Tag Archives: mamihood

Loose Teeth and Blue Green Streaks

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There are a ton of milestones happening in the Mala household.
Last weekend, 14 year old Mapu asked for my help in putting blue/green streaks in her hair, which meant with her dark, thick hair, a two step process involving bleach. Some parents and teens may find it strange we went in on this together and that Mapu came to me for help with something most parents find out about AFTER the fact. But luckily for both of us, we have an open enough relationship that she knew it was something I was willing to do with her. After all, when she was in elementary school I was the ever present PTA mami volunteering at school events, creating a translation program for non-English dominant families, and chaperoning school trips with a variety of hair colors: hot pink, fire engine red and varieties in between. The combo of my style and mouth even caused the school principal to advise my daughter, in front of me, to not end up like me when she grew up. I’m kind of proud that she is rebelling a little.
Two days ago my five year old walked into our bedroom with her fingers in her mouth. She was showing off the fact that has not just one but two loose front teeth. She yelled, jumped up and down and promptly started rattling off the impact this had in her life. According to Poroto she was growing up and the tooth fairy would come. This was a sign that 5 years old was getting closer to 14 years old and eventual adulthood and,
“I can then do whatever I want!”
I won’t front. I teared up a little, not just because yes, it was one step in growing up but also because I wished it was as easy as she made it sound.

Mami’hood Lessons : Delayed Gratification

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An important lesson for kids as they move out of toddlerhood and into preschool age is delayed gratification. You can’t always get what you want when you want it. This has been a hard lesson for the five year old in the Mala household. My constant single mami work from home presence has come to mean that most of the time Poroto gets what she wants when she wants it. It also mean that I am a horrible disciplinarian and boundary maker. If I’m writing and poroto wants to play, I’ll usually hit save or put down the pen and play. If I’m tutoring and she wants a snack or a drink, I will continue my lesson on solubility while preparing a bowl of cereal or sticking a straw into a juice box. Hell even my 14 year old has come to think that I am always available. When he comes home from school and I am tutoring she will announce how her day went, ask for a snack and to use the computer. I usually pee, shower and shit with the bathroom door open so I can field questions from my kids. I don’t have a separate office space I can lock myself into when I am on deadline. I’ve really failed at setting and sticking to boundaries and teaching my kids that they are not the center of the universe.

Amazingly, my children’s expectations of getting what they want, when they want it at home, hasn’t transferred itself into their classrooms. I will admit that I wasn’t so worried about it when my now 14 year old started school. She has a fairly chill personality and a go with the flow attitude. My now five year old is a different story. Before she started Pre-K, I imagined getting an endless stream of teacher’s notes and phone calls. I envisioned dreading parent teacher conferences and getting called into the principal’s office. I underestimated my energetic five year old’s ability to distinguish between someone who wasn’t playing like a teacher and someone who wouldn’t follow through, like me. My five year old is thriving in Pre-K. She follows directions, plays well with others, and moves from one activity to the next with ease. Once she comes home however, it’s a completely different story. So maybe her bubbly personality isn’t the problem but my inability to hold firm is.

Growing up there were a ton of boundaries set up for me. Most of them relating to expectations around grades and privileges. As long as I did well in school and stayed out of trouble, I could hang out and do other things. It helped that I liked school and studying. Yes, I was a nerd and was rewarded for that. But there were also boundaries that didn’t make sense. Like how my sister was allowed to throw violent tantrums that disrupted my sleep and ability to do homework to the point that I had to move out. There were guilt trips for writing instead of accompanying my mother on walks. I witnessed boundaries being set out up in front of me to respect but I was never allowed to create my own or taught how to do that. So no has been the hardest word for me to utilize. I take on too much. Swallow too much. Allow my time, space, work to be disrespected and I’m teaching it to my kids. Not a good pattern.

