Life goes on

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Time seems to be slowing down and the days only get longer.  Today we went to visit Aunt Luz and the only cousin who still lives at home with here.  Aunt Luz is the only remaining daughter of grandmas who still lives in Mexico.  Five of her six children decided to go in search of the American Dream while Aunt Luz and her family stayed to search for their own dream in Mexico. 

I sit and I listen to the stories of her youth and her own children.  I remember how fun my times were here as a child.  Aunt Luz and her husband always had a farm and animals and her back yard was always filled with alfalfa and hey bails where we would jump and make forts and hiding places.  It’s hard to believe now that my cousins are adults with children and lives of their own.  I am not sure how it is for other children who are forced to immigrate at early ages and are taken away from their homes but for me coming back to Mexico I want things to be like when I was seven.  For me time stopped when I left my grandmothers house.  Coming back now I want my cousins to be little and for us to grow up together like we were supposed to.  There are cousins who have visited us in the states but there are so many more that we have not seen in over 23 years and we all feel like strangers to each other.   Now are tossed into the same pot to pretend as if time has not passed and we are the best of family, yet the reality is that over the course of 23 years everyone moves on and creates lives of their own, lives that don’t include those who have passed and those who have left.  You know about each other and word comes of the health and wealth but in the end the lack of communication creates more than borders and barriers.  Now it’s the age of technology and things like the internet and facebook allow us to stay in contact more often but the 23 years of not being there for life’s major and unexpected events has still created a sense of strangeness. 

Each one of us goes on with the lives we were given and those who go to “el norte” or north to the United States are mostly remembered by the money they send “home”, but, for the children, we are left to be forgotten.  Not by choice but out necessity, the need to continue and survive.  I imagine that there must be some resentment from those who stay towards those who go north in search of a “better life”.  What is so wrong with the life here?  For those who stay it is a slap in the face to say that America is a search of a better life, as if those who remain behind by chance or by choice have a lesser life than those who head north.  I am a stranger in the place where I was born and life won’t let me forget that.