Tag: mama

Will you always love me?

Will you always love me?
Will you always love me?

With cliff edges at my 
fingertips,
tigers at my heels, and
thunder
in my chest?

When ghosts cling to my back
while I flavor dinner
with my weeping?

When I come home hissing
like a glass-breaker?

When I’m sighing, 
sinking into sofa cushions,
and I have no strength
to pull off a smile,

so instead, I push?

Will you still think I’m strong?
Will you love me always?

Written May 20th, 2018.

A poem I wrote when I was grieving, and thinking of my significant other who had to live with me while grieving. Understandably, I was a depressed, anxious, weeping mess. It’s nothing fancy or full of any special techniques. Just feelings on a page.

Mama’s Favorite Flavor is Grape

Mama’s Favorite Flavor is Grape
Mama’s favorite beans when cooking are black beans.
Jade Seneca, the Chinese place a block up, and around the corner,
she orders chicken and broccoli. When someone’s sick, we order 
chicken and rice soup. Sometimes she makes Lipton 
with a packet of Sazon and sofrito, a cube or two.

Breakfast on the go is a cherry danish from the coffee stall in the city.
Hot chocolate all winter long. 
In New York, the winters are long.
If you stop by here when it’s winter, guess what you’re getting?
Quiere chocolaté? We’ve got plenty.

At the Japanese place downtown, by Chambers, I think?
She orders lemon chicken. Never sushi.
She doesn’t like mochi ice cream, so she lets me take it.
She doesn’t drink. Only a pina colada. It has to be virgin.

While we’re shopping on Myrtle, to cool off on a hot summer day,
there’s a piraqua stand on the same block as Payless. 
Her piraqua is either grape or cherry flavored.
When we’re buying candy for the theater or at home, her favorites 
are Mary Janes, Peanut Chews, and Snow Caps. Random days my dad will come back 
from the bodega with Sno Balls to surprise her.

She hates olives. She uses her fork to take them off her plate, and drop them onto my father’s.
At the dollar store, she grabs a pack of jelly rings, chocolate covered cherries,
and when it’s Easter, it’s Peeps, and chocolate covered marshmallow eggs.

Whenever I visit, and I’m homesick, she makes fricassee de pollo for lunch.
At the all you can eat Chinese buffet, my mother likes crab legs.
Ice cream from the Mr. Softie truck, always vanilla.

Grape juice, cranberry juice, apple juice — always juice in the fridge. And iced tea.
My mother bought the frozen kind, concentrate. 
Where she mixed it with water and stirred it in a pitcher.

She doesn’t like spicy. She buys Franciso Rinaldi
pasta sauce. Meat flavored. So she doesn’t get heart burn.
Always Tums in the house. Heart burn is something she always has.

She expects nothing less than Whitman’s chocolate for Valentines Day.
If we’re making a trip to the bodega for munchies, honey BBQ chips it is.
Come church events, she’s bringing potato salad.
Sunflower seeds on the train, we spit our shells in the plastic bag.
She’d always tell me, when your father and I were dating, 
he took me to Outback’s.

Burgers and steaks, always well done.
Applebees for birthdays.
McDonalds: Big Mac, Burger King: Whopper, Wendy’s: 
Either a taco salad, chicken sandwich or baked potato with cheese and broccoli.
I know all her favorites, and all her orders like the back of my hand,
even though I don’t remember what I ate for dinner yesterday.

I’d do anything to cook for her. She doesn’t have to cook for me.
I’d do anything to eat with her again. 
I’d do anything to treat her again. 
To meet her for lunch during my work break.

I’d do anything anything anything
	everything
to just share that last piece of cake 
we baked together from the box
always white cake mix
always vanilla frosting or cool whip on the top.
But I can’t, because it’s four years later,
and my mama’s still gone.

And I still use present tense because these things I know about her
still are.
Just like she still is.
In my memory, in my dreams,
even if not physically. 
Here
with me. 
She’s in my heart.

I hear Jade Seneca closed. It was our go to Chinese restaurant ever since I was a kid. The place was probably as old as, if not older, than me. I think the pandemic must’ve hit it hard. Was sad to hear it’s gone now.

The Roads Our Hearts Know

The Roads Our Hearts Know
We know all the avenues, and all the roads.
I can walk to Mrytle, Wyckoff, or Knickerbocker 
with my eyes closed.
And I do. 
More than you can imagine.

