Among the earliest conscious memories I have of my mother involved my first late night jail break. Bedroom break is a more literal way to describe what happened but the effect was the same: one late night at age five I had escaped the confines of the bedroom that I shared with my younger brother and mom and thus found myself enjoying the forbidden freedom of staying up several hours past my Mom-decreed bed time. Unfortunately, on this particular late evening my mother came home unexpectedly early from her night time shift and found me wide awake and sunk deeply into the contours of a sofa tucked against the wall of our darkened living room. There I sat, nestled obliviously and quietly between my two grandparents, Nona and Papasito, who were then in their sixties and timelessly ancient to me in a Treebeard sort of way.
On this bedroom break evening the television set my grandparents and I gazed upon was projecting pastel 1970s images and a mono stereo Spanish language blare that engulfed the living room with a silver electronic glow and an acoustically dull din that were as mysteriously vibrant to me as any cave man’s fire from prehistoric times. I sat staring so intently at the television’s flickering blur that by the time my mom burst in to the living room I had no time to think of flashing an escaped fugitive’s dash for a likely looking hidden corner. “Get up!!” my mother hissed at me in Dolby Digital surround sound quality Spanish. The tone of her voice and the emphatic body language she used revealed a maternal anger I had rarely heard or seen from her. “Go to bed!” she yelled more forcefully as she gesticulated in the direction of the bedroom. “You know you have school in the morning and you know you’re not supposed to be up this late!”
I blasted off from the living room couch, zooming past her as fast as my child’s adrenaline filled legs could carry me, and burst in to the darkness of the hall way behind her. As I did so I simultaneously hoped to avoid a pulled ear or a pinched arm or a slapped noggin courtesy of my justifiably ticked off mom even as I rued how so few secrets could ever be kept from my mother for long. Still just a kindergartner I was already learning from direct experience the universal truth that a good mother and the survival of her child’s flimsy secrets no more go together in Real Life than a cascade of otherwise delicious ketchup poured over a stack of pristine IHOP restaurant flapjacks.
A good mother. In my entire life I do not remember that my mom ever used those two words in tandem to characterize herself. This is not all that personally surprising to me as she was an eminently modest person: humble to a fault. My mother was neither a perfect mom nor a perfect person and yet her actions over the course of my life testified to the authentically best kind of mom that she really was. I will consider myself lucky if my written words in this or any future electronic space can capture a small fraction of the intangible qualities that defined my mom’s character and distilled her Mom-ness.
By the year that she died I had long since convinced myself that in a hypothetical Battle of the Chefs my mom could cook any erstwhile competing chef on the planet right under the table. She daily concocted an aromatic Peruvian cuisine that I grew up wishing I could somehow commercialize into the world’s finest T.V. dinners, a feat that by age 16 I was sure would set our impoverished family on the path to billions. But my mother did not start out so gastronomically accomplished. From her teen age years onwards she had been a working woman and until she turned 51 she had largely left the household cooking details to her own mother, my grandmother Nona. Embedded in this fact was the reality that my mom and Nona lived together under the same roof for over half of what turned out to be the total length of my mom’s life.
Living with different generations in the same house defined my upbringing and formed the gravitational laws governing the many orbits of the world I grew up to call Brownotopia. As a practical matter, however, having my grandparents available to watch over me and my younger brother day and night also enabled my mom to work the jobs and attendant work shifts necessary for our family to economically scrape by just long enough to make it to her next biweekly paycheck.
Looking back on those early first years after our arrival in California, I recognize how materially poor our family really was and how my mom struggled day and night to provide for us. We never lacked for food or clothes or a roof but beyond these necessities nothing else rated a slam dunk as a guaranteed given. A certain summer time recreational activity me and my little brother Edwin participated in can perhaps illustrate this point.
The old Lake Avenue house that we grew up in was not air conditioned and turned furnace levels of hot under the Southern California summer sun. To cool ourselves off, unlike some of my Pasadena area cousins, who seemed to have innumerable bevies of goodies including the super fun and super unaffordable Slip N’ Slide and even actual backyard swimming pools, all we had at our old house was a beat up sprinkler that still (mostly) worked when connected to its leaky decrepit front lawn faucet. One long summer, in addition to not having a Slip N’ Slide, me and my brother, then aged seven and five respectively, also did not have actual swimming trunks that fit, as my mom had no money to buy us any.
Not yet old enough to know any better, anxious not to waste precious sun drenched hot afternoons, and no swimming trunks notwithstanding, we regularly cranked up the old leaky faucet anyway, stripped ourselves down to our low cut Superman and Captain America Underoos (which were as near full monty style threaded fabric as could cling on to the fannies of little boys) and for hours happily took turns jumping through the sprinkler on a sloping front lawn directly facing four lanes of opposing traffic carrying hundreds of cars, trucks, and pedestrians.