I especially allowed many boundaries to be ignored in most of my past romantic relationships. Wanna call me drunk at 3 am? Sure I’ll wake up and spend hours on the phone with you even though I am a single mami to two kids and have to wake up early to take them to school. Want me to do some work for you for free and without me getting any credit or acknowledgement? OK because I want to show how much I love you and respect the work that you are doing. This goes double if you are a radical man/woman of color. I will then seethe silently and quietly mourn the death of my own creative work.

I am trying to change that pattern in my current romantic relationship. When my partner and I are in different time zones, which is most of the time, it’s easier to demand respect for my boundaries. I can slip into my routines of writing and mamihood. I go to bed early and wake up early. Sometimes this means conversations are hurried and light. We are both busy people with commitments and we respect that. Sometimes there are moments of jealousy or neediness on both sides but we work through them. And I will admit that I still ere on the side of sacrifice meaning interruption in the name of a good relationship, which is not a good habit. When we are in the same time zone it gets tricky. I usually feel so bad about all the time we are apart that when I am out of town visiting him or he is in town visiting me, I drop everything. I don’t write everyday. I try and tutor less even though that is my main source of income. I feel like I have to entertain my partner constantly and be accessible all the time. Instant gratification.

But what happens when you have an adult who wants instant gratification and a five year old who wants it too? I felt like I was smack in the middle of this question during my partner’s last visit here. It was a slice of semi-reality. My older daughter was away with my mom and sister but I was full time parenting my 5 year old. My partner, who is a great father to his own teen son and amazing with my 14 year old, has some work to do with my five year old. I feel like he’s not used to an energetic five year old and he’s not used to dating a single mami. Hell people I have dated have no idea how to handle the single mami thing, especially regarding how much time and energy it takes to solo parent. I also know that it is really hard for me to accept help and experiencing him set boundaries with my five year old drove me to tears at times. OK many times. To me a lot of the boundary making felt harsh and made me feel like a shitty mother. I mean you’ll have to excuse me, the current election cycle has made the fitness of single mothers into a national issue (again) so I’m admittedly sensitive about that. Plus I’m not sure that any of us : my partner, my five year old, and me, have really figured out how our new family configuration will look like and how that getting to a good place for all of us will be a learning process that will take each of us out of our comfort zones. Perhaps that is the biggest lesson in delayed gratification.

Here’s to working towards loving endings.

Single Mami’hood and Sexuality Under (Wed)lock & Key

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Yesterday two states, Michigan and Arizona, held their Republican presidential primaries and my womb apparently is on the campaign trail. At the last GOP debate in Arizona, all of the candidates took a lot of time to blame single mothers, especially brown single mothers, for many problems in the United States. The mainstream media, including a front page New York Times article, has fallen in line attacking single mothers of color and our kids for the poor state of the economy, crime, failing schools and the threat of nuclear weapons in Iran. Ok maybe not what’s happening in Iran but the arguments are just as ridiculous.

This revived attack on brown single mami’hood is just another front of a war of anti-Latino sentiment. It’s root is that same that led to anti-immigrant laws like SB 1070 in Arizona and HB 56 in Alabama. It doesn’t take a big leap to move from targetting anchor babies to calling my being a single mother of two a “social catastrophe”. It’s not hard to say that poor brown people with uteruses shouldn’t choose the type of families they want to create when in some states it has already been determined what books shouldn’t be put in the hands of our youth.

As Bianca Laureano points out one of her recent RH Reality Check columns, the cultural and sexual habits and values of Latin@s are still read through old, racist narratives like Oscar Lewis’s La Vida and  Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s The Negro Family. Rich Lowry, who was given a whole page to trash brown single motherhood in the same issue of TIME that highlights the power the power of the Latino vote, cites the Moynahan report as just the beginning of how a problem of “the underclass” (people of color) has climbed outside the realm of race. In other words, brown loose morals are catching. According to the editor of the National Review (full disclosure : I went to high school with the online editor of the NR), us poor, people of color just aren’t following the example of the upper classes who cling to marriage as a class rite of passage. Marriage, according to Lowry, is a way to climb the social ladder, if only we poor single moms would get on that ladder and find ourselves a good man. Lowry goes so far as to suggest a public service campaign in favor of marriage mobility with First Lady Michelle Obama as its spokeswoman.

