Search Results for: Chicago Magazine

On Solitude (and Isolation and Loneliness [and Brackets])

Illustration by Homestead Studio

Sarah Fay | Longreads | March 2020 | 18 minutes (5,122 words)

 

The change came less as a chrysalis moment, an instant of emergence and blossoming, than after weeks of distress. My apartment at the time was in the rear of the building, away from the street. Even by studio standards, it was tiny — the kitchen too close to the bed, the bed practically touching the bookshelf and the desk. It had a slight view of the Chicago skyline but mainly looked onto a brick wall. My immediate neighbors kept to themselves. They were presences, a series of doors opening and closing. I’d lived contentedly in that remove. It suited me. Then it didn’t. 

Naturally, I blamed my apartment — the claustrophobic lack of square footage, the oppressive brick wall. The moment I walked in the door, I felt a crushing weight on my chest, followed by a pit in my stomach. My environment had to be the cause.

In his essay on solitude, the 16th-century essayist Michel de Montaigne disagrees: “Our disease lies in the mind, which cannot escape from itself.” Finding contentment in solitude requires self-reliance. (Ralph Waldo Emerson would later agree, though he remained very much engaged in public life.) Montaigne advises us to keep a “back shop,” a private room within the self, where others can’t enter. Plaster and wood have nothing to do with it. We must have “a mind pliable in itself, that will be company.” My inner back shop had somehow transformed from a place of solitude to one of isolation and loneliness.

The ideal of solitude is strength. It’s a skill to be mastered: the ability to be alone without feeling lonely.  Read more…

15 True Crime Longreads and the Questions We Should Ask Ourselves When Reading Them

(Armin Weigel/Picture Alliance via Getty Images)

“I think one of the reasons these stories are so popular — and they’ve been very popular since long before whatever true crime boom we’re currently in,” Rachel Monroe notes while discussing her book Savage Appetites, on our cultural fascination with crime, is that “they’re very emotionally engaging.”

“Whenever we’re telling these stories,” Monroe continues, “we’re participating in that emotional, social, political conversation, whether we want to admit it or not.”

For all that we can stream entire seasons of docudramas in a single day, true crime stories often take years to report out and get right. Whether the person facing the facts of any given case is a staff writer or a law enforcement official, even full-time, invested professionals can lack the bandwidth or the resources to investigate every life story that crosses their desks, with the undivided attention each of those lives deserves.

Read more…

House of the Century

Illustration by Homestead Studio

Daisy Alioto | Longreads | February 2020 | 16 minutes (3,903 words)

“A house is the physical manifestation of the ego”

Aline Kominsky-Crumb, “My Very Own Dream House”

I. Security

I have always harbored suspicions about fire escape windows. When my mother was living in Boston in the 80s, her TV set sat across from the window that opened onto her fire escape. One night she woke up to a hairy leg entering the window and screamed loudly enough to wake her neighbors and scare away the television thief. An acquaintance who lives in Park Slope listened to an intruder pop the glass out of her fire escape window and watched their iPhone light sweep closer to the bedroom as she silently tried to shake her boyfriend awake. After an eternity, he sprung up and chased the intruder out with a hockey stick.

My boyfriend does not harbor suspicions about fire escape windows, so when he moved to a one bedroom apartment, security considerations became my own research project. The acquaintance in Park Slope sent a link to a $20 window alarm on Amazon. I watched a short video about the installation process and began to read the reviews. The top review was 5/5 stars, written by Mary in Florida and it broke my heart more than any thief ever could.

She writes that she debated buying a door alarm but never did, despite the fact that the rest of the house was baby proofed for two children under two years old. One day, after feeding a bird outside, the younger one slipped back out without her noticing — probably to chase the bird, she says. In a few minutes she sensed the lack of noise in the house, the too quietness. She found him in the pond across the street and he died the next day.

The review continues. “I am a good mom,” she writes, listing the other ways she baby-proofed the home. “I am a good mom.” I’ve forgotten why I’ve come to Amazon. Maybe this is someone’s idea of a sick joke, a manufacturer’s enthusiastic review of their own product gone too far but no… with a little Googling, I find Mary and the local reporting on the tragedy.

I want to reach through my screen and hold Mary. To tell her yes, you are a good mom. It’s not your fault that doors open and babies look at birds. Of course you are a good mother, there’s just so much that can go wrong with a home.

