A Dream Called Home

by Reyna Grande

  The only thing I loved about the house was that it had two huge avocado trees in the backyard, which provided plenty of shade and a good harvest. I looked forward to making as much guacamole as I wanted. As I stood under the avocado tree, I felt someone watching me, and I turned to see a man in the neighbor’s yard looking at me through the chain-link fence that divided the properties. He had pitched a tent in the yard, and he was starting to light a fire to cook with. If my son and I wanted to come out to our backyard without being watched, I would have to figure out what to do about that chain-link fence.

  In my pregnancy book, I had read about the nesting period, the instinct in moms-to-be to get a home ready for their baby. At that moment, my nesting instinct fully kicked in, and with excitement I went back inside to throw myself into turning this house into a home for me and my baby.

  25

  Mother and child

  ONE OF THE times I truly needed my mother by my side was when I became a mother. But she wasn’t there. Not that I expected her to be. Mago, who had been the only mother I had as a child, showed up at the West L.A. Kaiser Labor and Delivery Unit and stayed by my side, coaching me, calming me, shaking me at times when I was too weak for another push.

  “They’re going to cut you open if you don’t push, Nena!” she would hiss into my ear.

  “I can’t do it,” I cried. “I can’t.” I writhed from the blinding pain. It was as if an invisible hand was squeezing the base of my spine again and again. I felt I was literally being torn apart. The doctor told me that back labor was the worst kind.

  Mago hovered over me, giving me her strength. “Yes, you can push. You must.”

  The anesthesiologist never showed up, though I had asked for him repeatedly. The nurses said he was busy with a Cesarean and couldn’t come to give me an epidural. I was forced to go through every spasm of pain, every tightening and cramping, with no hope for the shot that would take away the suffering. I wondered if I was being punished for being so irresponsible. You wanted a baby? Well, now suffer.

  I named my son Nathaniel, a variation on my father’s name, Natalio. His middle name, Khalil, was for one of my favorite writers, Kahlil Gibran, whose real name, Khalil, had been misspelled in school when he immigrated to the U.S. as a child. I had discovered The Prophet six years before, when I was at PCC. It was a book that soothed my soul with its lyricism, spirituality, and powerful words on topics such as love, marriage, and children. But the one that impacted me most was the piece on joy and sorrow.

  The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.

  Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven?

  And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives?

  Gibran’s words helped me to look at my sorrow in a different way. Sorrow was what I had known most of my life—and I had resented my sorrow. Life hadn’t just given me lemons; it had given me a whole lemon grove. But Gibran’s words helped me to think of my body as a vessel hollowed by sorrow so that one day it could fill with just as much joy.

  That day in January 2002, when I held my baby boy in my arms for the first time, I felt something pure and beautiful begin to bubble up from the underground spring in my soul. As every nook and crevice of my body filled with an incredible joy at seeing my child’s tiny eyes looking up at me, I finally knew what Gibran’s words had meant.

  Since the repairs to my house weren’t completed yet, I went to stay at Carlos’s house to convalesce, and Norma, who had given birth to her second daughter three months earlier, helped me recuperate. It took four days for my mother to finally come meet her newest grandchild, and that was only after I gave her a piece of my mind on the phone about what kind of mother I thought her to be.

  “The hospital was only twenty minutes away from you, and you couldn’t bother to come?” I said. Most of all, I was angry at myself. Furious for wanting her by my side, for expecting her to do the right thing even though through the years she never had. As I watched her hold my baby for the first time, I swore to myself that I would never be that kind of mother to my son. I would be there when he needed me and even when he didn’t.

  Francisco had been at the hospital when Nathan was born and, to his credit, he did his best to check in on us periodically. But, just as I’d known he would, he eventually stepped aside and left me to care for and raise the baby on my own. He would come by once in a while to visit, but then would disappear for months on end, until one day he would call me out of the blue to ask about our son. I never blamed him. I had known what would happen, but the guilt ate at me as I wondered how having an absent father would affect my son. Would he grow up with that hole in his heart the way I had? Or would my love be enough?

  My new identity was that of a single mother. My child would depend on me for everything, and I would do my best to honor my responsibility as a parent, the kind Kahlil Gibran had written about in The Prophet:

  You are the bows from which your children

  as living arrows are sent forth.

  The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,

  and He bends you with His might

  that His arrows may go swift and far.

  Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;

  For even as He loves the arrow that flies,

  so He loves also the bow that is stable.

  What I wanted, most of all, was to give my son something that my own parents hadn’t given me—a home full of love, stability, joy. In order to do that, I would need to be as strong and stable as an archer’s bow, and learn how to bend without breaking.

  Not long after I moved into my new house, Mago called me and said, “Let’s go to Fidel’s for sandwiches.”

  Since I hardly saw her—she was so busy raising her three kids, working, and dealing with her marriage issues, and I was busy being a new mom and teaching full time—I was elated to get her call.