The way to the post office, the supermarket, the cuchifrito.
Street fairs, and flea markets.
All across Brooklyn and Queens. 
Times Square, 34th Street, and Broadway.
All the bus lines, all the trains.

My soul aches 

the way people’s broken bones ache
on rainy days. Except for me
it’s every day
when my eyes are open.

We roam Bellevue, Memorial Sloan Kettering,
the dollar stores, and the parks.
All the places I don’t visit anymore
in New York. We’re like ghosts 
replaying records new and old. Except one of us
is alive, 
and alone.

All the time,
I hang out with my mother.

Nowhere fancy. Nowhere grand.
Just a mother and her daughter buying groceries together
every night
since she passed.
I dream, and I long
for the roads our hearts know.
And for the life mama, and I
no longer have.

Ice Chips

Ice Chips
Ice chips.

I gasp from a night’s fog.
Ghosts came home with me from the 9th floor.

Ice chips.
None of the nurses said anything to me 
whenever I entered the employee only pantry 
with a styrofoam cup to get

ice chips.

Unstrapping the bi-pap mask feels like
apologizing for plunging my mother’s head into water.
If we’re lucky,
I can slip a third ice chip into her mouth before
I re-strap what must feel like a bear trap 
of air wrapped around her head.

She points out the window.
She flicks invisible shackles 
off her legs before trying to swing them over the side of the bed.

I ask her where she’s going every time,
knowing that she can’t answer until
finally 
I ask:
“Do you want to go home? Is that where you’re trying to go?”

She nods yes —
delirious.

I clutch my heart,
clutch her hand
and, tell her,
“Yes, you can go home if you want. Don’t worry about me and daddy. We will meet you there.”

Every hour I flinch now.
Ice chips.
Bed up.
Bed down.

Mama there’s nothing behind the curtains what are you pointing at oh my God.
Whatever ghosts were at her bedside followed me, 
and jolt me awake as my leaden body 
moves to get 

ice chips.
Except I’m already home.
Without her.

I wrote this is in December 2018 when my mother was rushed to the ER, and she spent one night admitted on a regular hospital floor until her ICU admission the following morning. Only one person was allowed to stay with her. No one else volunteered. I wasn’t going to leave her alone.

I didn’t sleep that night. Was not at all prepared physically or mentally. Every time I was about to drift off, I jolted awake for one reason or another.

Oxygen deprivation makes you hallucinate. So does sleep deprivation.

It was traumatic. No one else, but my therapist, know the details of that night. I had nightmares about it after where I’d wake up in my own bed, and swear I was still in the hospital, already halfway up to get my mom some ice, or fix her blankets, or move her bed, or keep her from trying to leave the bed, or or or or…

I know it’d hurt her to know how much pain this memory caused me. And at the same time, I would do it all over again. When faced with the hard stuff, you see just how much effort people are willing to put in. In the months leading up to her passing, I did the hard stuff when no one else was willing.

Why? Because I was an asthmatic, hard of hearing, anemic, colic, preemie, and my mother took care of me all her life. Surgeries. Hospital admissions. Doctor’s appointments. Chicken pox – twice! Cracked my skull open once. Ear infections so bad, I would literally scream like someone was stabbing knives in my ears. I remember her breaking nights to slip the nebulizer mask over my face or to give me some nasty medicine. Even after I was an adult, and lived on my own, sometimes if I had a doctor’s appointment, she’d go with me just because. And when she got cancer, I tried to return the favor. My efforts definitely pale in comparison compared to the years she put into me, but I still did it because I loved my mama.

And while the pain has… become more of a scar that aches really bad on some days. A limb I was forced to live without, but life has never the same. I don’t regret being there for her. I’d do it again.

WattPad Link: https://www.wattpad.com/1240795162-a-votive-that-has-un-mothered-ice-chips

What missing mama is like

What missing mama is like

It’s having to YouTube how to peel yautia.

It’s having to Google translate Spanish.

It’s all the little girls holding their mother’s hands on the street.

It’s all the elderly women and their middle aged clones sitting between shopping bags on the train.

It’s buying flowers every 20th because the petals feel like the tops of her tender hands.

It’s not knowing who to put in my emergency contacts now.

It’s not having someone to ask if these shoes match with this shirt.

It’s realizing my life was on training wheels the whole time I thought I was adulting.

It’s realizing that “You are my sunshine” is the saddest song ever created.

