i know i complain
and yes, they drive me crazy
but i love my kids
Sometimes negative energy just builds upon itself. I suppose that’s what’s happening now, even though this has been happening to us for weeks and we are just entering the actual week of Daylight Savings, full moon, AND Friday the 13th. Madre mía.
So I am going to look at the funny/not funny moments of the past twenty-four hours.
Funny: In the emergency room waiting room last night, I had to explain Furries to my Honduran son. “Some people just think they are animals, and they like to dress that way all the time, and that’s why he has on the suit and the raccoon tail.” “Oh… well his face already looks like an animal.” I had already looked away, so I had to wait a moment to steal a glance of the dark glasses, the perfectly-raccoon-shaped beard, the dyed mustache, and be ever-so-grateful that Fabian only speaks Spanish so the poor gringo couldn’t understand what he had said as I stifled my laughter.
Not Funny: After a long day of working and screaming at children for ignoring me and running seven blocks in frustration and watching my baby girl kill it in her ensemble role of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Jr., 
after I had just put on my favorite outfit of all time (pajamas) to settle into a stupid sitcom in my bed with my puppy who has his own water glass (Figure 1)… a loud crash in the kitchen called me downstairs (we thought the cat had knocked over one of her daily glasses).
I rushed downstairs because, as usual, all three girls ignored our, “Clean up after your cat!” calls, and found myself standing in a trail of blood that led from the knife on the floor at the kitchen entryway all the way to the sink where my son stood, trying to flush out a wound so deep and scary that all I could do was grab a wad of paper towels and scream, “BRUCE!!!!! GET DOWN HERE NOW!!”
(No, I did not actually take a picture of the bloody knife. This is a reenactment)
Funny: The mulleted, heavily-tattooed paramedic whose job at the emergency room was to walk into the waiting room and scream out his mispronunciation of names, then rush back behind the desk to reread the names and try again, most times failing on the second attempt.
“Luceeero!!” No response. Breathless rush behind the desk. “Sandra (the a pronounced as in apple, heavy Southern drag to boot) Luceeeero?” No response. Breathless rush behind the desk. “Lu-SAR-oh?” “Oh, yo soy Sandra Lucero.”
“Rizzo! … Rizzo!… ” Breathless rush behind the desk. “Roos! Roos!”
“Do you mean Ruiz? I think that’s us.” (To the side: “Rizzo? Like in Grease? Have you seen Grease? Maybe we’ll have to watch it later.”)
Not Funny: Walking into my kitchen at 9:30 pm on a Friday night after bitching and screaming at my son, after posting a blog post, after my love-hate relationship with him, after everything I’ve done, and thinking, “Is he trying to harm himself?”
Because everything that I complain about means nothing.
Because every spot of blood splattered on my wall, on my tiled floor, on my heart, means everything.
Because if I lost him now, I would be as brokenhearted as if I lost one of the three babies I gave birth to.
Because I love him.
(And he did not harm himself. He is a boy. He ran across three countries to come to my home. And he was literally trying to catch a Japanese steel chef’s knife that was falling from the counter to the floor. Because he’s a boy. And he catches KNIVES.)
Funny: “Oh, I will call the actual police on you! You think I’m part of the DPD? I don’t work for the DPD, and you need to get out of here NOW!!! I will NOT be cussed at! I don’t have your stuff and I don’t know where it is! GET OUT NOW!!”
“Miss, what’s she yelling about?”
“This guy was looking for his stuff, and she doesn’t know where it is, and she wants to call the police on him because he used bad words.”
“See Miss, that’s why you shouldn’t use bad words.”
Not Funny: “This emergency room is so calm and quiet compared to how it is in Honduras.”
“What do you mean?”
“In Honduras, everyone in the emergency room is either dying or dead from gunshots and knife wounds. Everyone is screaming. And dying. Because the gangs have ruined their lives.”
Funny: The doctor asked us to come into the temporary room until we could get to the real “room behind a curtain” that had a bed. He was the only one so far who had attempted to speak Spanish to Fabian, and even though my Spanish is always broken, I don’t think it was as broken as his.
After asking about the cut, the incident, the pain, he asked, “Está numblado?” Fabian didn’t respond. He asked again. No response. “Está dormido?” “Sí, sí.”
After he wrapped it up, he told me he thought Fabian cut a nerve, and that was why it was numb. “But you know, I don’t know why he wouldn’t respond to me. I use that word all the time, ‘numblado,’ and usually I get some response.”
