to be a woman

Something terrible has happened to every person who has ever loved my mother.

Her first boyfriend suffocated in the icy grip of death to some respiratory illness. He was only seventeen. Her second boyfriend was paralyzed from the neck down after a car accident. Then, my mother married Omar. On the day she found out she was pregnant with my older brother, her husband died in a car accident.

He was impatient, turned to soon, and another car collided with his, killing him instantly.

When she shared all of this with me, she confessed that she was only able to eat because my brother was growing inside her belly. She took care of herself because her body was no longer her own, but housing another living being. Yes, her husband had passed away, but her only dream in life was to be a mother. My older brother saved my mother’s life.

My grandmother has always been a superstitious woman. It’s more common than you’d think in Venezuela. I knew my grandmother avoided cracks in the road and feared black cats with a passion. What I didn’t know was that when my mother’s life seemed to be aligned with tragedy, my grandmother took her to see a witch. The witch agreed with my grandmother’s diagnosis; my mother was cursed.

Leave it to the world to blame a woman for tragedy.

My mother told me about the experience, the memory she only recalled after I told her about the Hoodoo book I was reading for a literature class. She recounted how the witch burned incense all around her, singing incantations she could no longer recall. When my grandmother and mother left, the witch instructed my mother to sleep the next couple of nights wearing only her left sock.

If she was cursed, the witch must have broken it.

My brother was three years old when my mother met my father. They found each other on the recently developed internet, in online chat rooms. Without knowing what the other looked like, my father traveled down to Venezuela to meet my mother for the first time. She told me how she was scared and embarrassed about it; she was worried about what Omar’s family would make of it, dating some random stranger from the United States that she found off the internet.

It was unheard of back then.

But they got married, nonetheless, in October. And then I was born in September the following year. Now, my parents have been married for twenty-three years. They’ve been in love for twenty-three years—an important distinction that hasn’t gone unnoticed by my friends when they visit.

For the last year, my father has been sick. Very sick. And of course, I worry for my father, for myself, and for my siblings. But most of all, I worry for my mother. Her own worries roll off her tongue when she enters my room, brown eyes wet and leaking.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she confesses to me.

I don’t say anything back. I must stay still, steadfast, or I’ll crumble apart like one of those disgusting keto muffins she force feeds my father. I want to scream at her and tell her to get out of my room, but I don’t. She doesn’t burden these thoughts with anyone else, especially not the boys. So, I let her lie on my bed and speak even though my mind is a spool of ribbon, unraveling faster and faster with each of her words. It’s the only comfort I can give her without falling apart. It’s the only way I can keep the weight of this burden from my sisters.

Something terrible has happened to every person who has ever loved my mother.

I think about what’s happening now. Over the past couple of months, I’ve become intimately familiar with the drive downtown. I used to need the GPS, now I know the best places to park when I visit. My dad is perpetually in and out of hospital rooms. The skin on his neck is too loose to hang onto his thinning body; there are bruises that cover his legs and arms. I hope my mother doesn’t blame herself.

“I don’t know what happened,” she tells me, as if the doctors know the cause of this cancer. As if there was something we could have done to prevent it, prevent my father’s lungs from filling up with blood as the infectious disease spreads. As if the food my mother has been feeding him was poison this whole time, as if changing his diet will fix anything.

There’s nothing that we could have done differently. There’s nothing that we can do now but go to bed with our grief and feel it stare back at us when the lights are out, lingering in the sheets like the scent of a lost lover. I, of course, do not share this with my mother. I let her hold on, white knuckling, grasping at straws at some semblance of control as she continually changes my father’s diet.

My mind keeps wandering back to the stories my mother has shared with me, the stories of her life. The stories of her loss. And I hope she isn’t wondering if she really is cursed. I know she isn’t, at least not in that way.

Leave it to the world to blame a woman for tragedy.

Nobody seems to blame god. Is god a man?

So yes, my grandmother and the witch were right; my mother is cursed. But it’s not one that some spiteful ex-girlfriend placed on my mother. It’s not the one that’s so simple to break free from with incantations and late-night rituals. It’s the same curse that my grandmother has, and her mother before her. It’s genetic, hereditary, a circle, a cycle.

I was seven when I first realized I was just a girl. Wearing the sparkly red dress my mother had gotten me for my Christmas recital, I left the house for the cul-de-sac with hopes of playing with the neighbor kids. Sydney and Bailey weren’t outside that evening. Instead, there were three boys. I came up to them to play, and in return, they lifted the skirt of my dress as far up as they could. They snickered and laughed with each other. My face turned hot and pink and my eyes flooded as I ran back home.

When I was nine, I finally asked my father why my mother loved my older brother so much more than me. The conversation happened by accident, as I sat in the backseat of his white truck. Fragile, like fine china, the words tumbled out of my mouth before I could catch them. Whenever I used to ask my mother who was her favorite child, even though I already knew, she always said she loved us equally. Still, it was a shock when my father didn’t say the same thing.

“She feels bad that his dad died,” he confirmed to me.

His words were the china shattering across the floor. He didn’t bother trying to sweep it up; that was all he said on it.

But I know that can’t be the entire reason, even if that’s what my dad believes. I was eleven when my mother and I looked through the family photo albums. We turned the page to the collection of photographs that were taken at my younger brother’s first birthday party. There was a photograph of my Grandfather holding a smiling, baby version of my little brother on the patio of our backyard.

“Your grandpa was so excited when John was born. Everyone was,” she recalled to me.

“What about me? Was everyone excited when I was born?”

“It’s not the same. He was the first boy.”

And I am just a girl.

Someone once asked me if I was the favorite child. I thought I had misheard them, so they repeated themselves. “Are you your parents’ favorite child since you do so much around the house?”

I told them, “No. If I was a boy I would be.”

They didn’t understand what that meant. They don’t have any brothers.

Regardless, I know it isn’t an isolated experience. My friends who are sisters to brothers understand. My fiancé’s sister constantly refers to him as “Mom’s favorite.” She told me she expected more people to show up for his wedding than people did for hers.

My mother toasted bread and cooked eggs for my brothers in the morning when they asked. But I would go hungry if I didn’t fix breakfast for myself. If I forgot to wash my plate, I’d be grounded for the weekend. The same for if I came back with a low grade on a test. It was not so for the boys.

Over the summertime, my older brother got signed up for creative writing camps. I asked my mother to sign me up for the same camps. Though she never explicitly told me “No,” she never did sign me up for any. Summers for me were spent at home taking care of my four younger siblings and my older brother, if he was around. I changed diapers, made their meals, cleaned their messes. If I forgot to do any of it, my mom yelled at me for neglecting them. She called me lazy; she calls me lazy, but not the boys. Never the boys.

Sometimes I hear her voice in my sisters’ when they raise it, and in my own. My dad always said we were loud like my mother. My brothers would parrot. I am the loudest of the girls, because I take most of the blunt of every blow. I wonder if that’s why my mother loves my brothers more even though we share the same sex. She must see me like a mirror. I am all she could have been.

She is all I can ever be.

Tragedy.