My mom grew up in an unstable home, where she was shuttled from city to city to parent to parent to grandparent, always one parental breakdown away from being sent back to where she had come from. She grew up watching her mother have a decades-long mental breakdown, during which Nana popped pills and guzzled alcohol and checked in and out of mental wards; Mom’s parents fought and argued and divorced and flung vitriol until the day each one of them died (coincidentally within the same year). Mom never really got to put down roots and breathe a sigh of stable relief until she married my dad and settled in Saltillo nearly twenty-eight years ago.<\/p>\n
She hurts, every day, because of the shit her parents pulled throughout her life. <\/p>\n
So, to this day, when something is wrong, Mom does her best to compartmentalize it, tuck it away, under a ratty pillow behind an old chair in a boarded-up room, where no one would think to look. She plays emotional keep-away, lobbing her troubles over my head until she can run past me and catch them, only to toss them back in the air and run the other way again.<\/p>\n
She does this because she loves me and she doesn’t want to burden me with problems that aren’t explicitly mine. It’s an amazing trick, really, to take all that hurt that’s churning inside her and push it down deep so that no one’s made uncomfortable by it. But it’s a trick I wish she didn’t pull so often, because no vessel can hold a limitless amount. Everything has its limit.<\/p>\n
Today I heard her arguing with my dad. He was complaining about her attitude, and how she’s been short-tempered lately. They’ve been kind of short with each other since I’ve been here. Apparently, they’ve been snippy with each other for a few days now. I wouldn’t know this because my parents don’t call me up and complain to me about each other. They just don’t do that, unless you call and try to pry it out of them. Even then, my mom wouldn’t budge. She’s scared to death of being like her parents — opening and draining wounds in front the kids, damaging them in ways she wishes she hadn’t been damaged. <\/p>\n
So she plays keep-away. <\/p>\n
I asked her, smiling, while she was ironing her shirt: “What are y’all arguing about?”<\/p>\n
She didn’t miss a beat. <\/p>\n
“Oh, just about hearing loss! Daddy says that most people don’t care enough to protect their hearing, but I think he’s wrong. I think they do!”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My mom grew up in an unstable home, where she was shuttled from city to city to parent to parent to grandparent, always one parental breakdown away from being sent back to where she had come from. She grew up watching her mother have a decades-long mental breakdown, during which Nana popped pills and guzzled alcohol and checked in and out of mental wards; Mom’s parents fought and argued and divorced and flung vitriol until… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[85],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-family"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1jWWl-nY","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1486","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1486"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1486\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1486"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1486"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}