Fabian and I returned to the waiting room. I must admit that, other than dormido, I didn’t know the word for numb in Spanish. “The doctor was asking you if your finger was numblado, did you not understand?”
“Like, the sky is cloudy?”
“No, not nublado, numblado, because the word in English for dormido is numb. Numblado? Es una palabra?”
I pulled up Google Translate. “Numb: entumecido.”
And we were crying laughing. Because language is so hard. And the poor doctor took the word numb and added “-lado” and it sounds like the word for cloudy skies (nublado), not a slashed-nerve finger. And because it was almost midnight by then and he’d lost a lot of blood and we were exhausted and everyone around us was wearing a coronavirus mask and he just couldn’t understand why. And it was just… funny.
Not Funny: “I hate hospitals. I’ve seen too many people die in hospitals.”
His cousin. His other cousin. His friend. His everyone-in-his-life-he-can-think-of killed. By gangs.
Funny: Me telling the story to the girls over biscuits and gravy the next morning.
“Numblado? Numblado?”
And Fabian smiling like he’s not in pain, like it doesn’t matter, like life can go on because this scar will match all the other scars he’s acquired from his life lived in poverty searching for food, searching for transportation, searching for a reason to keep on keeping on.
Not Funny: Everything I just put on this page.
And life. Life is funny. (Not funny).
Do you know why he makes me so angry? Do you know why I screamed at him (during passing period) in front of the entire class? Why I was still yelling after the last bell, spilling the whole story to my two unwilling-to-listen-but-forced-to daughters, cuss words and all?
Because I love him.
And I want him to think of me, of all of us, when he doesn’t clean the cat litter or mop the floor. When he pours all the creamer I just bought into one cup of coffee. When he changes his doctor’s appointment that I rearranged my entire day around and had my mother drive across town to bring him to, and doesn’t tell me until two minutes after class STARTS.
I want him to stop running the damn space heater all night long (with the door to his room open) and costing us $100 extra a month.
I want him to care about learning English.
I want him to be my son, to be like my daughters who absolutely drive me crazy in every way and refuse to do chores and forget to turn in work and to tell their boss they can’t work when we have a ski weekend and rearrange their weekends with friends when ski weekends get canceled and then whine about having missed most of the ski season without actually skiing… And get near-perfect grades and would never change a doctor’s appointment without asking me or checking the calendar first.
Alas, I have four teenagers in my house, and one of them is a boy whom I barely know and from a culture I barely understand and from a not-more-than-a-day-in-advance plan that I didn’t take into account when I asked him to move out of the homeless shelter and into my home.
Alas, that $100 a month on electricity matters to me right now because my husband just got laid off from his job and we have until May 21 to live like kings and the rest of our lives to figure out how we’re going to pay for our mortgage and our health insurance, and Bernie lost Super Tuesday and the stock market shot up 1,100 points the very next day because investors care more about health insurance profits than HUMAN LIVES.
Alas, just when things couldn’t be worse at work or anywhere else, the 1998 Camry died, and now I have another weight to carry each day: the shuffling of more teens to every last event from track practice that he (at the last minute) signed up for to musical rehearsal to never-ending-hours of fast-food employment to driving them to school each day.
Alas, I did not raise this boy to check calendars.
And I want him to listen to me. I want him to think about how each phone call and acting-up-in-class-joke and putting-his-head-down-shutdown is a punch into every last dark hollow of my teacher-mother soul.
But it is almost 5 o’clock. And I am going to walk seven blocks and sell tickets to my baby girl’s musical because, yes, I needed one of my tickets comp’ed so I can pay for the space heater and not spend another $12.
And I am going to smile and wear this shirt in front of all the racist white people at her school.
And that is my happy hour for today.
second one driving
(more reluctant than the first)
we’ll see how this goes
He doesn’t tell me over the phone when I call him on Valentine’s night to ask for the wifi password for the cabin we’re staying at. Not after twenty minutes of Google-Siri-searching for how to share a password so our son can call his real parents at the appointed 8-o’clock time, something impossible to do without WhatsApp or wifi in this middle-of-nowhere mountain town.
He doesn’t make me a card or buy me flowers.
The next day, when three of us return from a bluebird ski day, he tells me he has started the taxes, but that he was tired, his back hurt, and he got discouraged and bored.
I make a list in my head of what he hasn’t done: thought of what to fix for dinner, gone to the store to buy the cheesecake ingredients for our daughter’s birthday, done the laundry, told the remaining-at-home-children to do some semblance of chores that would peel them away from their screens.
