Sometimes, after finishing the cleaning—vacuuming the small living room, scrubbing the kitchen that had been built in 1973 and still had the original tile, checking on the pipes that were always threatening to leak—I would sit with her for a while and listen to stories about her youth. Stories about her husband Miguel, who had passed away fifteen years earlier. Stories about her children—two sons and a daughter—who, according to her gentle phrasing, “had their own lives.”
She never spoke badly of them.
That impressed me. That would stay with me long after this story was over—the fact that a woman who had clearly been abandoned by her children could speak of them without bitterness, without the kind of rage that seemed like it would be completely justified.
She would only say, always with the same tone of gentle acceptance:
“A mother never stops being a mother, even when her children forget how to be children.”
