Mothering while mothered, Colombian mother-in-law style

My son cries at night and I rush to him, perhaps a little faster than I might otherwise, worried that she’ll hear him continue to cry and think I’m a bad mother. His nose drips or he lets out a tiny cute cough and I fear her silent reprisals, shaking head, and “pobrecito” as she wipes his nose with an old cloth diaper.

I’m not a pobrecito type of mom. I’m a “you’re okay,” an “ oh, you bonked your head,” a “boogah-boogah-booh,” smiles, smiles, smiles, wiggle the feet, tickle the ribs kind of mom.

Yesterday my husband, Eduardo, and I had Elisio out at Panera Bread so he could get some work done outside of the house, and a mother and daughter were at the next table commenting on how cute he was, how well he was sitting up in his high chair. It’s ridiculous how proud I was of these accomplishments I had little more to do with than my half of the contribution to the gene pool.

As I went to leave, I zipped Elisio up into his brand new Baby Gap brown snowsuit. It was 50 degrees outside. Now, when I left the house, I was opposed to the wearing of the snowsuit. I was angling for the option of the hand-me-down-ugly fleece elfish suit my boss gave me that would have kept Elisio perfectly warm on a sunny November day, but my mother-in-law seems to have gotten to my husband in the “I think he’s going to be cold” department, so out we go in the snowsuit.

Elisio is not fond of the snowsuit. Not only does it make him look like a cross between a tootsie roll and the Michelin man, he cannot move his arms or legs, his head sweats, and he barely fits in his car seat, even with the straps loosened all the way.

So the ladies in Panera Bread are watching us tag team the little guy into the snowsuit on a perfectly fine fall afternoon, and the mother comments on how she used to bundle her daughter up like that when she was a baby. I’m reminded of my mother-in-law when we were in Bogotá, Colombia over the summer and Elisio was just 2 1/2 months old and the entire family was hell bent on sending him out of the house in a comforter if we sent him out at all. It is permanently spring in Bogotá, Colombia, a nice 60 degrees, and everywhere I look the native population has their children wrapped in 17 wool blankets and wearing a ski mask to bed. How can they be wrong, mother-in-law logic tries to convince me, they live here all the time?

So while the Panera mom is reminiscing about the layers she sent her daughter out in, her daughter is shaking her head, and she suddenly remembers her old neighbor, a Jewish woman, she says, who used to put her kids out in the pram in the hallway in the winter to get them used to the cold.

“You got to get them used to the cold now,” she’d said, “or they’ll never be able to stand it.”

While I don’t plan on sticking Elisio in the driveway in his stroller in the snow, I’d rather him feel the cold and build up an immunity to it now than suffer the sniffles the rest of his life as soon as the thermometer dips below 75.

I’m reminded of a co-worker, who at 50 suffers from poor circulation and bad feet because she refused to come in from playing in the snow as a kid. Her toes literally froze one time too many and she is still paying the price for it.

I didn’t grow up with snow like we have in New England. For us down south, snow was a once a year occurrance, if that, an excuse to stay out of school, buy extra milk and bread, and roast marshmallows in the wood burning stove when the power inevitably went out. My mom would rummage through the hall closet for the mittens and hat when those two or three inches fell each year, and we’d roll around in the fresh stuff and then build the obligatory snowman before rushing back in to have the ice melt off our boots on the linoleum.

I don’t know what I’ll do when it actually gets cold here. I spent my own first New England winter depressed at the 4:00 p.m. sunsets and my husband’s insistence on shutting off the heat when we left each room. I will never again live in an apartment with room-by-room controlled thermostats – they may save electricity but they could have cost me my marriage.

I think of the three space heaters my mother-in-law bought us for our current apartment in the basement of their house and the blanket she purchased at J.C. Penny that I actually succeeded in getting her to return because I convinced her we wouldn’t use it. I don’t know how I’ll get Elisio over the threshold of the doorway when its freezing out if I have to give a five minute explanation and dodge all the follow-up calls when I tell her I’m not coming home for dinner when its 45.

I’m learning to live with her little intrusions into my thoughts. I make the bed in the morning more often than not these days and manage to wash my own dishes most of the time, unless she insists on clearing them away while I’m still sitting at the table as if I were at a restaurant and she were my server.

I anticipate that she will want to feed my son as soon as he makes the first squeak two hours after his last meal – hence my husband’s chubbiness in all the photos of him up to age 12 when he went to military school – and I keep careful track of when he last ate and when, 3 1/2 to 4 hours later he will need to eat again so I can report to her his schedule. It doesn’t always work. Today I left at 10:30 for the gym, with clear indication that he had eaten at 9:30 and wouldn’t need food before I got back, only to come home and find him sitting up on her bed, surrounded by pillows, her breaking off pieces of baby rice cracker and stuffing them in his mouth. “I’m giving him a cracker,” she said in Spanish, looking only slightly guilty, when I arrived.