I take our son, alone, to the Honduran restaurant for our Valentine redo.
No one else wants to go.
On Sunday, I do all the things while Bruce visits his friend for hours. Walk the dog. Fight the weekend grocery store crowds to buy not only the cheesecake ingredients, but everything else on the list that’s accrued in the three days since we’ve visited, because with six people living under this roof, why the hell not? Start, fold, and finish three loads of laundry. Throw together the soon-to-be-cracked cheesecake and read, appallingly, that it is an eight-hour, not four-hour, cool time. Put raspberry compote on the stove to overflow for forty-five minutes. Scrub the shit out of the glass cooktop for another fifteen.
He won’t take the time to come with me to see Bernie because it took me thirteen years just to convince him to vote and another nine to push him farther left, but he still doesn’t have any faith in the future, let alone a singular politician who has spent his entire adult life fighting for people unlike himself.
He won’t come with me to waste all of our money on indoor skydiving, Izzy’s birthday gift, even though it would have been nice to have a second parent, like all the other families there, to take still shots while I took the video.
Instead he grumbles about how he wished we’d just bought the cheesecake from the New York deli instead of me making it because “You pay so that it’s perfect.”
Because mine is not.
Before he drops me at the light rail, he argues with me before reluctantly agreeing to apologize for the remark.
We go to bed with few words and wake throughout the night to the giggling screams of Izzy’s sleepover, each of us texting and yelling at her to stop.
We wake at the sound of his alarm set two hours too early.
I begin it all again. Walk the dog. Fix the breakfast. Put away the dishes.
Ten minutes before he needs to leave for work, I whimper as I say, “We only have one year left of her childhood,” and wipe tears to walk into the dining room. He follows me and pours out the brutal truth of his three-day grump.
“My boss told me on Friday that they’re going to cut four positions. No more voluntary cuts. Involuntary. Two of the positions include my job title.”
His voice cracks as he continues the long explanation of every possibility, and I see now that he has been carrying this load all weekend, fuck Valentine’s Day, fuck our daughter’s birthday, fuck all that is right with the world.
I think about what Bernie said last night, what I didn’t catch on video: “We all have families. And every family has problems. We are in this together. We are in this to think about and support everyone’s families, not just our own.”
And I know what Bruce carries is more than the likely possibility of him losing his job. It is the weight of this presidency, this evil presidency that plagues our society and keeps us from moving ahead just when we think we can move ahead.
I immediately think of two years ago when this loomed over our heads, and all the bitterness and anxiety entailed in those two months of stress and anticipation.
I think of the four years of ski passes. The six weeks in Spain. The three-four-week family vacations we have taken. The ski weekends. The going out to eat. The boy living in our basement.
And I know that all of those things combined might add up to a year of his salary if only we had saved the money.
Yet, for that one year of safety net, we had five years of living like kings after ten years of living paycheck to paycheck, and I wouldn’t change that for anything in the world.
I am so angry at him for not having hope. For trying to carry this weight for an entire weekend when I would have unloaded everything the moment I heard.
I am so in love with him for trying (quite pathetically) to protect me for two extra days because he knew that all I would do is spend most of the day up inside the bedroom trying to hide my tears from the girls.
Our good health insurance will be gone, and we can’t even begin to pay our mortgage on my salary, let alone everything else.
But it’s out there now. He’ll come home tonight to our magical Costco Caesar salad, wish our daughter happy birthday, and act like nothing is wrong.
And we will find a way to make this work. Because twenty-two years in, that is what we do.
Spain-exploring, childbearing, child-adopting, paycheck-to-paycheck, ski-trip, road-trip, voting-and-hoping, working-not-working, accruing-and-paying-debts…
That is what we do.
Tears or not. Silence or not. Apology or not.
That is what we do.
You were born on Presidents’ Day, making me a mother. And now we celebrate seventeen years on the seventeenth, another February Monday that teases us with sun in the city, snow in the mountains, and just one year left of childhood.
Just one year left to relish your youth, be irresponsibly wild while simultaneously mastering physics and calculus.
Just one year left to argue with your mama about screen time limits, driving rules, homework completion.
Just one year left to be the stern at the front of your sisters’ ship, leading the way towards a future none of us can predict.
How can it be seventeen years after this moment in the sun, rocking you in your jaundiced stupor, my baby who would never wake?
Just one year left of your childhood, a childhood filled with formal dresses (of your choosing) every day until age seven; of trips across continents and oceans; of making, keeping, and losing friends; of an ever-tumultuous relationship with school; of dancing and skating and skiing and snowboarding, but never hiking; of a first love, gained and lost; of always wanting more and finding a way to get it.