According to Robert Lee’s A Treatise On Hysteria (1871), Greek physician Aretaeus was one of the first thinkers to link hysteria to the female body. “In the middle of the flanks of a woman lies the womb, a female viscus closely resembling an animal.” The womb wanders the body, leaving a slew of undesirable symptoms in its wake. “On the whole it is like an animal within an animal,” Aretaeus writes.
Read more…

The Ancient Waterways of Phoenix, Arizona

The Central Arizona Project canal in Phoenix. AP Photo/Matt York

Bruce Berger | A Desert Harvest | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | March 2019 | 25 minutes (4,980 words)

 

As Mars was once thought to be, Phoenix is crisscrossed by canals. Except for what remains of its desert setting, canals may be Phoenix’s most distinguishing feature. Varying little, pooling a personality, they make soft incisions through what surrounds them. As you jockey through traffic dizzied by small businesses and their signs, numbed by miles of ranch homes and convenience stores, your eyes will flicker coolly down what seems an open tunnel of water. Receding parallels of packed desert sand, twenty feet wide, clean of vegetation, frame an even, sky-reflecting flow. Glimpses of joggers and cyclists along the banks indicate that there is still human life without combustion. For all their sterility, the canals command moving water and thus retain more mystery than anything else in the valley. Because they so prominently display what makes a desert city possible, it would seem that to get to the bottom of the canals would be to get to the bottom of Phoenix.

Part of the canals’ mystique is that some of their routes predate Phoenix by nearly two millennia. Beginning around A.D. 200, Hohokam Indians, using handheld digging tools, moved tons of earth and engineered the largest pre-Columbian irrigation system in the Western Hemisphere. Some 250 miles of canals fanned like tufts of hair from the Salt River, irrigating several thousand acres of corn, squash, beans, pumpkins and cotton. Having reached a population of twenty thousand, the Hohokam abandoned the Salt River Valley around 1400, possibly because they had depleted the soil.

Read more…

American Dirt: A Bridge to Nowhere

Flatiron Books / Illustration by Katie Kosma

Sarah Menkedick | Longreads | February 2020 | 20 minutes (5,591 words)

I first heard about American Dirt from Myriam Gurba’s scathing critique of the novel on Tropics of Meta. Her take immediately made sense, and it jolted me. Back in graduate school, I — a white, American woman — had written a novel about Mexico. I had lived there with my husband, Jorge, who is from Oaxaca, for five years. Many of our friends are Mexican; my extended family is Mexican. I speak fluent Spanish. I normally write nonfiction, and this was the only piece of fiction I had ever felt pulled to write. It was about a pregnant 17-year-old Oaxacan woman who adopts a dog. Yes. Really. I very briefly flirted with the idea of trying to publish it and was told that no one would want to read a novel that featured a Mexican protagonist — could I find a way to make the main character American?

Later, as I worked on a nonfiction book about return migration to Oaxaca, I received the same response: Could I make an American — myself, possibly, or a “young girl” living in Mexico — the main character, instead of this 35-year-old indigenous man who’d moved from L.A. back to his tiny village in the Sierra? That book didn’t sell. I was too scared to send out the novel, and I still am. As a nonfiction writer I can position myself, inquire about the limits of my understanding, push on them by asking questions. Writing fiction, one is fully laying claim to a world.

Read more…

Through a Glass, Tearfully

Illustration by Hannah Li

Maureen Stanton | Longreads | January 2020 | 26 minutes (6,448 words)

In the early 1990s I joined a stream of people strolling past the AIDS quilt spread across a gymnasium floor in Lansing, Michigan, the room quiet but for our muffled sniffling. I hadn’t expected the quilt — a patchwork of many quilts — to affect me so powerfully, the clothes and artifacts and mementos stitched into tapestries, with dates of births and premature deaths, soft beautiful tombstones.

Humans are the only creatures who cry for emotional reasons. Animals do not shed tears of emotion; apes have tear ducts but only to “bathe and heal” the eyes. Crying makes us human. In the 1956 film, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, people who’d been replaced by aliens could no longer cry, a telltale sign that they were not human. In one scene, a man carries a pod containing the alien replica of a small child. “There’ll be no more tears,” he tells the child’s mother.

