Adolescence
Testing the patience of parents and teachers was my game. My earliest report cards described someone who was “still learning to practice self control.” I was intense, self-confident and proudly weird, until I wasn’t. Puberty hit me late, which meant I grew 8 inches in high school and my weight couldn’t catch up. I called it being horizontally challenged. My hair was unruly and curly, my style confused.
I learned how to punt bullying about my skinniness by perfecting the art of self deprecation. Do your parents feed you? – No, my mom is saving up for college. I want to be skinny, but not as skinny as you. – What, you don’t want to be a hairy walking stick? A human yield sign? I have to walk by a place twice to make a shadow… etc.
My Greek friend’s mother once informed mine at a sleepover pickup that my big hair was sucking the nutrients from my body, urging her to cut it short. My mother nodded politely, once a skinny herself who grew up in Spain, and was used to intrusive advice. When we’d go back to visit family, nosey women would saddle up to share their fool-proof tricks for weight gain. Once, a classmate commented that I looked like a Holocaust survivor. Which was a bit on the nose, given that my grandfather escaped a concentration camp.
Through it all, my mother stood her ground. Even when I was cruel to her. She ignored her family’s sentiments that my hair was too “messy”. She told me I was beautiful, which I didn’t believe. She shared her own painful adolescence stories, which felt impossibly far away to me. She could be blunt too. My legs were too bowlegged to stand straight in photos, my questionable color and pattern combinations were migraine inducing. But when I came to her at eleven, desperate to rid myself of my Frida Kahlo-inspired facial hair, she calmly showed me how it was done.
When women traded judging glances over my body at the pool and beach, she encouraged me to buy the cutest bikinis. The Spaniard in her demanded that no matter your body type, everyone deserves to maximize their tan, a lesson I wish Americans would learn. That patient woman, who detests clothes shopping, would diligently take me to every clothing store within driving distance, holding me when I came out sobbing, and buying 10 of whatever fit me when it rarely happened. Eventually, with age and experience, I learned to trust her compliments, which she never gave unless she meant it. Plus, she gave me the best comebacks (see above).
I know she wasn’t as lucky with my now 96 year old yaya, a formidable, mentally unstable, semi-illiterate civil war survivor prone to endearing expressions like, “If you leave the house past 11pm people will think you’re a prostitute.” She regularly sent my mother to the doctors in a desperate plea to fatten her up, taking her undesired thinness as a personal failure. My bisabuela was allegedly even worse, having lost both of her parents to the 1918 Spanish influenza, forced to raise her ten siblings, marry at sixteen, and have ten children of her own.
They both loved in the ways they knew how, but their daughters suffered. My mother instead chose to break the cycle of pain reserved for and inflicted solely on the women in our family. I’m grateful, but sometimes I wish I could give back some of the self-confidence she built up for me. I can share.