Spacious Solidarity Blog: Day 107

I remember emerging from the water at the beach on a warm, sunny summer’s day. I couldn’t have been much older than six.

My mother is sat on the shore smiling at me as I come running towards her. As I get closer I notice she is holding something in between her thumb and forefinger.

She holds it out towards me with a sparkle in her eye. It’s a ring. A silver band with a crowned heart held up by two hands. My eyes go wide and my jaw drops.

“But where did it come from?” I ask.

“I made it for you while you were swimming. I made it out of the sand,” She replies.

I take the ring and inspect it closely. It’s shimmering in the sunlight, shiny and new. I put it on my thumb, where it fits just right.

I don’t know what happened to that ring. What I do know is that this was a critical moment in my relationship with my mom. From then on, she was magic and I would watch her closely to see what other kind of magic she might conjure up for me.

She moved to Boston at the age of twenty-three after a year of marriage. Before she met my dad she’d been dating a Jewish guy who was in the Chilean Army. I remember hearing somewhere along the line that her mother wasn’t all too happy about that.

Which was weird because we had a lot of Jewish friends. I grew up going to bar mitzvahs and my Dad was close friends with a doctor at the hospital who was Jewish.

I don’t think my parents were antisemitic and I’m pretty sure my grandparents weren’t either. I think they were just really, really Catholic and wanted my mom to marry a nice Catholic boy. And I don’t think they could see the “othering” in that and I would guess no one ever pointed it out to them.

It’s interesting how the older we get the clearer it is that nothing is ever black or white.

Anyhow, she met my dad and got rid of the soldier and four months later they were married. And a year later they moved to Boston. They had to leave Chile because of the political unrest. My father’s parents and two youngest siblings had already moved to Boston and had been living there for a couple of years.

She didn’t speak a word of English when she got there. She learned mostly by watching daytime soap operas and taking classes along with my grandmother at Harvard.

She had one daughter and then another. My father tells me that when I was in the womb my mother told him that I was going to be different. This made him worry that she meant I might come out with a birth defect.

So when I came out with a massive hemangioma he was worried. They took me to every doctor in a 100 mile radius to find out what could be done and they all said they simply had to wait.

This is why I don’t have any baby pictures. My sister’s got whole albums. Me, one or two random shots buried amongst all the other family photos. (actually, that’s no longer true since my sister one Christmas decided to do right by me and dug them all up and put them in an album for me. My very own album.).

I saw a baby with a hemangioma on a train once. It was the fast Virgin train between London and Manchester, a trip I used to frequently take when I still lived in Manchester but was dating my partner who lived in London.

I smiled at the baby, snuggled in a pram, and then looked up and smiled at the woman holding the pram who I assumed to be the baby’s mother. She had a worried look on her face.

“You know I had one of those when I was a baby and my parents were really worried but eventually it went away, no problem,” I said.

She smiled big, the worry dropping from her face and I swear I saw her shoulders soften.

“That’s strange, we are actually on our way to see the doctor about it and I haven’t known what to think,” she said.

At that moment I knew it wouldn’t be kind to tell her that in rare cases they can be problematic. She was going to hear that soon from the doctor. But for now, and in the small space of time between the train and the doctor’s office, she could have a brief respite from worry.

Sometimes even when something is factually true, it may not be kind. And sometimes when something is true and kind, it may not be appropriate. And sometimes when something is true, kind and appropriate it may not be timely.

Applying the principle of non-violence to one’s practice of skillful speech is a lifetime’s work, and even then it’s all process, no end in sight.

We didn’t have the greatest relationship, my mom and I. Apparently I didn’t talk for a long time. They thought I might be deaf but had my ears checked and I was fine. Then they took me to a psychiatrist who told them they were confusing me speaking Spanish at home, but with English all around us.

He said they had to pick one language and only talk to me in that one language and so of course they chose English. I never understood that until I became an adult. I remember emphatically asking my father why they didn’t choose Spanish as something in me knew that I would eventually learn both.

So I think that created a kind of rift between my mom and I when we had to start communicating with each other in a foreign language.

Then of course I started going to school and I had this weird long name that the teachers wanted to shorten and then everyone started calling me that but no one ever asked me what I wanted.

And somehow the message slowly seeped in that we were different and I became ashamed. I didn’t want to bring friends over to my house because they would hear my parents talking to each other in Spanish and see all the South American paraphernalia and think we were weird.

That’s when I rejected Spanish all together and refused to speak it to my parents. I wanted to fit in and I was embarrassed by them.

One evening when I was in my early teens I remember sitting in the family room with my mom. The TV was on and I was completely absorbed in whatever was unfolding on the screen.

All of a sudden my mom taps me on the shoulder and holds up a piece of paper. On it is a simple yet elegant line drawing of my profile, wisps of hair falling around my ears and down my neck, delicate eyelashes.

And it looks just like me. My eyes go wide and my jaw hits the floor.

“Where did that come from?” I ask.

“I drew it,” she answers.

“Right here, right now, while you were watching your show,” she continues.

“But it’s only been like five minutes, you drew that in five minutes?” I ask.

“Yes, do you like it?” she asks in return.

She was an amazing artist and singer and musician. Apparently she and her four sisters (she was the second) used to play the guitar and sing Beatles songs on the radio in Santiago when they were at university.

I have fond memories of going to bed to the sound of her practicing her scales. La, la, la, la, la, la, laaaaaa. Up and down, up and down. She would record herself, listen back to the recording and then have a go again. Over and over again.

Sometimes remembering her feels like reaching into the back corner of a closet to dig something out I haven’t worn in ages and sometimes she just arrives in my consciousness like she’s sat right in front of me.

When I became a teenager I learned that the ring my mom gave me that day on the beach was a Claddagh ring. They were worn by all the girls to signal whether or not they were available. If the ring was worn heart facing inward it meant they were taken, outward, that they were available.

The Claddagh ring was invented in the 1680s by an Irish goldsmith who learned his craft during a fourteen-year stint in slavery. He had been picked up by Algerian Corsairs and sold to a Moorish goldsmith who taught him everything he knew.

When he finally returned to Ireland, after being freed by King William III he became a highly successful goldsmith. He also returned with the Claddagh ring design which he’d fashioned while enslaved.

The beauty and sheer genius that is forged out of adversity is beyond words.