***

Some people are super tasters or super smellers, or even super see-ers, with an uncanny ability to remember faces. I am a super crier, or maybe a super empathizer. An astrologer once said that my soul bears the karmic burden of feeling others’ pain as if it were my own. This is apparently because of the placement on my birth chart of the comet Chiron, “the wounded healer,” named after a Greek centaur who could heal everyone but himself.

Once, in Columbus, Ohio, I choked up at Taco John’s, a brand new mom and pop joint, all spiffy with shiny stainless steel, but empty of customers. I could see the work and sacrifice the family had made to realize their dream — opening a taco shop. I could feel their hope when I walked in the door, but I could calculate the meager profit from my order against the cost of utilities, salaries, supplies. I could see their dream failing.

I nearly lost it again at Karyn’s Kitchen, a food truck in someone’s yard along the road to my house in Maine. Karyn probably figured she’d snag summer traffic on the way to the beach, but who wants to eat in someone’s yard? I ate there once out of pity — her husband’s “famous” meatloaf, which she served with mashed potatoes, steamed carrots, and two slices of white bread with a pat of margarine. When I asked her to heat up the cold gravy, she microwaved it until the plastic container melted and handed it to me like that. When I drive by Karyn’s yard now, I can’t stand to look at the empty space where her dream failed.

A woman in a laundromat once yelled at her small son, “No one wants to hear you,” and I got a lump in my throat.
Read more…

If My Scars Could Talk

Illustration by Homestead Studio

Tega Oghenechovwen | Longreads | January 2020 | 15 minutes (3,777 words)

Content warning: This piece contains mentions of child abuse and childhood sexual abuse.

* * *

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Up from a past that’s rooted in pain

I rise — Maya Angelou

* * *

1. Why is the World Silent?

I am 7. B is 8. We are on the balcony of this monstrous brick house, naked. Our small bodies are soaking in gasoline. Our shirts, shorts, and shoes are on the concrete balustrade with our bags. A Good Samaritan who found us at the bus park trying to run for our lives just dragged us back. B’s teeth are inside his tongue. His eyes are liquid red. Tears and gasoline have washed away my sense of smell.

We face aunty Em. Her eyes pierce us to the marrow. She has a matchbox. She draws out a matchstick. She threatens to strike it. We shout as if shouting was what we were born to do. Our bodies creak and crack with fear. After a short while, Aunty Em fishes a waist-high koboko from the pantry.

“If you ever —” Lash. “If you ever try—” Lash. Lash. “If you ever try to run again —” Lash. Lash. Lash. She lashes us with the koboko until we become like raw beef; until we promise we will stomach her wickedness; that we will forget we are people’s children, and become her footstools.

Uncle Dee is in his study crafting a model boat for a client. He could be building a bomb to finish us. I wonder why he doesn’t hear us weeping. I wonder where the world is.

We hate here. The food we eat here tastes like burnt soil. Even at that, it’s never enough. Why did our parents dump us here? What did we do to deserve this? What?

I draw two eagles with enormous wings on the yellow walls of my room — one for me, the other for B. Aunty Em sees the eagles. She pops my head with the heel of her ko-ko shoe and locks me in a room without any light or window.

Silence speaks in the dark room. I hear the blood flushing my veins, and the worms eating my belly. I cry. I cry until I faint. Why is the world silent? Where is God? Why does He or She do nothing?

Read more…

Witness Mami Roar

Illustration by Homestead Studio

Sonia Alejandra Rodríguez | Longreads | December 2019 | 13 minutes (3,486 words)

 Writing the Mother Wound, a series co-published with Writing our Lives and Longreads, examines the complexities of mother love. 

* * *

My mother feared removal and separation from her children long before Trump became president. I crossed the Mexico-U.S. border with her and my younger sister in 1992. We walked from Juarez, Mexico, to El Paso, Texas, and boarded a plane to Chicago where my father, already a permanent resident, met us. We were stopped at the airport in El Paso. Officers handcuffed my mother and separated her from my sister and me. At 5 years old, I sat in a black plastic chair, with my 4-year-old sister crying on my lap, waiting for my mother to return. The men interrogating her harassed her with questions about her family and made comments about her appearance. 