There are quite a number of problems with the arguments presented by Lowry and by all who point to single mamis as the downfall of modern society. The whole family model relies on the invented notion of a whole, nuclear family that only really exists in the realm of 1950′s sitoms. I took enough sociology and history classes to know that The good ole days were never that good. The family model we are expected to aspire to leaves out extended families and families of choice including LGBTQ families. The assumption is that because I don’t have a ring on my finger that my kids are not inside a warm, loving home with multiple people caring for them. It assumes that the only legitimate relationship comes with a certificate. It assumes that it is better to be in marriage that contains violence than it is to be single it also assumes that women of color don’t have a right to control their sexuality.

It’s not that women of color have more sex than white women, it’s that the state has always intervened to control when and under what circumstances we will have sex and what the outcomes will be. Slavery, sexual violence via colonialism, forced sterilizations, rape, forced abortions, forced child birth, childbirth in chains, non-consensual medical prosedures and experiments have all been used as ways to control our allegedely uncontrolable sexuality. Women like me, unmarried women who haven’t achieved a certain academic or economic status, women who aren’t white – well we are just expected to keep our knees locked unless told or forced to do otherwise. Enjoyable sexual experiences are not for us.

We, women of color are blamed for having children out of wedlock and then having those children have more children. Forget the fact that according to a recent report by The Guttmacher Institute
the teen pregnancy rate dropped by 37% among Hispanics. The fact that the rates of teen pregnancy among black and Hispanic teens remain 2–3 times as high as that of non-Hispanic white teens isn’t blamed on a failing healthcare system or a failing education system (have you seen what passes for sex ed?). It’s blamed on our hot blooded culture. A large body of research has shown that the long-term decline in teen pregnancy, birth and abortion rates was driven primarily by improved use of contraception among teens. But instead lawmakers like Senator Roy Blunt (R-MO) want to pass laws that limit access especially to poor people of color.

I am sure that many would love to use my picture, my life, my story as a poster for what not to do. A Nuyorican twice single mami, without a college degree, struggling financially. It’s easy to give a white man like the editor of the National Review a page in a major magazine about my poor values than to ask someone like me how I am making it. It’s easier to have a major magazine run a feature on how important my vote is as a Latin@ than to confront the reasons why my vote is more important than my right to decide when and what goes in or comes out of my body. It’s easier but that doesn’t make it right and it doesn’t mean that while people are trying to lock my knees together, I should lock my lips.

Moving Through Death and Disappointments

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An ex of mine became a believer in the message behind the book The Secret. You know, believe something is yours and it will be. Your thoughts can manifest things into reality. While I never really bought into this and thought he had been smoking too much weed, one of the things I really tried to engage with in February was positive thinking and countering negative self-talk as soon as it came up in the back of my head. While I think that it takes more than positive affirmations to change your life, I’m sure that buying into a “woe is me” mentality isn’t healthy.

So I reminded myself everyday that I’m a good mami. I’m a good partner. I’m a good writer. That there is enough time for me to do what I need to do. That there are enough resources for me. That my next home would have an avocado tree. That I’m a good daughter and that I deserve to have good things in my life.

But then sometimes life has other plans.

My titi, the youngest of my mother’s remaining sisters, was struggling with cancer that was quickly worsening. Hospital and home visits were spread among various family members until she passed away, exactly three years to the day that her mother died, a month shy of three years since another sister passed away from cancer. Dealing with death and the morbid logistics of death are hard enough. Throw in dysfunctional family dynamics. All I wanted to do was sleep but that is not an option with two kids and a long distance relationship to tend to.

So I pushed on. I didn’t make it to the next round of a fellowship I applied for. One writing gig I got excited about didn’t pay. The other writing offer I celebrated as a validation was put on hold because of the state of print journalism.

My relationship with my pareja is wonderful but so hard. My kids are great and doing well in school but my five year old never seems to shut up and my 14 year old is lazy.

