Sunday/Monday Scribblings-When I was wee

How much of your story is yours, and how much is lore? Because I can remember so many things from when I was wee. And yet I know that, factually, I wasn’t there. It was more like I was the guardian spirit of the stories, just off stage, silently laughing or shaking my head. It’s a bit like hearing so much about a movie or a television show that you feel you had the experience even if you never saw a frame of it.

If you want to imagine me at all, imagine me as an infant pulling over a somewhat-reluctant set of 4 people to another country via the planned miracle of her birth--using my diaper as a rope, perhaps. My family, like many others, came to this country in shifts--my father first, then my mother, and then three long years later, my parents were finally able to go back to Colombia and bring over my siblings.

I try to remember what it must have been like, knowing that I had a whole family elsewhere, knowing that my mother must have been sick with longing for them, even as she buried her nose in my infant plumpness and tried to lose herself for a moment. Maybe I sat in my playpen, squinting through the mesh walls, watching my mother put her head on the kitchen table and weep while she could, before my father came home from another day at the factory. Maybe she leaned down and showed me photos of her other children, carefully keeping them out of my grabby little starfish hands, and told me stories. Maybe that’s when my fascination with stories began.

So many impressions from those early days--which are my own memories and which are the softly-whispered bedtime tales about an absent brood? Does it matter?

I remember flying to Colombia for the first time--to reunite with my never-seen brother and sisters and to bring them back to the states. I almost wrote "home" but of course, we weren’t bringing them home. In fact, I was the chubby interloper from another country, stealing them away from all they knew and changing the comforting pattern of their family life. They were told flatly to love me, even though they had missed the beguiling baby years, faced instead with an unsteady toddler who launched herself at them with a torrent of words in a language they only hesitantly understood from repetitions in the classroom.

My arrival was greeted by my extended family with a combination of tolerant affection and mocking. I was a living sign of my parents’ changed status--my existence meant that they’d all be headed to the Promised Land, the US. So they were charmed by my swaying on my rounded little legs, singing "Happy Birthday" and nursery rhymes learned from Sesame Street. They were also a little scornful of what were seen as my mother’s new affectations--keeping me from playing alongside the road with the neighborhood children, eating Gerber while other family babies gleefully chomped on bistek. I was soft, vulnerable, an easy target for the other kids (and adults) who maybe had also dreamed of moving to El Norte, but lacked my Golden Ticket-self.

I wish I could remember what that first meeting with my brother and sisters was like--that’s one of the stories that never gets related much. My Mami recites facts from that day--how thin my sisters had become in her absence, how sophisticated Older Sister appeared, how dangerously like a man Oldest Brother seemed now, even as he bit back tears to see Mami again. But, I want the full fairy tale experience. How did everyone feel? What exactly did everyone do and say? I’m sure she remembers every moment, but some events invite silence.

Three year olds are great at making up their own explanations when none seem forthcoming. I’m not sure how I reconciled this new family, the endless beach and the narrow passageways of uneven pavement in front of my abuela’s store with the raucous city streets where my mother popped my stroller above the high curbs and tried to keep me out of the snow. Maybe I didn’t have to--maybe I just trusted that what I saw, what was in front of me, was reality, plain and simple. Reality was the buzzing florescent light in my grandmother’s small kitchen. Reality was the lazy ceiling fans. Reality was a hundred arms passing me back and forth like a doll, arms I only vaguely remember.

Middle Sister (before she became Punkish) was especially distressed at my arrival. After all, she had been the baby of the family before I was born, so she had the most to lose. Jealously, she watched me get all of the attention that had been accorded to her. In her ten year old mind, I was the reason she had been deprived of her mother’s hugs and her father’s smiles for three years. Ten year olds have a wonderful way of cutting through the fog of adult explanations and honing in on the essential. I’m sure the fact that she was saddled with babysitting duties didn’t endear me to her either. So she made sure to hiss in my ears that I was the ugliest baby ever, that my cousin was beautiful, and that my parents only wanted another baby so that they could live in the US with "real" children, i.e. not me.

So of course it makes sense that I was instantly besotted, and that one of my first clear memories of this time period would star her. The kids were playing, and needed to run home in time to make it to lunch. I couldn’t run very fast, so she picked me up. Finding me heavy, she tried to throw me to our other cousin, running behind us. I remember the sickening thrill of flying through the air, and landing with a gravel crunch on the road. All of the cousins circled around me, as I huh-huh-huhed my sobs. Options were discussed. Leave me there? Call a tia or tio? I think that’s when I stopped being an abstraction for her, the sister who Was Not and then Was, and became a fleshy, bleeding reality.

I don’t remember what they decided, but I do still have the scar. And my experience of flying through the air like the heroine of any fairytale, showing my sister that I might have been soft, but I would not break. And memories of my newly discovered family, back when I was wee.