Last night, on the eve of Christmas, I connected with my mom to a call with my sister and my brother. I hadn’t seen or spoken to my brother in perhaps three years, but it’s also possible that we’ve done it on previous holidays but I don’t remember.
My brother had sent a message to our family group (the siblings and my mother) and I asked him to delete it. The message said that he would be visiting my mother when she came back from Spain, with his family and inlaws, a total of 8 people. He said his inlaws often talked about those delicious “chiles en nogada” which she prepared like ten years ago, and my brother asked if it was possible to make them again.
This immediately raised a red flag for both my sister and myself, because my mother would start obsessing over it on her vacations, and when she got back to Mexico she would pester Margaret to driver her everywhere to get the necessary ingredients (which are many), and this is one of the most laborious traditional dishes of Mexican cuisine, requiring peeling off the thin skin of chestnuts by hand, which usually takes days. It’s crazy labor intensive.
In any case, we asked our brother to delete the message, there was no need to stress her out on vacation, and futhermore, my mother would just be arriving from a transoceanic flight just a couple of days before to rush in to cook a meal for 12 people that requires days of preparation. Not possible and even if the conditions were perfect, my mother is 80 now and her executive skills are degrading.
He deleted the messages without our mother noticing.
The camino is in the background and my family drama is in the foreground. I feel as if I have failed to be present in the walk, being reactive in my relationship with my mother, not having been up to the challenge that this walk brought me. At the same time I appreciate the adventure we had together, I know the experience will mature better than what I appreciate now, and all in all my mother’s visit gives her peace to know that I’m in a beautiful safe country and that I have good friends here.
My mother and my sister have commended how “intelligent” my friends are, which I hadn’t noticed before. They expressed this to them and they seemed surprised… well are your friends in Mexico stupid? No no it’s not like that, I’d say my friends are usually smart people, but smart people didn’t stay in Puebla. When I go back to Puebla I find my dumb friends, but even then it’s not like that, they’re not really dumb but… not good people. I gave Moisés as an example, he used to have a restaurant in Tabasco which was a used as a stop for human traffickers to change vehicles as they smuggled central american people to the border with the US, and he would take their dollars at half the real value. My Spanish friends were mortified. And still, this is not the worst he has done.
In any case, I do not consider Moisés my friends anymore. He was a friend in my youth, a friendship that arose from the fact that we were neighbors but had little else in common (well, that our parents gave us very little supervision too), but throughout our adult friendship he has shown his true colors multiple times, and anytime I’m disappointed I just remind myself that’s on me, I expect him to be someone he is not, and furthermore: it’s very likely that associating with him could get me in trouble, he’s the kind of person who could get gunned down for gambling debt, for example.
It’s 3:22 AM and my mother is awake too. We arrived to the albergue exhausted yesterday, and went to sleep too early. We were watching a documentary on the early pre-history of mankind, a topic that fascinates me. What was man like before we became civilized? But I dozed off, unable to keep my eyes open.
Enough rambling, I’ll try to get back to sleep now.