When I was 21, I had this memory of being caught somewhere between my mother and an abusive relationship and feeling her corner me even deeper. I was standing in the doorway of the garage. She was in front of me. I wanted to push her down the stairs. I had this sudden vivid instinct that it would be right to kill her. I screamed at her that I wanted to kill her just then. I think back now, would that have saved my brother’s life or just ended mine?
I read this passage from Gilmer Mesa, La Cuadra. The backstory is that the mother was gang raped and then ostracized by her family and forced into a life of prostitution.
“La primera en llegar corriendo a la esquina fue Claudia, que al ver a su hijo se largó a gritar y llorando le decía ¿Qué hiciste, culicagao, por qué vos? No, no, y se agachó para abrazarlo y el niño le susurró sonriendo Sí vio, mami, que yo le dije que le iba a matar a este hijueputa para que usted no sufriera más. Ella, teniendo todavía abrazado al niño, observó profundamente el cuerpo yacente y sintió un cúmulo de contradicciones, trece largos años había esperado este momento y ahora que sucedía no atinaba ni siquiera a saber qué le producía: se sentía liviana con la liviandad que da la venganza consumada, pero también seguía sintiendo odio aunque un odio diferente, un rencor hacia sí misma, pues había transferido a su hijo ese sentimiento durante toda su vida y ese era el resultado: su hijo ya era definitivamente uno más de ellos, igual a los hombres que le habían hecho el revolcón, y ella era la única culpable.”
The memory at the garage door stays beneath the surface and I try not to touch it because it exposes my true weakness, the weakness of revenge, the thing I try not to float around and live around it, realizing now how my mother controlled her lives and any expression of love. I was genuinely not allowed to show love to my brother or father. All forms of love were redirected to her. My father and brother relied on me to provide real emotional space, which I strategized and provided like a spy every day of my life, even pretending to myself that I didn’t love them because my mother didn’t allow me to know. And my father and brother protected me and loved me with a devotion forged from survival. Those moments of love I can count on my fingers because they were so, so rare. But those moments contained all the love that was suppressed and hidden, and I learned to survive on those alone.
So I’m asking God why he did this to me, why he took my brother, the younger brother that was my responsibility, that I would have died for, without us ever having expressed love to each other safely. I feel that wanting revenge is a state of pain in itself.
There is some other version of me taking shape. She’s from another world where the suffering has meaning. I just haven’t fully met her yet.
I remember the words my mother told me when my brother died. He didn’t think you loved him, implying that’s how I treated him. It was implied that he felt inadequate because I was talented and this was the cause of his death. My grandmother said this to me. Everyone believed what my mother said. I said I felt guilty and then my mother said she felt worse. It was a disguise so that I wouldn’t question further. Nobody wanted me to question the real cause of his death.
When I think about my brother now, it’s like meeting him for the first time. I realized he wouldn’t want me to save him anymore and he wants me to have a life better than the past. It feels bizarre to accept that he could actually love me and want something good for me the way I hope for life to be good. Both concepts are foreign. It makes me dizzy every day, because I am so disoriented. It’s a strange feeling like leaving a prison you lived in your whole life. Everything is better but sometimes you miss the bad food and the steel aluminum beds. The pain is so great in my body and mind.
This is the best I could do with my life I had. These were the choices I had. Sometimes I feel life is so so small and so threadbare. What a vigilant life it was, watching the razor’s edge of morality at all times, it was an obsession, I find it hard to look at anything else. I feel like I had so little, owned so little, just like my mother growing up in poverty. But I didn’t give into revenge the way she did. I wasn’t weak the way she was. Not once, not ever. And that feels like everything. So few choices I had, and yet it was so much more than she had. And in that small margin, she raged against my life, all her lives, against her own life. In the end, I didn’t hurt anybody, not even in the name of love and protection. And she killed her only son. What kind of nothingness she lives in is not a place my mercy wants to go.
This is one of those moments I write from survival because writing this saves me from the part of me that wished she had control, some fantasy that I could control my mothers life the way she controlled mine. Control comes in small pieces doesn’t it? That’s what makes it so terrifying to take one step forward. Because you never feel like you have enough of the control you need when you need it most. This is why people lose their minds for power. At some point in my mothers life she chose chaos and never found her way back, every step brought her closer and closer to less control. That is how she was with me that night, when I was old enough to see her, and brave enough to face her. I changed in her eyes forever that moment, I became the enemy, exiled from my home and it’s inner circle. And she became my enemy too, I exiled her as well from my inner knowing, and two factions formed in our family, mine and hers. And slowly I chose a different kind of control than she had ever reached for, a kind of control that would leave the darkness of her life, one that was too late for her to find.
SUBLIME COURAGE 
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