It’s having to keep family drama to myself.

It’s not knowing whether to bundle up unless I actually look up the weather.

It’s sleeping all the time because dreams are the only way to see her.

It’s chronologically organizing and filing day every card she’s ever given to me.

It’s caring for an oversized pair of pajamas the way a museum conservator does artifacts.

It’s not having a partner the night before Thanksgiving who knows how to tuck in the turkey wings.

It’s buying nothing with her name, for Christmas, mother’s day, or her birthday – ever again.

It’s being truly homesick, because home is where the heart is and my mom, was my heart.

It’s crying at the live action trailer of Dumbo, because damn those bastards who take his mommy. Heaven forbid Disney decides to reboot Bambi next.

It’s her number in my favorites, that I refuse to delete, because she is still my favorite person to talk to.

It’s never being able to talk to my favorite person again and when the cold turkey becomes unbearable, it’s stalking her Facebook feed, memorizing text message threads and writing her in messenger despite that it’s the same as writing to myself.

It’s writing her into a Christmas card for my dad because I’ll be damned if I have to refer to my parents as anything other than a pair – two halves of a whole.

It’s having a dream where she isn’t really gone, and it was all a trick, because she is here – in the flesh, and I’ve never known true happiness until that moment.

It’s waking up at one in the morning and realizing she died all over again, and real life, is the nightmare.

It’s knowing my life will always be “the before” and “the after”.

And most of all, it’s knowing I will never bask in the unconditional, effortless love, that is my mother’s.

– Rachel R. Vasquez, January 2019

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I don’t think many people realize, until they’ve lost someone so integrated into their lives, what having that person gone is like. It affects so many things, it’s this gaping hole in your life, that you are forced to live with. To learn to live with.

Some things have “work arounds”, like youtubing a video about something I could’ve asked my mom about. The 2 years before she passed, she taught me how to make pasteles from scratch and we made them together for the holidays. This past holiday, I stood in the supermarket feeling completely bewildered, because I didn’t know the difference between yautia – white or yellow – and malanga. I think if I didn’t have the internet on my phone to help, I wouldn’t have tried making pasteles without her again.

For other things, like the urge to call her, it doesn’t go away. It’s almost been a year and even today, without thinking, I thought, “I should call my mom,” and then to realize, “Oh wait. Yeah…”

Running errands have become quieter for me. Either she kept me company or I called her on the phone to catch up. I like to talk to people when I cook dinner, and she was one of the people I called most. Now there are times I cook in silence, and my husband asks me, why aren’t I talking to anyone? Because sometimes calling someone different makes it feel a bit better, other times, nothing can replace talking to her so I choose to talk to no one at all. There, in the emptiness of a phone call and conversation that could’ve have been – had it not been for cancer.

It sucks. Still trying to find ways to cope. Writing is one way. Taking it day by day.

Mama’s Heaven

Mama’s Heaven

I hope mama’s  heaven is

The Spring

 

trees with cotton candy tufts

pink because

what other color would love be?

bundles of pom poms

like they were dipped into clouds

yellow suns sprout among

the green thickets beneath her bare feet

leaves like canopies,

like baby angels

holding a million tiny umbrellas to shelter

her from a drizzle

heart shaped greens, they wave

like toddler hellos

like butterflies fluttering along

cloister walls

I hope mama’s heaven is

The Spring

so with every flower I see

 

there’s mama

smiling back at me

 

– Rachel R. Vasquez, May 2018

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I wrote this the weekend before mama’s birthday on May 8th. Her first birthday without her. I saw a movie with the in-laws the Sunday before and as we were driving home, I couldn’t help, but be in awe of all the flowers in the trees – it was beautiful. I started writing this – hoping that wherever my mama is, that it was a place full of flowers. I bring flowers home every 20th, she passed on Feb. 20th, and for me, the flowers connect us. Her name is Rosalina, Rosa, like the flower. She loved flowers, and by keeping flowers close to me, I hope that in some way, she’s just as close.

Agony

Agony

Oh God! Oh agony!

Throb that has been cast on me!

Oh silent searing

in my soul!

This violent breaking

of my home!

My womb, my mother

from where I was born.

My roof, my shelter

from this life’s storms.

Hacked off from me

like limb from body.

Hands gone from me,

like wind not breathing.

Meandering, I’m grounded

to this earth.

Wandering unfounded,

still I search.

