Writing The Mother Wound: A Mother’s Day Anthology
“Bending Down” by Jessica Alazraki.
I was sitting in my red-walled living room reading everything I could find about grief. I had recently lost my brother to a fifteen-year heroin addiction and my mother had disappeared from my life again, as she had so many times before. I was in the darkest place of my life, and was trying to climb my way out. I threw myself into literature and hiking, the two things that had saved me so many times before.
I knew Cheryl Strayed’s work from her memoir Wild, but I was new to her essays. I stopped when I read the lines in “Heroin/e:” “It is perhaps the greatest misperception of the death of a loved one: that it will end there, that death itself will be the largest blow. No one told me that in the wake of that grief other griefs would ensue.” I read them again. Wrote them down in my journal. Posted them above my desk.
My brother Juan Carlos was my Superman. No one had ever loved me the way he did, relentlessly, with no conditions or requirements. He looked out for me the way the world told me my mother should, but this wasn’t my reality. Carlos was my first best friend and confidante, so losing him did something to me that I have never come back from.
The loss was exacerbated by my mother’s behavior. In her grief, she pushed me away. Those last few months of my brother’s life, I’d fooled myself to believe that maybe we could finally have a functional relationship. We took turns caring for Carlos, taking him to appointments, visiting him, and taking him food when he was hospitalized. At one point, we went together to get my brother a fancy juicer for his new beginning; he swore he was going to get clean, eat better, care for himself more. We joined forces to help him. On the train on our way to Macy’s, as I people watched and stared at the ads above their heads, I looked over at my mother and realized I couldn’t recall the last time she and I spent time together, just us, without the motivation of caring for Carlos. That all went to shit when my brother died. Her grief was cruel, angry, like she resented me for living.
Strayed gave me language for something I didn’t yet understand—my brother's death had unleashed griefs I’d been carrying, and they came rushing at me with a vigor that made me crumble. That grief for me was over my complicated, often antagonistic relationship with my mother.
People have asked: Was it always bad? Have you ever had a good relationship with your mother? What I can tell you is this:
My mother was on birth control for four months before she realized she was pregnant. The doctors told her to abort, concerned about the effects the pill would have on the fetus. I was born healthy. Decades later I would learn that my mother doesn’t remember the delivery. When she woke up two days later, the nurses pushed me into her arms, but she didn’t want to hold me. “I think I had postpartum depression,” she revealed. But this was 1975. This wasn’t a thing then.
It didn’t take long for the symptoms to show up—projectile vomiting, diarrhea, dehydration, fever. Mom told me of her carreras to the hospital when I was so weak, I couldn’t raise my head. But no one could figure out what was wrong with me. A doña told her about a doctor, who referred her to a hospital in Queens. One day, after a full day at work in the factoría, she went to visit me in the NICU. The doctors had placed the IV through my scalp because the veins in my arms and legs were too weak to hold a needle. Nodes on my chest monitored my vitals. My body was bruised from the needle pricks. She says I looked like I hadn’t been touched tenderly the entire day. The doctors told her I wasn’t going to make it. My mother got on her knees and prayed: Dios mío, si mi hija va sufrir, llévatela.
Something came over her. She knew she had to get me out of there. She started yanking the nodes off of me. The hospital staff thought she’d gone mad. She had to sign a release form so she couldn’t sue the hospital if the worst happened. They created a makeshift board so my mother could carry me because my bones were so weak, I couldn’t be held to my mother’s chest. That’s how mom carried me on two trains, more than an hour ride, to Columbia Presbyterian’s Baby Hospital, holding me on a board that she held out in front of her, her arms bent at the elbow.
There, an enzyme specialist visiting from Boston diagnosed me with a metabolic disorder—I was born without enzymes to digest my food. I was in the hospital for much of my first year of life. When I was finally released, I was put on a special diet of yucca water. Mom had to grind the yucca every morning and wait until it settled. Then she scooped up the cloudy water that remained and fed it to me. When I responded well to that, mashed avocado was added to my diet. Mom hunted the city looking for aguacate when it was out of season.
I am alive because of my mother.
