Twinkling Eyes and the Perfect Button Nose
My mommy is born!
It’s easy for me to feel a strange emotional attachment to certain characters or actors in movie and TV shows or someone who was a big icon in very nostalgic moments of my life; even if the person in question has nothing to do with me whatsoever and I have no ‘real’ gage of their life other than what is shared with the masses. But, that doesn’t stop me from watching something from 20 years ago and then almost unhealthily googling every thing about their life from then to now. There is something about witnessing in some weird way the passage of time from a completely outside, but albeit skewed perspective, that both interests me and saddens me. To see a glimpse of someone in a specific moment in time knowing the trajectory of their life and how things played out or didn’t play out…affects me.
While yes, I am aware that I don’t actually know them or know anything but ‘headlines’, it is the smallest peak into someone’s life over a period of time and being able to look or watch back and think ‘this is how this or that turns out’. The part that I very often overlook though is that it’s not the big moments that measure the depth of the life lived. As I have learned from my grandmother it’s the ‘stories’ and one's own reflection upon them that really hold all the magic. And that is something that very few people have the privilege of truly knowing about someone else.
All of that exposition was to point out that knowing we are starting the story of my “moms life”, or at least her grand entrance into someone else’s story, really puts me in that “similar position” of witnessing or hearing a story “backwards”. Being transported into a moment in time before someone knew what life would hand them but yet knowing what lies ahead.
Yes I have lived with my mom for 35 years, but I assume it takes most “children” until at least adulthood to fully view their parents outside of their designated role, and see them as their own person. For me, it’s still a work in progress. As children we don’t realize that our parents are individuals with their own dreams and aspirations, flaws, trauma, views… We see them as the people who should know all the right answers, who should show up in EXACTLY the way we need them to, and who’s role of ‘self’ comes second to ‘mom’ or ‘dad’. So hearing the beginning of “her story”, now that I myself am a mother and a woman well into adulthood, gives me just enough distance and perspective to really be able to take it all in. And while I get to begin to view it from that “all knowing bystander position” that I find so compelling; I also get to be a person who knows a lot of her story from the inside. I know the big moments to come but then I also know HER big moments, how she measures her life and where she holds her magic.
So “today”, in the retelling of my grandmother’s own life story, my mother was born… and what a magical life she will have.
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A very important time in my life; getting to Elkhart Indiana was such a big adventure and then being there not knowing exactly when my baby was going to be born. So, there we are… Christmas comes and goes..still waiting…then New Years and still no baby. During this time Henry was still looking for a job but he couldn’t find anything because he didn’t speak the language. This is when he called Oscar Lara, who in 1949 came to Champaign Urbana to Study at the University of Illinois. We had his number and he would always write to Henry. Oscar and Henry had gone to school together and had known each other since kindergarten so he was a very close friend. Henry talked to him and Oscar said ‘I can guarantee when you come to Champaign Urbana you will be able to find a job, and until you get settled you can stay with me’. So this was the plan, we just had to wait for the baby to be born.
So finally on January 3rd I started to feel more and more pain. Uncle Carlos and Henry were watching a game and they looked at me and said ‘hey, wait a minute we aren’t going until the game is over’, so we waited and once it was over we went to the hospital and soon after my little girl, my beautiful little girl was born. She was 6lbs and 13oz, a lot of hair with a beautiful little nose and everything about her was just beautiful. The nurse took her and cleaned her up and brought her back all wrapped up with a pink ribbon in her hair and I had my little girl.
Uncle Carlos said, ‘okay if you’re feeling good we can go home’, so 8 hours after she was born we went home and Ralph was there waiting. He had no idea what to expect but he would just say ‘baby’ ‘baby’. That night I just remember her crying and crying as she wouldn’t take my milk. I didn’t have much because of the stress of the trip and the move, so that morning Uncle Carlos brought back all different kinds of formula and she was finally a very happy and full baby. After that she was such an easy baby who never cried, she would smile with her twinkling eyes. Henry named her ‘Teresa Maria’ because he said she looked just like me, so I had my beautiful ‘Teresa Maria Mendez’.