Her laughter, her being,

my ears bleed with strain,

to hear her tell me

she loves me again.

But an empty cold hearth

I receive.

Her safety and warmth,

I feel only in dreams.

 

– Rachel R. Vasquez, April 2018

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2 months later and still hurts like no other. It’s hard to put this kind of despair into words, but I tried to any way.

Candles

Candles

My mother never liked candles.

Twice they were responsible

for a childhood blaze.

Now, like a candle,

her life wanes.

 

Her lips form soundless shapes

on January 9th,

“Happy Birthday.”

She smiles bright and sleepily

even when she’s held me to

her swelling belly

after I cried to “You are my sunshine,” on the guitar.

She mouths, “I love you, “

as if she’s drifting.

 

Sailing on the lip of a parting boat

and I am her shore.

The ocean between us grows by the hour.

 

Her glow extinguishes

with every breath,

her soul relinquished,

lying dazed, unfocused, silent –

she becomes far.

 

Her body rancid,

we count the days,

her wick dims placid.

 

A piece of my heart,

a piece of her goes.

I pray God carries her

afloat like music notes,

as she slowly sets like a sun,

into a gentle wisp of smoke.

 

Tallow lessened into rest

until her time has run.

Ended to infinite slumber,

from ember to ashes,

a votive that has un-mothered.

 

– Rachel R. Vasquez, February 2018

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I wrote this in February within the weeks my mother was becoming less like herself. By then she was in a nursing home, intubated via tracheotomy, and Pleurx catheters in her lungs and stomach. Although she survived a bout of pneumonia in December and January appeared hopeful, as February rolled in, I noticed she was sleeping more, becoming less focused, and forgetting things you told her minutes before. The cancer was progressing fast. A church friend of hers sat with me and said it reminded her of her father, who, like a candle, dimmed each day until he wasn’t there anymore. I wrote this praying that if I could not keep her, that God at least take her peacefully, without pain.

Room 10-24

Room 10-24

There was a woman I didn’t recognize,

the same color as the walls,

stacked like a house of sticks frail enough to knock over with a touch,

waiting for her daughter.

And I,

looking for my mother

popped my head into each room desperately.

In the room I passed

this woman I didn’t recognize was

until my cousin said,

“That’s her!”

I’m here mama. I tell her I love her, kiss her short haired head, and hold her hands.

I try to focus on her smile and not the tubes.

I come home guilty because

for just a brief second

she was a woman I thought I didn’t know,

until she was my mother again.

 

– Rachel R. Vasquez, November 2017

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This is the first poem I’ve put on this site for 2018. I have gone on internet hiatus with social media, my blogs, and writing in general since October. There’s no easy way to say any of this, but my mother, my sweet mama who I lovingly refer to as “mamasita”, died in February after a 4 year fight with stage 4 breast cancer. My life has been whole heartedly focused on the last 6 months of my mother’s life and now that it is “over”, I have never felt so – angry. Lonely. Heartbroken. Lost. Out of place in this world. Like I’m living in a twilight zone where everything else moves when for me, it’s like the sun has been blotted out of the skies.

I’ve spent my life writing. My mother knew I loved to write. And though I haven’t felt like myself in months, and I can’t imagine a future where one day, “this” will feel okay, I know that this is step one. Step one: Get back on my blog, my twitters, and write. Do the thing I know I loved once and hopefully it will get me through, one day at a time.

I am thinking of creating a blog dedicated to the last 6 months of her life- of my life when she existed in it. There are so many emotions and so many lessons learned, writing seems the only way to get it out of me. Until this new blog comes into existence, this is one of the first things I wrote as things began to go downhill. When I was beginning to face the fact that my mother was dying.

She was in the first of what would be a weekly routine of urgent care and hospital stays before the climax in December and the end in February. I was looking for her room in Memorial Sloan Kettering with my cousin, and I passed right by it. I peeked in there, saw a woman looking down at the floor, and I didn’t recognize my own mother. I kept going, trying to find her, when my cousin pulled me back saying that she was in the room I’d just dismissed.

When I realized that I didn’t recognize my mother, it was terrifying, and I felt incredibly guilty. I would never tell my mother that I didn’t recognize her. I cried when I got home that evening when I told my husband about it. I’m crying just writing this, but I’ve gotten this far! I’m typing! I’m going to keep trying and no matter how painful, I’m going to vent this in one of the only ways I know how.

If you have a mother alive, please, cherish her always.