Just one year left for your mama to be able to call you her girl… Because you are so fast becoming a woman.
A woman who wants her hair braided while completing calculus so that it’s curly for the dance team.
A woman who wants to be an aerospace engineer or an Air Force pilot, a mother, a wife, a keeper of all of beauty’s secrets.
A woman who woke from her jaundiced infancy to fight for everything she wants, whether it be a better part-time job, a new dance partner, a different class set for senior year, or a friendship that has lasted since kindergarten.
As you turn seventeen on the seventeenth, I just wanted you to know that I love you. That you have made me more than a mother. You have taught me how to listen. How to have a stronger voice. How to raise a girl in the twenty-first century (with patience, love, and technology all mixed up into a tumble of confusion and hope).
You have just one year left of childhood, Isabella. Lucky for you, you already know how to fly.
Fly high, my girl. Fly high.
Happy seventeenth.
i walk my puppy,
fight weekend grocery store crowds,
and bake a cheesecake
before 10 a.m.,
i cook raspberry compote
and finish laundry
by noon, i’m ready
to begin this Sunday cleanse
and climb out of here
the city beckons
(no, no—the world beckons
for another chance)
our democracy
and the fate of our future
rest with how we vote
(even though it’s cracked,
my daughter’s birthday cheesecake
is one of many)
let this election
be one of many chances
to give us all hope
a Valentine game
with two of the four children
this magic cabin
(no romance tonight.
just a son he let me have.
love is beautiful.)
first, do calculus
then dance for the whole school
last, drive sister home
My boy loves to ski.
That should be the whole post, I know, because what else is actually important with this groundbreaking news from a person who’d never been outside of a tropical environment before seven months ago?
But it has been a hard week. It started with a $270 phone call to Honduras (yes, the phone company forgave my discrepancy in understanding here, bringing it down to $27). It continued with my child withdrawing (to the point of email contact from a math teacher who never contacts me) completely from math class, to juggling and standing on desks in science class where my colleague (covering a class) texted, “Man your son is a shit” to several outbursts and clownish behavior in the three hours I have him every afternoon.
This is what it comes down to: I have three daughters, and I do not understand how to raise a son.
Last night I took him to Walmart where we scored the final pair of snow pants for $10, and after we stood in the endless line, we arrived home to no dinner.
He fixed eggs for himself (his go-to meal), and I carved out an avocado to pair with my wine.
I mentioned, again, his behavior in all of his classes.
“But I am just being myself, Miss, and I can’t change who I am. And I always show you respect.”
“Do you show me respect when you return from a doctor’s appointment and shout across the room when everyone is taking a test, telling the whole class that you can’t write because of the shots you got? Do you show respect when you ask Melvin to tear off your bandaids? When your goal is to flirt instead of to learn?”
“No, Miss.”
“You are eighteen. And you can change your behavior. Not your personality. Your behavior. And the thing is… I already love you. I love you because you are my son. And I spend hours planning those lessons because I really care about everyone in that class learning English… Everyone including you. Do you understand?”
No response except visible tears that this boy will not allow to fall (though my three daughters pride themselves on regular tear-shedding).
“Oh, son. Give me a hug.” This sentence 100% in English as I pull him towards me in the middle of the kitchen, and Riona and her best friend witness the entire event, understanding nothing, but are too afraid to continue making their meringues, as he won’t let go.
He just holds me in that kitchen like he hasn’t been hugged in a hundred years.
And maybe he hasn’t.
“What did you say to him?” Riona asks when he finally releases me, opens the refrigerator, searches for hot sauce.
“I think I should tell you later. Who knows how much he really understands.”
“Really, Mama? I don’t think he understands us at all. He doesn’t act like it.”
He pulls his face away from the fridge: “Que pasa?”
We all laugh. Back to Spanish: “Do you know what we’re saying?”
“I understand some words, but not the whole conversation.”
“Do you know the word, ‘understand’ in English?”
“No.”
And that is it. That is my Saturday post. I knocked on his door at 5am and he was ready to sing me Spanish love songs all the way to Winter Park by 5:15. He learned how to ski in one day with his absentee fear and my broken Spanish, and what more could one ask for from a brokenhearted, ever-loving, muy-atletico, hijo hondureño?
Does he understand me?
A little.
Do I understand him?
I’m working on it.
But one thing I know:
I love him.
And that is better than any frost you will feel on your face. 
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