My mother was 22 years old with three children, one who was so sick, she had to quit her job to care for. It’s through writing about her and her story, her life in Honduras and when she came to this country, that I can now see her as a woman with deep traumas who did the best she could with what she had. Still, I spent much of my childhood terrified of her and her rages. I knew at a very young age that something had happened to my mother, and she’d never recovered.
“Las niñas vienen a este mundo a sufrir,” she once told me.
I can empathize with my mother’s journey, while also knowing that the girl I once was suffered as a result of her trauma, and the woman I am today carries those wounds. These truths are not mutually exclusive.
It took me a lot of intentional healing work, writing and therapy to get to the place where I can write these truths about my mother and our relationship. That started with my searching after Carlos’s death. I wanted to understand what it was I was enduring. I needed to know that I wasn’t alone. I was looking for a way to survive. That’s how I found the term “mother wound” and the research around it. I started amassing the information, and quickly found that much of it was white and cis-heteronormative. How did legacies of poverty, colonialism, racism, slavery, the horrors of immigration, homophobia, etc., shape and exacerbate the mother wound? I dug deeper, and found answers in novels, memoirs, personal essays and plays by black and brown women. I read them voraciously—Toni Morrison, Jaquira Díaz, Cherie Moraga, Patricia Smith, Reyna Grande. And thus I began to birth the Writing the Mother Wound class, that focuses on the mother wound through the lens of race, class, sexuality, and citizenship.
We are taught to sacrifice ourselves at the altar of la madre. We are told from infancy, “solo hay una madre.” But what about those of us whose mother didn’t care and support us in the ways we needed? What about those of us who still carry those wounds and need to process these experiences through our writing?
The writers in this series have all participated in a Writing the Mother Wound class. They too have sought to give language to this wound they carry that has shaped their lives so profoundly. They too have found healing and, I dare say, redemption, in writing their stories.
We chose the three pieces to give a range of motherhood and craft choices. They show the stages of motherhood, or rejection thereof; and also offer different approaches to writing the mother wound: an IVF journey, a food piece, and a spiritual one.
Mother wound work isn’t about dragging our mothers or blaming them for our missteps. It is an attempt to understand why we are the way we are, and how we can be better, for ourselves, our communities, our futures.
Writing the Mother Wound is about remembering our mothers through stories about food, our connection to the earth and to spirit. It’s about remembering that the best part of them is also in us and we can lean on that, harness that energy to move forward, more whole and able to take on life’s challenges and embrace the beauty and the love with more honesty and authenticity.
Writing the Mother Wound is grounded in the belief that storytelling is healing. May we all be better for it.
–Vanessa Mártir
“bitter oranges”
by jo reyes-boitel
My mother always said she had horse’s hair and I would laugh because I thought horse’s hair was super soft. Hers was more like skunk or goat. Thick. Bristly, but shiny. It moves as one, like an animal breathing—in then out—as fingers pass through. Her skin dewy, fresh from the shower. She smelled like soap, the scent lingering on her skin for hours. When she cooked, her fingertips smelled of sweating onions, or the cold, wet smell of meat. Sometimes a distant cigarette. She always smoked outside, even in the coldest months, stepping away from her own exhales to avoid the lingering scent.
I was born in Minnesota. An outlier, of course. Born in Havana, the island became a myth for my mother. In my life with her I’ve seen her choose other places to temporarily call home. Always Florida, in one way or another. Homestead sometimes, Miami proper when she feels free. We are in Central Texas, which is an endurance. Like bitter oranges which have a tantalizing appearance, but leave an impossible tartness in the mouth. Sour. She’s made do but never cared for this place.
For Christmas, I special ordered a couple of pounds of bitter oranges and was set to make dulce de naranja agria. It’s my mother’s favorite dessert. My grandfather would make it over several hours until the house smelled like orange syrup. I scraped away the orange zest until my hands were sticky with its oil. I scooped out the flesh and membrane to make mojo later. I cleaned the rind out, cutting it into quarter moons. They sat through three cycles of rolling boils for hours, until they became ghosts of themselves. Finally, they could be doused in sugared water and boiled down once more with cinnamon sticks. A sweetness thought unfeasible.
