Mother of Adversity
After a shaky landing in Valencia, a quick taxi ride to my new mother’s house, and meeting the woman herself. I quickly learned how completely unprepared I was for this new culture I was stumbling into. I had always been raised in a home where as young adults we controlled our own fate and my parents became extremely hands off the moment we each crossed the significant age of sixteen. That was the age when we began driving, when we could finally date prospective teenagers and most importantly, when we chose to eat what we wanted and wear what we felt expressed us at the time.
Now at the age of 21, I have grown accustomed to my personal preferences and am strong willed in my life choices. That was until I met Dolores. The most fitting word for this woman is feisty, while she is adorable, she has a fiery passion for her ways. Maybe things would be different if we had less of a language barrier but other than the obscure words I understood and her extremely detailed demonstrations it was nearly impossible to get anything across in under ten minutes. The first of her many questions was, “¿Que es lo que tú comes?” which means, “What do you eat?” In poorly phrased Spanish I explained that I was a vegetarian.
She looked up at me through her thick glasses, and her thin lips stained with a coral lipstick parted with a quick “¿Que?” Then continued to explain in an accelerated dialect that it wasn’t possible for me to not eat meat. That there had to be some instances where I did. She asked how my mother fed me and I explained that I enjoyed feeding myself which only pushed her to question more and she refused to believe. In my usual temperament I became offended because I felt that she was saying I had a bad mother. It was then I felt as though my ability to form a relationship with this excitable woman would be nearly impossible.
One of the truest things about Spanish culture is how involved a mother is, in my lifetime I haven’t seen so much involvement. From the constant need to know schedules by the minute to what we wear when we are about to leave the house. Her refusal to believe that I had thicker blood and was constantly warm caused a static in the air as I grabbed a jacket just to leave the house.
I never intended to feel such stress from someone I had just met and before her I always believed that I was quite good at handling differing opinions. I truly felt I was an open minded individual that thrived in diverse situations. I had no idea how much a language barrier would cause emotional strain on me. The moment I realized that she would never understand my diet and its importance to me, I had to compromise. I decided the best way for me to get the proper nutrients for myself was to become a pescatarian. On the night I first tried tuna I began to tear up for a moment.
I didn’t realize how emotionally invested I had actually become in my decisions. For a moment I became angry because I had let someone I had just met change my viewpoint and put me in an emotional state.
Then I spoke to Dolores again as she was removing boxes of jewelry from her closet. As she stood on the ladder I saw the small woman differently, I was looking up to her. She was nothing more than a frail woman who couldn’t understand, not some monster that pushed me to consume what I swore against. She was just as disgruntled as I was, trying to comprehend my needs as I was trying to comprehend hers.
I realized that this was my first lesson of self, a lesson on what it means to work with others in the face of adversity. I know Dolores will continue to question my ways and I will continue to silently cringe as I am told how and when to do things. I also know that in the back of my mind I will remember that we are simply two people trying to understand each other.