Enter more negative self talk.

I don’t want to believe that I have a black cloud hanging over me or that everything in my life is destined to be hard/a struggle but damnit it sure as hell feels that way.

But I do have two more fellowships I applied for. I’m still healthy. I am loved and there’s a house with an avocado tree waiting for me.

When Two Hours Isn’t Enough

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The kids just had their first full week in school. Poroto’s Pre-K is now a full two hours and 10 minutes and I didn’t write one damn post on this personal blog.

What the fuck? What happened to my euphoria, my joy, my looking at this extra time as a blessing and a gift?

Well I got a cold for one and having a cold while mami’ing, and tutoring and trying to maintain a long distance relationship means my ass was more tired than usual and no one wants to sit next to the sick girl in the cafe.

But I also will admit I got lazy, picky, and resentful. I would pass by the cafe and find it too crowded, too noisy (I lost my headphones and can’t afford to buy another pair right now), and I was feeling sick of drinking coffee and buying coffee. I wanted to write in a bar but there are no bars in the hood that are open when Poroto is in Pre-K and the ones that are don’t have wifi. So I would go to my mother’s house, drink rum and cokes and open my laptop but there at my mother’s (where I also tutor) I would get distracted. I would gather all my tutoring materials. Vacuum. Take out the garbage. Chat with the neighbor who thinks I should move back home. Watch bad reality tv because my mom has cable.

The resentfulness came when I was trying to work. I would look at my calendar and my emails and realize that I still had to reject all the invites to cover events as media because I didn’t have enough time in the middle of the day to drop Poroto off at school, go into Manhattan, cover the event, and then to come back to pick her up. So many of the Fashion Week events were happening on school nights and as a single mami (yes I have a pareja pero it’s complicated) I’m responsible for dinner, checking homework, ironing clothes for the next day, waking the kids up, making breakfast etc.

When I was going through both rounds of the NYC pre-K application process, I engaged in fantasies of Poroto being a full day Pre-K program and I would have my days back. I dreamed of getting a part time job so I wouldn’t be so broke. Pero no one is going to hire me for an hour and a half a day.

So I’m still broke, still without enough time. I know a part of me just needs to get over this. Figure out some sort of routine that works and that allows me to write/be productive in the hour and a half I really have to work and hope that the rest of it will fall into place.

The Mami’Hood Goes Back to School

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Call this a state of temporary bliss. A gift.

I am sitting in a cafe in the middle of the day – ok it’s really a chain restaurant that offers free wifi- but don’t ruin the image.

I’m sitting in a cafe in the middle of the day with an iced coffee and my fingers tapping away. My four year old is not pestering me to play a Dora game on the computer or to play with her princess toys. My 14 year old isn’t asking for the computer so she can update her very serious role play where the future of genetically modified vampire clone warriors is at stake.

It’s back to school time.

I never wanted to be one of those mamis, the ones in the commercials who joyfully run through the aisles of the office supply store because they are getting rid of their kids for a few hours pero here I am.

On Thursday, La Mapu started high school (!!!). She had to commute via the subway for an hour and go through a metal detector (Oh thank you NYPD secured DOE public schools). But despite her worry and mine (none of us slept very much the night before), she made it and actually liked it. She scored a new friend (a young woman who has never been to school before). Getting la Mapu into high school was a nearly two year process that involved tests, open houses, interviews and essays. I’m pleased that the hard work we both had to put in was well worth it (so far) pero the fact that we had to go through such a process pisses me off.

The only thing that pissed me off more than the high school application process was the Pre-K application process. Really wanting Poroto to attend a full day public school program meant putting myself through two lotteries, none which yielded ideal results. In this second round of the NYC Public School Pre-K lottery- Poroto was on of 46 percent or so that got a spot. She didn’t get a spot in our neighborhood. Nor did she get a full day spot. On Thursday I stood in a crowd of people outside her assigned school for over an hour- in the rain, with poroto. El Chileno came with thinking it would be a quick process, but he left to go to work. Clearly this was mami’hood business.

