p.s. love yr mother part two

Today my mom taught me to say some curse words in Spanish, the old ones from the ’50s when she grew up, and she was giggling like she was going to hell. “Hijo de la chingada,” hee hee hee, “that one’s the worst! Don’t tell anyone you’re cursing with your mother on the phone.” Such a pleasure, it was. So familiar, that crossroads: reverent, so Catolica!, but reveling behind the proper mask of piety.
Sandra Cisneros in Woman Hollering Creek:
Virgencita de Guadalupe. For a long time I wouldn’t let you in my house. I couldn’t see you without seeing my ma each time my father came home drunk and yelling, blaming everything that ever went wrong in his life on her. I couldn’t look at your folded hands without seeing my abuela mumbling, “My son, my son, my song…” Couldn’t look at you without blaming you for all the pain my mother and her mother and her mother and all our mothers’ mothers have put up with in the name of God. Couldn’t let you in my house.
I wanted you bare-breasted, snakes in your hands. I wanted you leaping and somersaulting the backs of bulls. I wanted you swallowing raw hearts and rattling volcanic ash. I wasn’t going to be my mother or my grandma. All that self-sacrifice, all that silent suffering. Hell no. Not here. Not me…
That you could have the power to rally a people when a country was born, and again during civil war, and during a famworkers’ strike in California made me think maybe there is power in my mother’s patience, strenght in my grandmother’s endurance. Because those who suffer have a special power, don’t they? The power of understanding someone else’s pain. And understanding is the beginning of healing.