  We met in Highland Park at Fidel’s Pizza, a little restaurant where they sold our favorite ham-and-cheese sandwiches on French baguettes. We had grown up craving the food from Fidel’s, which was just down the street from our childhood home. We would beg our father to take us there, but he never did. Sometimes when he was in a good mood, he would give us a dollar each, and Carlos, Mago, and I would pool our money to buy one ham-and-cheese sandwich to split three ways. We were always left wanting a whole one for ourselves.

  So as adults, we still craved the sandwiches, and now we had enough money to buy a whole one without having to share!

  After we finished eating, Mago said, “Do you want to go see him?”

  Our father lived right up the street, a mere five-minute walk. Really, it would be so easy to go see him. Wasn’t that the normal thing daughters did? To drop in on your father for a surprise visit? But we didn’t know whether our father and stepmother would be pleased about it.

  “Well, what do you say?” Mago asked, waiting for me to decide.

  I longed for my child to have a relationship with his grandfather. Mago longed for the same for her children, and if she, who was even better at holding on to her anger than I was, was willing to go see him and make an effort to connect, then so could I.

  “Okay,” I said.

  With our four children in tow, we dropped in on our father. Mila had gone to the market, so he was alone. We greeted him with big smiles. I wanted to hug him, but none of us had that kind of relationship with him. We had arrived with a positive attitude, but not a minute after our arrival, he said to Mago, “Remind me again what your children’s names are?”

  And that was enough to trigger Mago’s short temper. “Aidan, Nadia, and Alexa,” she said through gritted teeth. “Is it that hard to remember your own grandchildren’s names?”

  “Why do you give your children such hard names to remember?” he said as a justification.

  “The names in the Bible are harder, and yet you’ve managed to memorize them
just fine,” she retorted. The few times we had seen him recently, all he talked about was his religion, and he had even tried to convert us. It was a touchy subject.

  Not wanting to find out whether my father remembered my son’s name or not, I quickly said, “And this is Nathaniel.”

  Mago was fuming, and I could tell she wanted to leave. My father didn’t make a big fuss over Nathan. All he did was state the obvious, “He’s so little.” But he didn’t ask if he could hold him. He didn’t even reach out to pinch his cheek or ruffle his hair, pat his head or hold his tiny hand, things that even strangers at the supermarket or the mall wanted to do to my baby.

  I tried not to care. I was here, with my father, and I wasn’t going to leave without at least sharing what was happening in my life, whether he cared or not. “I bought a house, Pa.”

  My father looked at me with surprise, then his doubt turned to enthusiasm when he realized I was serious. “Really, Chata? That’s great news.”

  Finally, I had done something right. Then, because I couldn’t stop myself, I also gave him the other news I had been dying to give him.

  “And I’m finally going to get my ciudadanía.”

  The previous September, on the day that would become known as 9/11, I had gone to the Federal Building downtown to have my fingerprints taken for my U.S. citizenship application. I hadn’t listened to the news that morning, so I didn’t know what was going on in New York. Mago had called me to tell me and begged me to get out of the government building because downtown L.A. could be the next target. But I didn’t leave. It had taken me years to get to this point, and I wasn’t about to lose my place in line and not finish the application process. In Santa Cruz, I had sent in my application but somehow correspondence from the INS got lost in the campus mail. The application process was further complicated by the three times I’d moved around in L.A. and more missing correspondence. I’d had to reopen my case and pay more fees. I hoped downtown wasn’t evacuated before my fingerprints were processed. U.S. citizenship was another dream that my father had had for us. In two months, I was scheduled for the oath ceremony, and for my child’s sake, I hoped that my citizenship certificate would give us the right to finally claim this country as our own.

  The way my father looked at me now, with admiration, told me that I had redeemed myself in his eyes. Sure, I was a single mom and had had a child out of wedlock, things he disapproved of. But I was a homeowner. I was a soon-to-be U.S. citizen. I had a college degree and was a working professional. Being a teacher for the Los Angeles Unified School District was a big deal to my father. He hadn’t been too impressed when I had told him I was studying to be a writer.

  “How do you like your new house?” he asked.

  “The house is fine, I just don’t like the neighborhood much.” I told him about the two times my garage had gotten broken into and the time I was at work and someone cut open the bars on the bedroom window in order to get in. I had to call a welder to repair them. I didn’t tell him about the endless airplanes flying over my house, the gunshots in the distance, the tires screeching from drivers who went too fast and barely managed to brake at the stop sign in front of the house. But I did tell him what worried me the most. “The neighbor is letting a friend sleep in a tent in his yard, and he can see into my property all day long through the chain-link fence. He’s out there cooking over an open fire, smoking and drinking, and he even pees out there in the yard.”

  “Hmm, that’s not safe for you and the baby,” my father said, looking very concerned. For the first time, he really looked at Nathan, and he didn’t take his eyes off his grandson when he said, “I’ll come build you a better fence.”

