insist the promise be kept.

Defeated, tormented, and pressured to hold true to her promise, Mother must have made an extraordinarily difficult choice to hide her pain and move forward. Mother did not need another mouth to feed and worry about. Heavy in her heart, though, loomed the lightly given promise that she feared her brother had taken seriously. Faced with losing her child, she decided to move the family from the split-log cabin my dad had built on her tract of land, to Santa Fe, in an unrealistic effort to keep the pregnancy a secret.

Immediately after we arrived in Santa Fe, the capital of New Mexico, Mother found a house for us off the main road on Rosario Street. It was ten blocks from where she found a job with the White Swan Laundry. Forty-two-years-old and pregnant, she stood on swollen feet for long hours pushing a heavy hot iron that had been heated on a coal-burning stove. No coming home at the end of a long workday to put her feet up and rest. No prenatal care or necessary vitamins. No indulging unusual cravings. After her workday at the laundry, Mother returned home to cook, sew, clean house, and give us love and acceptance. Mother was always active, and at times impatient, sometimes restless, but never helpless. She never implied that her load was too heavy. If ever she was caught with a tear in her eye she made light of it.

“Nothing is wrong, I have something in my eye,” she would say.

It was while living in this house in Santa Fe that my brother Tony found a roll of copper wire and made rings by twisting the wire into interesting designs. Hunched over a wooden box using pliers to twist the wire he said, “I’m going to be rich selling these rings, Rosabelle.

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