My mother would always put up the altar during the day of the dead. She would go to the market and pick out the most beautiful orange marigolds, bread with sugar, black mole, and some of the most dazzling colored paper decorated with skeletons dancing around a cemetery. She would carefully arrange them on the table with the photos of my abuelas, and I would watch her proudly as she stood back to admire the final altar.
My great-grandmother is a mystery to the family; my grandmother doesn’t speak of her. I know of her from the photos of the revolution and her old recipes. There is a book written about her, made by my grandmother, reading “Carmen” as the title.
My grandmother was a secretary and an English teacher. She married very young into an abusive relationship, and after her first husband died she married someone thirty years older than her who is still the love of her life. She is loud and opinionated, makes the best niño envuelto, and loves to watch very violent horror movies. She has never made me cry, only holding me accountable when it is necessary. But of her five daughters, only three of them call her on her birthday.
My mother was a ballet teacher and was once a ballet dancer. She never talked a lot about her childhood, getting to know her story was piecing together anecdotes she would tell her friends when she drank a little too much. Because she was a ballet teacher, she valued discipline, but that didn’t stop her from holding her daughters close on Saturday mornings after a long week of work. Discipline though meant she was often cold to most people she didn’t know. Discipline meant that you could very easily disappoint her. It meant sometimes rides home would be filled with screaming and crying, with the anger of her mother and her grandmother. And most times she would have a hard time saying she had made a mistake.
Mothers are hard to understand because we often forget that mothers are human. They are given so many standards to meet that they often forget themselves and carry the anger of their mothers who also forgot themselves. But mothers are also careful and filled with love, so much it spills out into their children. They can be hurricanes with only silence at the center. Often forgetting how much words mean when they come from them. They just stick to you, like honey to fingers. Because mothers make up stories for you, for your future. And that’s why it is easy to disappoint them and so hard to make them proud. But at the end of the day, you look for them because they are all you have ever known a mother to be, with all of its complexities, all you want is a mother’s love, so warm and so safe you can finally be calm.
I wonder, on the day of the dead, of the future, when I’m the one putting up the altar. I wonder if the pieces of their stories will be correct. If they will think I have done them justice. We think we know them, but in reality, we only know what they have chosen to show us and what they cannot hide. We hold them so close to our hearts that we don’t realize we only see a part of them. Will they visit me on that day when the veil of death is dissolved?
But I don’t know all mothers. I just know mine, and I love her in a way I don’t think anyone without a mother would understand. Like a painting, so complicated, you often have to step back and ask why.
Ana Delgado is a freshman Art History major at DePaul University. She has been writing since her freshman year of high school and has published a book before. She works in poetry and short stories as well as more academic pieces. She loves the intersection of happiness and sadness and is obsessed with ghosts.