Paula H. Bloom <pauli@netmeister.org>
Those of us who have moved to the United States from other countries, or whose parents are immigrants, know what it means to live between two cultures. My mother left her native Argentina in 1963 for what was supposed to be a year of studying English at Boston University. Her year abroad turned into a lifelong residence. While there, she met my father, married him, and decided to make her life in the US.
Growing up, it never occurred to me that my mother had made an incredibly painful decision, or that she had sacrificed everything she knew. Her story is not one of flight from poor economic conditions in the hopes of finding a better life, nor of escape from political or religious persecution. Her life in Argentina had been happy, her father a doctor, her mother a dentist. She'd left a culture and language she loved to be with my father and make a different kind of life here. To me, she was simply my mom and I was an American kid who happened to live with two cultures, hearing and speaking two languages at home. My older sister, María Valeria, learned Spanish before she did English, and at times would confuse the two, saying "globoon" instead of "globo" or "balloon". My mother realized that by giving her first child a typically Hispanic name, my sister had to deal with a lot of hassle: "Valerie-a?", "Isn't that a disease?", and "Which is it? María or Valeria?". To spare me similar grief, I was named Paula, equally acceptable in English and Spanish.
Our trips to visit our Argentinean family were stressful for me. I dreaded having to speak in Spanish all the time, forced to kiss and smile at endless droves of relatives whose names I could never remember. Yet once I adjusted to being there, I enjoyed playing with my cousins, and basking in the unconditional love that only family extremely happy to see you can provide. My parents, sister and I also reveled in the joys of a large, close-nit family, something we only experienced in Argentina where everyone lived in the same town and saw each other almost daily. Our cousins were each other's best friends, whereas we saw our American cousins only on holidays. Even my father loved going to Argentina, having picked up Spanish quickly after meeting my mother. He enjoyed immensely the large asados, my loud, funny uncles, and the support network inherent in a large extended family. By the end of our visits, I no longer wanted to go home, couldn't remember why I had been reluctant in the first place, enjoyed speaking Spanish and realized how much I would miss everyone there.
Now, as I look back on those times as an adult, I realize these trips were probably much more stressful for my mother than they were for me. If even I didn't want to leave our relatives behind when it was time to go back home, how hard must it have been for her to adjust from her new life to her old and back again? When my grandmother died, and I saw my mother sob for the first time, I began to think of her as more than just my mom. She was also a daughter. And she never recovered from the shock of her own mother's sudden death, nor from the guilt of having left her behind.
It wasn't until after my mother's death, and after reading the memoirs she'd written while she was sick with cancer, that I began to appreciate the courage my mother had had to make the decision to stay in the United States. I can't imagine doing the same. How difficult was it to live with one foot in each country?
I remember the last time she traveled to Argentina. She'd gone by herself for a month so she'd have time to visit with everyone. To my surprise, she decided to come home early; she'd missed us. By that time, she had lived more years in the United States than she had in Argentina, and her heart no longer belonged there. She would always be connected to the place of her childhood, but her home was with us in the US. And now that she is gone, I've begun to feel many of the same feelings of connection to Argentina, to understand what it was like for her. Taking over my mother's tasks, I now write the letters to her sisters, awaiting their responses. I am now responsible for remembering our relatives' birthdays, for calling on holidays, sending pictures, keeping in touch. Since we brought my mother's ashes to Argentina to rest in the family mausoleum, maintaining the connection to our familiares argentinos is a sweet way of staying connected to her.