Mother’s Day, May 14, 1989. Uruguay.
Exactly two months earlier, my father had killed himself.
We had been living in Spain. Now we were back in Uruguay, inside the strange geography of after, where the world kept moving on but no longer felt the same, not even the blue of the sky.
In July my mother would turn forty.
She had no husband. She had two sons. She had grief in her body and children who needed the world to continue.
And still, she mothered.
My earliest memories of my mother live in my body. Her presence. Her attention. Before I had words for safety, my body knew it through her.
Mothering after devastation is labor at the edge of collapse. My mother could not keep grief away from us, but she stood between us and its full force. She absorbed what she could. She carried what had nowhere else to go.
That kind of carrying did not begin with her.
My grandmother was fierce, brilliant, difficult, loving, wounded. She came from a world where survival required force and vulnerability had little room to live.
She taught me a Uruguayan phrase I have carried my whole life: sin pelos en la lengua. No hairs on your tongue. Speak your truth. Say it as it is.
And she did.
She could speak with force, clarity, and fire. But speaking one’s mind is not the same as speaking one’s wound.
Some truths my grandmother could name. Others stayed buried in her body, alive and unnamed.
What she did not speak was Ukraine. The pogroms she fled as a child. The fear that crossed oceans and never reached her tongue. The history her body carried alone because there was no one to carry it with her.
When my grandmother was inside her mother, my mother’s beginning was already inside her too.
A baby girl, before birth, already carries the eggs she will have for life.
Three bodies, one inside the next.
So when my grandmother fled Ukraine as a child, my mother was not yet a child, not yet my mother, not yet a widow. But her cellular beginning was already inside a body marked by terror.
The past was not behind them. It was inside them.
What is not worked through does not disappear. It finds another body.
My grandmother survived what she could not fully digest. My mother inherited it not as a story, but as a silence loud with what no one would name. A dread she lived inside since before she was born, without knowing what it was.
My mother did not end the line of pain. None of us does. But she changed its force. She worked enough of it through herself that it arrived in us less raw, less sharp, less able to become the atmosphere of our lives. More tenderness reached us than had reached her.
My mother did not wait for grief to pass. She mothered from inside it.
And from inside it, she made us possible.
Related Essays
I loved reading this, Stephen. Thank you for sharing their, and your, story. 💟