Even at this young age, while joyously pretending the feeble splashed sprinkler water to be Malibu class ocean waves, we noticed adults with astonished looks on their faces staring at us from inside their cars. We also noticed they talked to each other while pointing at us. Edwin and I were just old enough to be a little self conscious about the stares and pointing but young enough to not let that self consciousness stop us for even one second from frog jumping endlessly over the muddy crab grass and sprinkler water in our clingy Underoos.
The first job that I remember my mom having was a night shift position at a film processing company in Glendale. My grandparents always regretted that my mom needed to work a night shift job. “Pobresita tu madre” [your poor mom] is what Nona and Papasito would frequently sigh as they reflected in Spanish on the long overnight hours my mom put in to make a living. During the many occasions Nona called me out on my various boyhood transgressions and chore completion screw ups, she frequently reminded me how hard and how long my mom had to work “de noche” (Spanish for at night) in order to provide for us and how this needed to motivate me to behave better. In reality, I only had the dimmest of understandings regarding what my mom had to undergo to provide for us. By age 6 all I really know was that her job took her out of the house a lot and when I was awake in the day she often had to be sleeping to rest up for her night shift.
So naturally I was thrilled one evening when I found myself in the kitchen and overheard my mom speaking anxiously in to the family’s rotary phone as the news was broken to her that the film processing company she worked at was shutting down and that she’d just lost her job. Now Mom’s going to be home all day!! I remember thinking joyously. Hooray!
Of course, in the weeks and months that followed there was no economic hooray for my Mom. Blocky government cheese (which was actually rather tasty) became a staple of our daily diet. During super market trips I saw my mom pull out food stamps to pay for groceries and at doctor’s visits my Mom pulled out the Medi-Cal cards with the little removable green stickers in order to pay for our medical appointments. The old Lake Avenue house, with its chipped white paint and falling shingles, looked more forlorn than ever and should trails of ants march in to a pot of boiled dinner broth, as several times they would in those months, Nona refused to throw out the resulting ant and vegetable soup and insisted on serving this hybrid brew to our stomach turned kid palates, saying the “protein” was good for us.
One enduring constant that my mother and grandmother modeled to us through this economic crisis and so much more that was to come our way in life was their Christian faith. Every Sunday morning during my grade school years Mom and Nona loaded me and Edwin in to my Mom’s old blue 1962 Plymouth Valiant. In those pre seat belt law days, Edwin and I would then scrunch ourselves against the car floor to listen to the gravelly asphalt of the road whiz by below us as the Valiant whooshed its way toward a first generation immigrant Latino church in far away Los Angeles that was ministered to by a man named Pastor Brady.
Pastor Brady’s church was huge. The pews me and Edwin sat on lifted us so far up off the floor that that our feet dangled in the air, not touching the carpet underneath. At every service Pastor Brady would call for an offering, saying to the congregation that the offering (ofrenda in Spanish) was “for God” and that God would “count” every penny of every dollar given to Him. I saw that my mom and Nona gave money at every service they attended and that their brows would furl in deep concentration as they prayed for a blessing on the day’s ofrenda. Deeply impressed by Pastor Brady’s pronouncements, I also closely observed how and when the offerings were passed by the church ushers around the pews inside woven baskets with long handles. I noted that after the ushers took the offering baskets to the church foyer behind the sanctuary, they then entered a door opening to a steep flight of stairs leading skywards. I always wanted to follow the ushers up those stairs because I just knew that on the second floor they met up with an angel who would literally count and collect the weekly offering. I was positive the ushers met with an angel because I was quite sure God Himself was too busy to go to every church on the planet to collect offerings in person. Several times I considered telling Mom my theory about how the “ofrendas” made their way to Heaven but I held back, thinking she probably already knew this herself.
For my mom and Nona faith was not just lived out on Sundays. Every night at home they gathered me and Edwin to the master bedroom, turned off the lights, and with all of us kneeling along the edges of the large bed, they led us in taking turns earnestly praying to God in Spanish, thanking Him for the blessings in our lives and asking for His grace in having my Mom find a new job, curing my grandparents of their arthritis, helping me with math, and meeting any other pressing need that we could think of. Both Mom and Nona prayed with conviction and humility, modeling to me and Edwin a defiantly vibrant faith, the light of which illuminated their lives and guided them through the tempest of joblessness that my Mom had to navigate for the time being and which was destined to see us all through more painful crucibles in the then unknowable future. The light from their maternal faith burns through the mists of the interceding years to remind me what my mother and her mother held closest to their hearts in teaching us how to struggle, how to endure, and how to prevail.