  True to his word, he showed up the next two Sundays and spent the whole day putting up a wooden fence that encircled the property. For the first time, I found myself reconnecting with my father in a way I hadn’t since we had gone to that Thai restaurant in Santa Cruz. I came out with a glass of water for him and sat a few feet away as I watched him work. At first neither of us talked. I held Nathan in my arms, and that little bundle against my chest helped me be brave in my father’s presence. Every time I saw him, I reverted to my old self. I was tongue-tied and nervous around him. I didn’t know what to talk to him about or how to engage him and get him to talk to me. He was a private man and didn’t like to share anything about himself, especially with his children. My father was a mystery to me, a puzzle with too many missing pieces that I wished I could find and put together so I could finally fully understand the man whose blood flowed through my veins.

  As my father worked, I watched him do what he did best. He was just as good at building things as he was at destroying them. I watched his hands, so brown and strong, shaped just like my own. I admired his skills as he measured and cut, hammered and drilled. The neighbor’s friend, a skinny man in his fifties dressed in a dirty T-shirt and jeans that were clearly too big for him, sat on an upside-down bucket outside his tent, smoking a joint and watching my father build the fence. One by one, the wooden slats went up as he drilled them in place.

  A helicopter flew by, and the sound took me into the borderlands, reminding me of the crossing that divided my life into a before and an after.

  I remembered so vividly that moment when we were trying to cross, the fear of being caught by Border Patrol, of being sent back to Mexico and losing my chance at having my father back in my life. I remember how my father had been right—at nine years old, I was too little to make the crossing, and I had put everyone at risk of being caught. Sure enough, Border Patrol caught us and sent us back to Tijuana twice. It was a miracle that we made it the third time, although my father had to carry me on his back most of the way.

  It was there at the U.S. border that I got my first piggyback ride from my father.

  “Do you remember our crossing?” I asked him.

  “No,” he said. “I’ve tried to forget.” Then he lowered his drill and looked at me. “You shouldn’t think about it, Chata. What happened is already in the past. Leave it at that. Olvídalo. Move on with your life.” He turned back to the fence and resumed his work.

  I didn’t tell him that I couldn’t forget. The only way I could move on was by remembering my past and trying to make sense of it. Only by understanding and accepting the life I had lived could I free myself from the trauma that still haunted me and kept me prisoner. This is why I needed to return to my writing. It was the only way I would ever be free.

  My father, on the other hand, drowned his immigrant trauma in a can of Budweiser. Even though his newfound religion had helped him quit drinking, he eventually started up again. Nine years later, he would die of liver cancer, still a prisoner of his trauma.

  “Do you regret immigrating?” I asked him as he turned off the drill to grab more screws from the bucket on the ground.

  He looked at me for a long time, as if weighing his words very carefully. “Too many people in this world are living lives full of regrets, Chata. At church, I’ve learned there is a better way to live—in Jesus. Do you think He regrets dying for our sins?”

  I looked down at the ground. I didn’t know if Jesus regretted anything—all I knew was that I sure did. I was certainly regretting my question, but my father continued. “Jesus died to save you, Chata. And He would die again for you if He had to. Just like I would immigrate again for you, if I had to.” He looked at Nathan and said, “You’re a mother. Maybe now, you’ll understand.”

  He turned back to his drilling and didn’t look at me again. Nathan woke up from his nap and I took him in to change his diaper, pondering my father’s words. I buried my nose in Nathan’s little neck, inhaling the sweet scent of baby powder. “Chiquito mío, I promise I’ll never leave you.”

  As I held my son in my arms, I began to understand the paradox of our immigrant experience. Despite the trauma I had suffered from my father’s decision to immigrate, that same decision would allow me to be the parent he could never be. I would get to watch my son grow up. I would g
et to celebrate birthdays and holidays with him. I would never have to walk away from my son and go to another country to seek a better life for him. I would get to spare my child the misery of being a border crosser.

  When my father was finished with the fence and left, I went out back to run my hands along its surface, admiring his work, the wooden slats as hard and rough as my father’s hands.

  My father believed in the gift Jesus had given us. I believed in the gift my father had given me—this fence and the time I got to spend with him while he built it. But as I stood there with Nathan in my arms, I realized there was another thing he had given me:

  My father’s greatest gift to me was that I would get to be the parent who stays.

  Reyna and baby Nathaniel

  26

  AFTER BEING AT the middle school for two-and-a-half years, I had come to discover that one of my biggest struggles as a teacher was that the school kept changing our textbooks. Just when I thought I was finding my way with a textbook, it would get replaced the following school year, and we would be sent off to teacher trainings to learn how to use the new one. Another struggle was that the grade level and subjects I taught kept changing, and I felt I couldn’t develop an expertise in any single grade and subject. In July 2002, when the new school year started for those of us in B track, I was given eighth-grade remedial and regular English. Even though I had requested sixth-grade Beginning ESL, which was the grade and subject I was most comfortable with, my principal said there was nothing that could be done about it. What was worse was that to solve the problem of overcrowded middle schools, the school district had implemented the policy that all eighth-grade students would be promoted to ninth grade as long as they had Ds in math and English. They could have an F in everything else. I was flabbergasted. In Mexico, you had to earn your way to the next grade and prove you were ready, which is why my mother didn’t graduate from elementary school until she was seventeen.