I placed it in a decorative glass container with an orange ribbon. My mother bites into one of the sugared skins and tells me it’s like a gift from her father, my grandfather, who by this time has been gone twenty years. Then she is silent. Her face creases and her look has moved from remembrance to anger. I don’t know what is bothering her. “I shouldn’t have had kids,” she finally says to me, not looking in my direction. She took a role she never wanted and somehow, she thought she was expected to hold the weight of that decision until the lilt of freedom was truly gone. Then she says to me: “You are so nice. I give advice and you listen, but you don’t take any of it. You’ll do what you want, I guess.”
“The Worst that Can Happen”
By Connie Pertuz Meza
Mami sat at the edge of the bed. Right beside her I sat, legs dangling, wondering when I’d be old enough to touch the ground. Already at six I knew not to swing my legs. I never wanted Mami to be mad, yell and call me a necia. Mami smelled of Jean Nate, her hair damp, and part of her neck was dotted with droplets from the shower, dressed in a bata the color of a bruise, and plastic chancletas.
“You know the worst thing that can happen to a child? Lo más peor?” Mami spoke out loud. She was staring at the white wall ahead of her. The way she sat reminded me of play dough before you rolled it into a shape. While it was nothing new for Mami to stare far away, her body never looked limp.
I turned my head in her direction, but if Mami noticed, she made no point to show it.
“Lose their mother. It’s the worst.” Mami’s voice trailed off. Her eyes fixed ahead, as if she was watching something only she could see.
I remained quiet, despite wanting to point out to Mami how her own mother was still alive, even if I had only met Abuela Repa once, Mami sent her money every month to Colombia, bragged about having built her mother a house in el pueblo con baño y todo.
Mami was silent before she spoke again, “If your sister and you were to lose me, I have a plan.” Mami turned to me.
Seeing this as an invitation, I shifted in her direction, reaching for her hands on her lap, tugging at one until my small hand rested in her grasp. Mami’s hands were veiny and tough from what Mami said was “la vida de perro que le tocó.” She didn’t swat my hand away. Nor did she welcome it. This absence of presence became familiar and what I would misunderstand to be love.
“I will ask Dios to take you and your sister with me if I die. He does that in special circumstances, when children are involved. To spare them the pain of being motherless.” Mami dropped my hand and clasped her own as she thought of Diosito.
I sat there on the edge of the bed, my hand discarded; yet still reaching. My stomach bounced as if it had grown legs, jumping up and down inside of me. I did not doubt Mami talking to God. Mami was always talking about how God spoke to her in dreams, whispered things to her, and even placed ideas in the corner of her skull, right below the earlobe. I wondered, if she could talk to God, why could she not ask the Almighty to spare her life, and in turn the life of her two daughters? I thought of my eight-year-old sister somewhere in the living room watching television. I also thought of Papi and all his drinking and staying out late, and I felt loneliness invade my heart and seep into my bones. I leaned my toes towards the ground, desperate to feel something beneath me. All the while I felt myself fading.
“Your Body is a Battleground”
By Lucy Rodriguez-Hanley
“Do you want to know the gender?” Dr. B, my OBGYN asked over the phone.
I was certain I was carrying a boy.
The results of the noninvasive prenatal test were supposed to take two weeks to process. I had not had a bout of anticipatory anxiety; dreading the worst-case scenario of the genetic probabilities that came with a geriatric pregnancy. Less than a week later, I got the call from Dr. B while I watched The Hunting Ground, a documentary about the rape epidemic on college campuses in the United States. I rubbed my belly comforted by the thought that it was going to be easier to raise a feminist son than a daughter who would not get raped.
I breathed a sigh of relief when she said all chromosomes were normal and there were no trisomies. After two miscarriages, and three failed IVF cycles, it looked like IVF number five was going to work.
When Dr. B said I was having a girl, my heart sank. We spent a small fortune on pre-implantation genetic testing prior to the fourth IVF cycle. I wanted a daughter, that was the reason we put in an excellent male embryo and a fair female embryo instead of the two excellent male embryos the reproductive endocrinologist suggested.
“A girl will give you horrible morning sickness to prepare you for the heartache she will cause you,” Mami said to my sister Sonja when she was pregnant with my niece.
