004: Thinking about the stories our histories tell us
Since my last letter, I’ve had two or three ideas for what I’d like to write about this week. I even began drafting one about how we procrastinate even when we know it’s terrible for us. It’s not half-bad, if I say so myself.
But I just can’t get behind putting anything even remotely chiding in anyone’s inbox right now. Things are too dark and scary and we’re all too close to the end of our ropes to read about how we can defeat procrastination, or whatever, right now. I think a lot of people are just trying to keep their hopes up right now, and I think it’s okay to honor that.
So instead I’ve got a story that’s one part silly and one part reflective.
Just last night, I had a nearly 3 hour phone call with my mom. It started as me asking her for advice about a project I need to keep under wraps for now, but kind of morphed into this meandering conversation that covered 40 years of time while she told me stories of her early days of working.
Someday, I want to write about my mom, and about her mom, and her mom before that. They each led interesting lives, full of emigration and adventure, loss and heartbreak. I mean, my mom dated a literal prince and broke up with him because she wanted to be an engineer but she couldn’t work if she married him. Is that a modern twist on a fairy tale or what?
But I don’t know enough about their stories (yet) to really do them justice.
However, in the course of this long conversation, we ended up talking about my birth. At early ultrasounds, my parents were told they could expect me on July 4. That due date was adjusted to July 14 late in the game, and I showed up on July 13. My mother and I have very different opinions about this fact: She sees it as me being nine days late, whereas I see it as me being one day early. In her version I was being headstrong and it was a sign; in my version I was being courteous, goddammit, and it was a sign.
I apparently waited a very long time to “turn,” whatever that means, and they were worried they’d have to do a c-section. Two years before, my mom’s sister had been in labor with her son for 36 hours, which I’m pretty sure is legally considered torture, so she was terrified I’d end up the same. Instead, the actual labor part of the birth only lasted about six hours, which is remarkably short.
According to my mom, I haven’t stopped being in a hurry since.
But listen, I had places to be. And I still do! There is so much to see and do on this earth and we only get so much time here. I needed the extra day!
After we hung up I was wondering: if the birthing process is a sort of divination for a person’s life, what does this mean for mine? Has that insistent need to get! there! now! shown up in my life since? Am I forever going to be the person pushing things back only to show up early and hurry things along? Is this an explanation for my chronic indecisiveness, my often over-powering wanderlust, my impatience, my ten years of semi-itinerant life? Do I still worry people needlessly then show up fine and dandy?
I come from a long line of women who left, who knew when it was time to go and left not a moment too soon. My mom escaped the civil war in El Salvador by coming to the US. Her mom escaped the Spanish Civil War by going to El Salvador. Her mom left Basque Country for Madrid; no one’s ever told me why, but I imagine it was because of WWI—Spain was neutral, the economy was good, and there was no sense in being right on the border with France, not then.
Sometimes, I wonder if that’s in our blood. I mean, that instinct to flee danger is in almost everyone, but specifically war—does war get into your blood, into your genes? Does it encode itself as a need to see everything and do everything before it’s too late? Does seeking out refuge (I keep coming back to that escape to El Salvador—the Savior) repeat through generations?
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