I keep reminding myself of how well my husband turned out – thoughtful, kind, intelligent – and that my own parents’ style of not believing in too much sympathy or going to the doctor, or eating candy, or drinking soda means that at 30 I hide candy wrappers in the ashtray of the car when I leave the gas station so my husband won’t see them, and I insist that my trip to the emergency room with a broken toe was a waste of time because all they gave me was an x-ray and a Velcro boot.

We’ve convinced her to stop frying everything over the last year, mostly by refusing – politely – to eat things if she did. Next on the agenda is salt, though I can tell she’s cut down on it and she’s torn. Every time she cooks something with less than two packets of “Sazon,” whose main ingredient is salt, she asks us several times if the food is too bland. It seems to be her greatest fear, that we’d have to add seasoning at the table. For me, it’s a way of expressing consideration for other people’s sense of taste to allow them to salt their own food. But here, I don’t even get to serve my own food. I have to hover at the stove when its being plated to control the portion or risk offending her by not eating everything put in front of me.

I remember when we were dating and then first living together and Eduardo would call home. He was so distantly polite with his parents when he dutifully dialed their number every night. Every day was the same basic conversation: How are you? Have you talked to any family today? Anything new? I was surprised that there was none of the gossiping or chatting that I do with my family when I call. Then again, there was also none of the drama. I wondered why he never shared any details with them; why, when he went in for minor surgery to remove his tonsils, he didn’t even want to tell them.

Now that I understand his rationale of keeping details to a minimum with the champion of all worriers that is his mother, there is no option to continue that practice. Our proximity has made me not only defensive, but evasive and occasionally untruthful. I always overestimate how long I’ll be gone so I can get home early and be the hero. Sometimes I put Elisio in several layers of clothes, only to remove at least one when she’s out of sight. I pretend to love outfits with, for example, a combination of camouflage and moose decals, because she bought them. I put them on him immediately to avoid continuous questions about when they will be worn. I lost five more pounds to fit into the pants she bought me after Elisio was born so I don’t have to be reminded that, no, they don’t fit yet.

Motherhood is complicated when you feel that you continue to be mothered, particularly by someone who is nothing like your own mom. Good or bad, my mom’s the one who mothered me, the one whose example I mentally turn to when I’m uncertain about what to do. But she’s over a thousand miles away wishing she could see her grandson more than once every two or three months, and its hard not to be embittered when after a few hours my mother-in-law reaches out her arms at me holding him, and coos, in her pobrecito voice “Ay, mijito, I haven’t held you all day.”

I intended to end these thoughts with some revelation, but I think it’s premature. I’m afraid I won’t reach any such conclusion until I’m out from under the floorboards that creak when she walks down the hall at night and the walls that echo with the sounds of her morning prayers.

My Colombian mother-in-law must think I’m a slob

My husband and I recently rented out our condo and moved into a basement apartment in his parents’ home in anticipation of the birth of our son. In the weeks following Elisio’s birth by Cesearean, thanks to my Colombian mother-in-law’s help, I was blessed to have no other responsibilities than nursing and taking care of my son. And now that I’ve returned to work she is a huge help in watching him when his stay-at-home pHd candidate dad is not available, and I never arrive home from the office that dinner is not already on the table.

So I feel guilty resenting the fact that she does all our laundry – including ironing my husband’s underwear and the baby’s onesies – and cleans the floors, bathrooms, furniture, mirrors, walls… you get the point… in our apartment. I’m torn, because it is certainly nice to have the extra time to spend with my husband and son, but it does seem like a passive aggressive way of communicating that I’m not a good wife, at least in the house cleaning department.

I guess I should have seen this coming, though. The first time she visited us when we were living out-of-state, she cleaned out my husband’s entire closet while he was at work, removing everything, dusting every nook and cranny, and folding and ironing each article of clothing. Once, while he was out of the country and I went to visit my family in Atlanta, I made the mistake of mentioning to her, jokingly, before I left that our place was a mess. I returned to find she had used her “emergency” key to enter and give the condo a floor to ceiling scouring the likes of which I’m certain it had never seen.

All of this was recently put in perspective when we visited my husband’s family in Colombia. (Note: she is a 68-year-old Colombian [American citizen now] who has been in the US for 33 years). Staying with my husband’s uncle, the floors were mopped EVERY DAY, and everything was ironed, down to the washcloths. A cousin of my husband is working in Spain now and her employer’s expectation – which she does not find at all unusual – is that she wipe down every surface in the home every day, and this treatment involves wiping out the corners and above the moulding with a q-tip.

