Molinaseca → Villafranca del Bierzo
Today my mother told me a story I hadn’t heard before, and I’ll have to provide a little bit of background to explain it: when my parents met, my mother was engaged to another man. I’ve heard bits and pieces about him, a seemingly indecisive guy who took too long to materialize the wedding. My mother was 30 and my father 24 when they met, and they’ve always bragged about getting engaged after only 10 days of meeting (and materialized the wedding only two months after).
My mother has never expressed this, but today I had the insight that the condition of breaking her previous engagement was having another one in hand, and likely it had to come with a specific wedding date. The story of how my parents met merits a post of its own, for now I’m only concerned with what my mother told me.
She said that, when she was still dating her ex-fiance, a cousin of my mother was selling a watch through a luck draw. The ex-fiancee liked it a lot, so he asked how much it would be to buy it outright. $3,000 pesos, my mother’s cousin said. My mother was already working and he was still studying, so he asked my mother to borrow him money to purchase the watch. He had an internship lined up and would be able to repay in the next few months.
The internship came and went without the debt being repaid, or even mentioned. This evidently festered (as my mother is retelling the story 50 years later), and at the end of it she remarked how lucky she was to have married my father and not this flaky dude.
This last remark made me reflect on the next leg of our walk, which was made in silence: if I could re-roll the dice with my parents, would I choose different ones? The gut reaction is holy shit of course not, but considering it has so many implications it makes me dizzy. It means I would love another person who is not my mother or father as my own parent, that they would have done a better job than what my parents did with me.
In new age circles they promote the idea that you choose your family before being born, because they are what your soul needs to grow in this lifetime. I don’t buy it, but it’s true that if we tackle the issue of parental trauma with a growth mindset, our family will ultimately become a great source of growth. Among my peers I often hear “oh my parents did great except for this and that, and when I have children I’ll avoid doing this and that”, just by devoting to not repeating the same mistakes as our parents we’re healing that inter-generational trauma that runs in our families.
And yet… I’m afraid we might be chasing the wrong ghosts. We promise not to repeat the same manifestations, but the root problem produces the same problem in a different manifestation. Being parent is no fucking joke, no wonder I’m 45 and still not ready for it.
I’m typing this with my phone nudged between the boards of the top bunk bed, my wireless keyboard lays on an incline on my bent legs. I feel I’m opening too many threads and not weaving them correctly, this fabric is way too important to be thread carelessly. I’ll have to go to sleep now. I’ll continue when I feel lucid again.
It’s 6am and we had a rough cold night without heating at sub-zero temperatures.
I think the situation has answered for itself: if I am able to share this experience in good spirits with my mother, I’d be a fool to want to roll the dice again. The same goes for my father, I’m sure he’d be willing to do this with me.
One time when I went back to Mexico I went to visit him at his home (my parents would eventually divorce and my father remarried). My father and his wife asked me about my walks, and they expressed interest in walking with me. When his wife left for a moment, he confided to me: I don’t think she wants to do the kind of pilgrimage that we would enjoy. When my father was 16 he embarked on a summer adventure with a cousin free riding on freight trains, they made it all the way from Toronto to California.
Why does suffering and challenge appeal to us? My mother has woken up and we’re laughing about a difficult situation we had two days ago. I want to close this thread, but I won’t be able to do it now.
There are personal and family secrets which I am not willing to reveal only to justify why this is even a struggle, and they don’t need to be revealed to work through them. It’s time to start walking again, I will see where the way takes me.