What my mother taught me
by Gabriela Vasquez
My mother has taught me just about everything I know in life. When I was two years old she taught me how to read, and I haven’t stopped since. She taught me how to doodle elephant butts and how to sing (I’m sorry, mami, I’m still tone-deaf). She taught me the toque de gaita to play during Christmas time. She taught me to dance salsa and merengue, to listen and feel the rhythm of the music. She taught me how to get lost in books and find meaning in them. She taught me that reading was what would set me apart — making me better in math, in science, in every subject. She taught me games and how to lose gracefully.
I was nine years old when my mom sat my sister and me down to tell us that she was going to start working. My dad had worked at Acer, making computers, until I was about seven. I remember visiting his office on “Take Your Kid to Work Day,” and getting to hit the button that would stamp “Acer” on a computer mouse. I didn’t understand what it meant for him not to work there anymore.
Later, I found out that he was working on different companies with his best friend from college, but all I remember is him renovating houses. I remember him taking my sister and me to whatever house or houses he would be working on. We would run around, picking out which rooms would be ours if we lived here. It was fun, and it didn’t seem strange that I wouldn’t visit my dad anymore for “Take Your Kid to Work Day,” stamping logos on computer mouses and playing ClueFinders: 3rd Grade Adventures — The Mystery of Mathra.
A few years of my dad being “in-between” jobs like this, things started to get hard. I don’t remember if my mom said this in an attempt to explain to my sister and me that we were going through a hard time financially, or if I overheard her voice her concern about being able to keep the house and took it literally, but I was convinced that we were going to lose our house and end up living underneath a bridge. Suffice it to say that I felt a small sense of relief when my mom told us she would be working for Bank of America.
My mom taught me to be brave.
My mom worked hard her entire life, studied hard to do well in an engineering major even though her passions were in the arts, and worked nonstop to be there for my sister and me. She made sure that we ate every meal, made it to every practice and recital, did well in our classes, and she never once asked for our gratitude even though she deserved it and more. My mom took a job defined by interacting with customers despite her limited English — despite her anxiety — for us. Her taking that job was more than just an act of bravery, of selflessness. It was like her stepping in front of our family as a human shield, taking hits from irrational customers, angry customers, impatient customers, racist customers, withstanding the crippling force of anxiety that came with having to communicate quickly to these people not in her native tongue, protecting us without so much as a second thought. She is courage itself, though at the same time so much more, and will always be my queen.
My mom taught me how to be kind, how to love, how to always help others. She taught me never to be ashamed of who I am, even if people don’t like it. She taught me not to be ashamed of my intelligence, no matter if I got picked on. She taught me patience and she taught me faith. She taught me to — respectfully — question authority if I didn’t agree with or understand the rules. She taught me that my sister is my best friend, that at the end of the day we only have each other. She taught me not to take anything for granted, to always be grateful. She taught me to be strong, but not hard. She taught me warmth as well as strength, that it is possible for both hot fire and temperate earth to coexist within a person.
My mom taught me to be flexible.
An acquaintance had given my mom a fax number to which she could send her resume, and after that she was working at a main Bank of America office, one that was always flooded with people. On her first day, her boss made a mistake and placed her in the “commercial”section, where she would have to interact with businesses and companies, something she hadn’t been trained for. Despite the incredibly high stress she felt, the horrible feelings of anxiety, the intense pressure of the situation, she adapted and managed to get through the day with the help of a colleague. My mom worked there no more than a month, eventually being transferred to a much smaller drive-through location where she worked as a teller.
My sister and I never saw this, never saw what my mom went through when she started working. More recently, my mom talked to us about exactly what happened that first month. About how she was thrown into an environment that was beyond foreign to her, where she had to communicate quickly to customers who were often impatient and angry in a language that was not her own. She now mentions this experience often, anytime my sister or I are about to face a situation that scares us, that we aren’t prepared for. She tells us constantly how important it is to always be able to adapt to our circumstances, no matter how difficult, no matter how anxiety-inducing, no matter how terrifying they may be.
My mom taught me to work hard and be kind.
In the three years that my mom worked at this tiny little drive-through, things started to change for me. Instead of being picked up after school by my mom, I would often catch a ride to the drive-through, where I would sit and do homework in the tiny break room until she got out of work. I remember wandering into the “work-space,” where the tellers would stand in front of the drive-through window waiting for customers, and hearing the other workers talk about how incredible my mom was. They were all pretty young, and many had been working there for a while, but they talked about my mom with such admiration and respect that I would swell up with pride. I remember watching her in action, so to speak, having account information for a customer ready before their car even finished pulling into the drive-through area, her fingers deftly counting the money, never making a mistake. I remember hearing her greet the customers warmly, hearing them respond in kind, and I remember feeling so proud.
My mom taught me to love where I come from, the importance and beauty in our language. She would walk around our block, holding my sister’s hand in one of hers and mine in her other, decked out in our Venezuelan outfits, singing our national anthem. She taught me to love learning, to love languages, to love music and writing and art. She taught me to love my new country, too. She taught me to be grateful for our lives in America, to love the country that gave us another home.
My mom taught me to be strong.
I had always remembered my mom’s experience at Bank of America as a positive one. I remembered how great she was at her job, how much everyone looked up to her, and how much the clients loved her.
I remembered all of the good, because my mom never told me the bad. Recently, I found out that it hadn’t always been quite so perfect. My mom had studied English back in Venezuela, and she really liked it, but she was far from being fluent when we moved to Florida. Living in “SoFla” (South Florida, so affectionately named) isn’t exactly conducive to learning English either, since about 80% of the people you would interact with speak Spanish. My mom had quite an accent — something I struggled to be okay with as a kid, since other kids would sometimes make not-so-nice comments about it. I couldn’t realize then that my mother working hard to learn a new language was something to be proud of, that her accent was just as much a part of her as her warm brown eyes or her laugh lines.
She told me a story, not too long ago, that breaks my heart whenever I think about it. She was at the drive-through when a woman pulled in, and my mother greeted her enthusiastically, as she always did: “Hello, welcome to Bank of America! How can I help you?” The response was a cold, harsh: “Find me someone who speaks English.”
My mom can’t protect me from everything bad in the world, as hard as she will try. And, I can’t protect her as much as it kills me to hear about things like this. What I’m starting to learn, though, is that my mom doesn’t need protecting, not much after all. My mom, five foot three, tiny, soft-spoken, big-hearted, vulnerable, doesn’t need protecting. My mother is iron and she is steel and she will stand as the wall between her family and everything bad in the world and she does not need protecting.
My mom has taught me everything, has given me everything, and there is nothing I can ever do to repay her. But, this is for her. This is for the woman who made me who I am, who showed me how to be strong, how to fight for myself and for others, but also how to be vulnerable and open. This is for the woman who showed me how to embrace my identity, so that when I got made fun of for not knowing English very well and for pronouncing words wrong, and I didn’t want to speak Spanish anymore; when someone yelled at me, “This is America!”; when I got called exotic; when I was told that my identity, and not my intelligence and hard work, was the reason for my success, I was not broken down. My sense of self was not torn from me. That was because of you, mami. All the good I have done, all the good that I am is because of you.
Gracias mami. Te amo, y no sé que haría sin ti. Gracia por todo lo que has hecho, y todo lo que haces por mi.