So, is it her age, her Colombian-ness, the fact my husband is an only child, or a combination of all three? I don’t generally think of myself as a slob, but four years into our marriage and now in new proximity, I’m still learning to reconcile my own vision of myself as a wife with hers.

Not rotting bananas

Am I bicultural because I speak Spanish or because I can look at a stock photo of green plantains and not see a hunk of rotting bananas?  Because when I see it I think of standing in front of the stove lifting hot disks from popping oil and placing them on a salted napkin before pressing them and frying them again.  Because when I see the brown spots, I think of how the skins will eventually go black, the inside will go pink, and they’ll get sweet and bake inside the oven with white, squeaky cheese. 

 

Or am I bicultural because when I was in Colombia this summer I mentioned to my husband’s aunt that I was dying for something green and she said, “We have plantains,” and I laughed.  She was completely serious in offering this starchy, heavy food as a vegetable when I was Jonesing for some lettuce, bell peppers, even broccoli – all of which I found when she left the house and I raided the fridge and made myself a salad. 

 

How is it that this Georgia peach understands an Ecuadoran plantain?  Am I holding the key to some mystery that will unlock an ever-increasing share of the U.S. market? How can I take this culinary knowledge and, as a communications professional, bridge cultures for my clients and my team?

 

It is interesting what discussions around the design table reveal. One member of our team, from Argentina, reminded me that its all meat all the time there, and the plantains might not strike the same chord as they would with Dominicans or Guatemalans who make up a large part of the Hispanic market in Rhode Island.  Another colleague, a native of New England, said she’d tried plantains once and didn’t like them, but perhaps she’d prepared them wrong.  When she told me she’d eaten them raw, she looked shocked when I replied that was the equivalent of eating a raw potato.

These conversations and this experience also reveal in a new way the importance of knowing and targeting your market.  Where this piece would be distributed was key to what it should include, not only in terms of being offered in Spanish as well as English, but the images that would be chosen and how they would be represented. 

 

While our non-Latin clients and some members of our team might initially see it and want to break out the Photoshop to smooth out the spots, a large portion of our Hispanic target would see it hanging in their kitchen and look over to a large aluminum bowl on the counter filled with the same green staple waiting to be prepared.

Perhaps I do hold some key to unlocking the Hispanic market.  But if I do, it is just the willingness, like my colleague, to try something unfamiliar, to sit with gusto at the table set with dishes that, growing up, I might not have been able to pronounce.

This I believe

I believe in old trucks. Merle Haggard, Jolly Ranchers, dirt roads and horns that go “uh-ooo-guh” when you honk them with your foot. Seven years of rust-colored primer as a paint job over the sea foam green. Whitewall tires. Lawn chairs in the truck bed on top of a thin layer of pinestraw, while we’re parked on a hilltop watching fireworks on the fourth of July. An old orange cooler full of Pepsi and half-melted ice. Sunglasses, cowboy boots, fishing poles in the gun rack. A crack in the windshield made with my head at a sudden stop before car seats or even seat belts were law.Chevy meant something then: heft, metal, vinyl seats my legs suck to on summer Saturdays. An engine so powerful I was never allowed to drive it, even when I was 21 and it was up for sale.

I believe in cornbread. A greased cast iron skillet that’s cured from generations of cooking. An egg cracked one-handed. A recipe measured in seconds spent pouring the buttermilk, the consistency of the batter, a peek in the oven at the color, the sheen.

I believe in popcorn, front porch steps, backyard gardens of cucumbers and tomatoes. Church on Sunday morning, Nascar and baseball on Sunday afternoon.

I believe in family because of all these memories. My father with his head under the hood of a pickup truck. Countless evenings I watched my mother, then trying for years to replicate her cornbread on my own. The fight my sister and I had when we were both too young for school over who would get to hold the prize -winning cucumber for the photo, her face turned and tearful, mine posing, a grin full of teeth. The fishing tournament she won at age seven, beating out all the grown men in my dad’s Sunday School class.

I believe in all these things though I’m now distanced from them by time, geography, and separation. My parents are in the process of divorce after all these decades. My sister has a child of her own who is older than I was when she and I fought over that cucumber. And I am here, a Georgia girl with a Southerner’s nostalgia in this winter place called Rhode Island that I have grown to love. The family I’ve created is with me – my husband, our cats, our infant son – and it’s left to us to find that same sense of family through our own rituals of the senses in years to come. This I believe.