Mother Love

My son, Alex, and me

Mother's Day did not originate as a bonanza for florists and restaurants. It is a little known fact that it began as a Proclamation by the social activist Julia Ward Howe in 1870 after she lived through the atrocities of the Civil War as a wife and mother. She believed that mothers ultimately bring to bear a sense of responsibility regarding the destruction that war brings upon society:

Arise, then, women of this day!
 Arise, all women who have hearts,
Whether our baptism be of water or of tears!
We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. 

Her words from across almost a century and a half ring with particular poignancy to me, as this Mother's Day will be the fifth year since I lost my son, Alex, to the war in Iraq. The pain that the war has brought me affects my life in ways that are difficult for those who have not experienced it to understand.

Alex on his wedding day

Arlington National Cemetery

This Mother's Day, then, is a day in which I gather my thoughts and think of the women who throughout my life influenced me and gave me the strength and clarity of purpose to rise each morning since that day.

I've had the good fortune of being surrounded by a multitude of resilient, resourceful women in my family, women who were unfazed by the incredible obstacles they faced growing up.  These women were products of families uprooted by the violence of the Mexican revolution, the ensuing diaspora, the Great Depression and the intense discrimination against Mexicans in Texas where their families settled. These women left an indelible impression on me.

Two of these women were my father's sisters, Tía Oralia and Tía Gloria. When my grandfather died unexpectedly of typhoid fever in the 1930s, my grandmother returned to Mexico with my tías and left the boys behind to be brought up by relatives. I can't imagine the pain shared by the family at having to make a decision like this in order to survive economically. Hence, my father was raised in Laredo by an uncle and aunt, and his brother, Fernando, in San Antonio by other relatives. The tías were raised by my grandmother in the little town of Villaldama, Nuevo León where the family originated.

Tía Gloria

The sisters, Oralia and Gloria, were brokenhearted at having left the country without their brothers, but from the stories that I heard growing up, the two brothers and two sisters were often reunited either in Laredo, San Antonio or during long summers in Villaldama. Later, as my sisters and I came into the world, these tías doted on us, showing up at our door loaded with tamales and other delicacies such as membrillo, pan de huevo from Sabinas, candied pumpkin and dulce de leche de cabra from Saltillo.

My mother's sisters, Tía Romanita (the tall, slender beauty shown in the photo above with my grandmother and great-grandmother) and Tía Lupita, were other ever-present women in my life who modeled hope, love, generosity and humor. Both of them, magicians with a needle and thread, could a create a dress out of a folded piece of cloth with an idea born in their imaginations rather than with a sewing pattern on paper.  To wear their creations was to be literally wrapped in their unconditional love.

My mother

But it is my mother to whom I owe so much of what I am today and to my ability to survive. It is from my mother that I learned to challenge, to question, to be brave, to demand justice, to seek clarity in a world of ambiguity. It is from my mother that I learned life goes on, in spite of unspeakable tragedies. And that it goes on only through an understanding of our shared humanity, in the giving and forgiving that is part of our existence.

This year, for the fifth year, the little flower shop in Bethesda that my son, Alex, used to call to order a delivery of Mother's Day roses will not receive a call from him. But today, I inhale deeply and am certain I smell the unmistakable scent of roses in every room of my house, our mother-son bond unbreakable across the cosmos. My aunts, my mother, and everything that made me are part of the embrace with which I reach out to my precious child. I will continue to attempt to live a life of grace as my mother and aunts did, as Alex would have wanted.