Once I made it inside the school, I was given a number (17), a stack of papers to fill out and we waited…….for two more hours. We sat through one assembly listening to the new principal of the school tell first and second graders that they were in school because President Obama wanted them to get good jobs and make a lot of money. We then sat though a second assembly where the principal told students that in the halls they should be “still, silent, and straight”. Umm yeah this was when I was ready to walk out and say fuck pre-k. Poroto – who napped and was more patient and quiet than I have ever seen her- begged me to wait a few more minutes because she really wanted to go to school. So I waited and finally our number was called.

The actual registering was fast. I had all my papers in order. The only confusion I caused was by checking off that my daughter was Latina and not white. With half an hour to spare before her first class, Poroto was an official public school Pre-K student.

Asking her, she’ll tell her her first day was boring, because I had to sit with her for orientation, making the grand total of hours spent in a public elementary school yesterday 5 and a half.

Pero back to today – with me sitting in a chain restaurant cafe, finishing my iced coffee, almost not annoyed by the ambient noise around me (note to self – next time do not forget your headphones), finishing a personal blog post! I left Poroto at Pre-K land’s special door. She didn’t cry. In fact we both skipped away happily in opposite directions, excited about the changes in our lives.

(PS – please consider donating to Poroto’s panderia fund which I will be renaming Mala’s cafe writing fund).

(PPS- I need to find a place where I can have a glass of wine while Poroto is in Pre-K. That will make this even more fun)

Thinking About Teen Abortion y The Privilege of Absent Papi’Hood

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I don’t have cable so I missed the MTV special on teens seeking abortions. I wanted to see it because 13 years ago I was a teen seeking an abortion. Well, kind of. I was 19, pregnant and in Chile, a country where abortion was and still is illegal. My housemates, other young mujer college students far from their home (although in their country), and I watched a special on TVN de Chile about underground abortion clinics filmed with uv cameras that made the young women look like ghosts. One of my housemates confessed to having used such a clinic herself. And I was weighing my own options.

The other person responsible for my pregnancy didn’t want me to stay in Chile (what I wanted at the time) and instead told me that I was better off returning to the U.S. where abortions was allegedly safe, accessible and legal. I stayed in Chile travelling for a while longer, convinced I wasn’t going to carry my obvious pregnancy to term. By the time I made it to U.S., I was too broke to afford an abortion and too far along anyway.

It’s not that I regret mami’hood or la Mapu. Most people know that I have centered a good portion of my identity around my role of mami and 13 years, another kid, and yes two abortions later, I love mami’hood, even in its moments of struggle.

Pero the papi? I think I am connecting my own personal history with abortion with fatherhood because recently la Mapu’s father has pressing hard to see her. He hasn’t seen her since she was 3 or 4 and is talking to my sister apparently even to get her to accompany la Mapu to travel to Oaxaca where he is chilling now, not paying rent and working at a hostel to feed himself and his girlfriend.

It’s not that I don’t want la Mapu to see her father or that I don’t want him to see her. I would never deny that, but there is a part of me that remembers him sending me on my way. Yes he was young, but for 13 years I have registered voters, sold furniture, temped, table danced, tutored and written my heart out for my hija and he’s been travelling the world, with his college degree picking fruit because his job in Chile bored him. So yeah, maybe I am a tiny bit resentful and irritated.

The language of choice doesn’t always translate across continents. Access isn’t always interpreted precisely. And parent’hood or not isn’t always an accompanied trip to Puerto Escondido.

Whoever Dropped the Plague on Casa Mala, I Hate You

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These are the days you miss being partnered, or at least living in community, with neighbors y familia you can lean on a little.

After Poroto being sick for a good week, I am now sick and lucky me my head cold that has every pore of my face aching happens at the same time as the December NYC blizzard.

Virtually no one was delivering in the hood yesterday and I wasn’t able to get out of Casa Mala to face the unplowed streets to find some soup and food for my 3 year old until 6 pm.