“A girl won’t let you look pretty when you’re pregnant because she's already stealing your beauty, that’s why you don’t look too cute,” my sister-in-law told my sister Ona when she was pregnant with my other niece.
I had no morning sickness and plenty of pregnancy glow. I bought into the Dominican myth passed around by the women in my family and convinced myself I was having a boy.
From the moment I found out I was having a daughter, I worried.
How will I protect my girl from the patriarchy that will disregard her NO?
How will I protect her from men who make decisions about her ovaries because her body, as artist Barbara Kruger stated, is a battleground?
When the reproductive endocrinologist suggested we transfer the two A+ male embryos because they had the highest chance to implant, my husband and I agreed. But IVF number four resulted in a miscarriage so bloody, I had to reupholster the light taupe driver seat of my car.
When I decided that the fifth round of IVF was going to be my last, I dismissed my doctor’s opinion. The science was flawed and favored the boy embryos. I chose to transfer a boy and a girl, but when I got a positive pregnancy test, my unconscious bias took over and incorrectly assumed the boy implanted.
I was already failing her by assumption. Dismantling the patriarchy had to start with me. I had to rise above the internalized traumas and prejudices to be able to mother my daughter.
Author Bios (in order of appearance):
Vanessa Mártir is a NYC based writer, editor and educator. She is currently completing her memoir, A Dim Capacity for Wings, and chronicles the journey at vanessamartir.blog. A five-time VONA/Voices and two-time Tin House fellow, Vanessa’s work has been widely published, including in The NY Times, The Washington Post, Longreads, The Rumpus, Bitch Magazine, Smokelong Quarterly, the VONA/Voices Anthology, Dismantle, and the NYTimes Bestseller Not That Bad, edited by Roxane Gay. Vanessa is the recipient of a 2019 Bronx Recognizes Its Own (BRIO) Award in Creative Nonfiction, a 2019 AWP Kurt Brown Award in Creative Nonfiction and a 2013 Jerome Foundation Award for T&W Artists. She is the creator of the Writing Our Lives Workshop and the Writing the Mother Wound movement. She teaches her classes in person in NYC and online. Vanessa has partnered with Tin House and The Rumpus to publish WOL alumni, and with Longreads to publish Mother Wound essays. Vanessa has also served as guest editor of Aster(ix) and The James Franco Review. When she's not writing or teaching, you can find Vanessa in the woods, listening to and learning from the land.
jo reyes-boitel is a poet, essayist, and playwright. jo is also a queer, mixed-Latinx parent working in community, a former music researcher, and amateur hand percussionist. jo’s work includes Michael + Josephine, a novel in verse (FlowerSong Press, 2019) and the forthcoming chapbook mouth (Neon Hemlock, 2021), as well as the recently produced operetta she wears bells. Publications include The Ice Colony, OyeDrum, Huizache, Scalawag Journal, and Chachalaca Review. As of 2021 jo is a member of the Macondo Writers Workshop and begins her MFA with UT-Rio Grande Valley in Fall 2021.
Connie Pertuz Meza, a Colombian American writer, inspired to pen pieces about her life, family, and ancestors. A NYC public school educator, a mother of two teenagers, daughter of a mother who taught herself to read with a Bible, and a journalist father. Connie’s writing appeared in The Rumpus, Kweli Literary Journal, Lunch Ticket, Women Who Roar, Herstryblg, Raising Mothers, Dreamers Creative Writing, Voices In The Middle, The Acentos Review, MUTHA, and several anthologies. Connie is a three-time VONA alum, Tin House participant, working on a semi-autobiographical YA novel, and staff writer for Hispanecdotes and guest writer for Epifania Magazine.
Lucy Rodriguez-Hanley is a Dominican American creative non-fiction writer, filmmaker and mother of two. Her memoir in progress, LATE BLOOMER explores the themes of migration, assimilation and maternal rage. She advocates for representation of BIPOC women and non-binary writers. She is the Chapters Liaison for Women Who Submit, and has a Leadership role with the Long Beach Literary Arts Center. www.lucyrodriguezhanley.com/