I can deal with the single mami’hood hustle. In fact most days, to paraphrase a twitterputeando partner, the choreographed dance as I go, is an exciting albeit at times frustrating adventure that I usually end on beat and with sexy ass grace.

But this…nah this being ill while taking care of a still ill child during a snowstorm, yeah this shit makes me almost wish for wedded bliss or at the very least vecinos who don’t stab each other so I can give them a few bucks to get me some food.

I had big plans for this week. There are big challenges/changes coming to VivirLatino, I need to do some year end roundups, and writing but even this post was painful to write.

I’m still trying to manifest a sick single mami sopa delivery service that , to paraphrase the words of Lex, doesn’t fuck me up more.

Pa’lante (sort of)

Performance Afterglow y High School Dragas

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Over the last month two things have been sucking my time in wonderful ways (in addition to the usual mami’hood/work biznuss).

I had four amazing opportunities/gifts in the form of different type of performances. I will recount each of them in different posts pero I have to give a shout out to Charlie Vazquez y his Hispanic Panic magic, El Museo del Barrio y Make/shift recLAmations. Each and every single one of these events was a reawakening and reminder of the power of poetry, performance and the community that can by built/grow from that space.

I am also in the middle of assisting my 13 year old, la MapucheRican, in the high school application process, which in NYC is a trip and a half that is stressing us the fuck out, exhausting us, eating up our weekends but also bringing us together. Some peeps have asked that I write about the process a little more in depth given how the media and other “sources of info” seem to be looking alot more at the education system now and given how many other parents will have to navigate the locura.

I also have video, audio and pictures to share….so let’s go.

Abrazos y besos

Free Range Mami

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I was feeling massively aggravated on Sunday. Aggravated because there was laundry that needed to be done. Aggravated because el Chileno doesn’t believe in a visitation schedule and kind of just shows up after he gets done doing what he needs to do, even if that just means sleeping in because he hung out too late the night before. Aggravated because I would rather been at a rally against what the Israeli government did to the Flotilla instead of helping my 12 year old prep for finals even if I wasn’t so keen on the org behind the rally. I wanted a public space to express my anger with my presence, not just typed letters.

My frustration reminded me of my younger mami’hood days. Mami’hood 1.0 if you will, when if I wanted to go to a rally I packed up la Mapu and went. If there was a risk of arrest or if I knew I was going to get arrested, I let my mom know and she would stay with la Mapu. But that was in a different time with a younger, more willing, less tired mother, with a different, more easy-going child and with only one child.

I guiltily wondered, how many mamis were on board the flotilla and how they probably didn’t worry about their kid’s finals or dirty Dora the explorer panties.

I’m often asked how I do it all and most of the time I feel like I do it pretty damn poorly, from mami’ing to organizing, to writing. I feel like I’m always behind, always struggling, always broke. I mean my kids are generally great, smart and aware pero I feel like people are always watching me and not in a creepy please don’t break into my house again way, pero to judge.

I am not the upper middle class mommy writer who leaves her kid alone in the park and gets a ton of media coverage on it (and of course she has a book deal pero that’s a whole different post).

Porque where I live, publicizing leaving my 12 year old kid could get a visit from CPS and then get my kid taken away. Where I live, my sister takes her pre-k class to a puppet show about safety and all the 4 year olds yell that they should not talk to the police officer because where I live it’s been feeling like Phoenix for a long ass time for familias. Where I live, the police knew me at first because my apartment was broken into, but now after seeing me at a few local rallies and marches, they know my kids and I and give us the “you deserved what you got” look.

“free range” is inaccessible, whether that be in the local Associated Supermarket where the free range eggs are $5.00 or in the local park where the mami/vendors hold their children tight next to the shopping carts filled with elotes or bottles of water.

I’m still frustrated that I can’t go to a million meetings and rallies planned this week because I am so broke ass right now and need to work doing something I am not really enjoying at the moment or because poroto is a little more inquieta than her sister and can’t be expected to not run into a line of police officers at a protest.
Everything is measured here, carefully.