Years later, as we sat around my mother’s kitchen table in Cicero, Illinois, she remembered that the officers tried to convince her to go back. “Me decian que que bonita soy,” they told her. A woman as beautiful as her should have no problem making a better life for herself in Mexico. At 23 years old, my mother had already heard her share of promises from no-good men — including from my father, who was the reason for the journey in the first place. If I had been thinking only of myself, my mother said to me, I would’ve stayed in Mexico.

“Tengo que pensar en el futuro de mis hijas,” she responded when the men asked why she was willing to risk it all. Her daughters’ future is why she left her mother and siblings in Mexico and why she believes she endured many years of mistreatment from my father. 

* * *

The climate around immigration in the United States today is not the same as it was when my family immigrated in the 1990s. And yet the violence and the terror feel familiar. Even though my mother made it past the border and was eventually reunited with her husband, she lived in constant fear that any wrong move could lead to deportation. Raids were a real possibility for her every day and would become a real terror for my sister and me as we got older. Today, many immigrants and asylum seekers have been apprehended and are now detained in detention centers and for-profit jails across the country. Images of overcrowded cages with brown children wrapped in Mylar blankets abound the news. The current condition of the U.S.-Mexico border is infuriating not because I’m formerly undocumented, but because the injustice against immigrants and asylum seekers suggests that neither the U.S. nor Mexico see Mexicans and Central Americans as fully human. My immediate family didn’t have such atrocious experiences with the immigration system. Instead, our trauma was crafted inside the privacy of our own home, where we believed we were one step closer to the American Dream.

Growing up, I often asked my mother to tell us the story of how we got to Chicago. My curiosity was grounded in a desire to learn where I belonged and a frustration because  our lives were filled with violence and pain. Even though I grew up in a predominantly Mexican and Mexican American community, where mixed status households were common, keeping our undocumented status to ourselves was paramount. Protecting the secrecy of our status meant we also needed to be silent about the trauma occurring in our home. Letting friends, teachers, or cops know about the violence always meant risking family separation. 


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In The Nation, Isabela Dias recounts a story of an undocumented woman, Nancy, who was deported back to Mexico after helping to convict her rapist. After many years of physical and emotional abuse, Nancy reported her boyfriend for sexually attacking her in their home and applied for a U visa, the resident authorization for undocumented people who witness or are victims of a crime. Because of an enormous backlog, Nancy was deported before she could receive the visa, and her U.S.-born children had to follow after her. Dias reports that since President Trump took office, the backlog for U visa applications “is now more than 134,000 pending cases” — only 10,000 visas are granted each year. While they struggle to survive in Mexico, Nancy and her children wait for her U visa application to be processed. Throughout the narrative, most of Nancy’s concern is the future of her children: ‘“I dream that they will have a career one day,’ Nancy says. ‘I want them to think big. Then, it will have been worth going through all of this suffering.”’ Nancy’s words remind me of my mother, who never pressed charges against my father for beating her. She never applied for a U visa; she probably never knew it was an option. 

* * *

In 2011, before my 24th birthday, I received a master’s degree in English literature. By then, I had been living in Southern California, away from any family, for about two years. I had also started what would turn into a five-year-long emotionally abusive situation with a man also enrolled in a graduate program, and I was living my best life as a high-functioning alcoholic with high-functioning depression. When I passed my exams, I called my mother from Riverside, California, to share the good news.

“No he de hablar ingles pero ahora mi hija es maestra de la lengua,” she said, laughing  at not being able to speak English while I was about to receive a master’s degree in it. I sat on a concrete bench outside the humanities building, holding the phone with one hand and plugging my ear with the other. The day was bright and hot. Students walked around me. The chatter of the campus made it difficult to hear my mother speak from some 2,000 miles away in Cicero, Illinois. My friends, also in graduate programs at the campus, stood a few feet away, waiting to celebrate me.

The current condition of the U.S.-Mexico border is infuriating not because I’m formerly undocumented, but because the injustice against immigrants and asylum seekers suggests that neither the U.S. nor Mexico see Mexicans and Central Americans as fully human.

“Todos mis sacrificios y todo este dolor ha valido la pena,” she said. All of her sacrifice and pain, she told me, had been worth it. My lungs burned from holding my breath too long at hearing my mother’s voice filled with pride. Guilt crawled from my gut and wrapped around my heart — because I didn’t have a summer job, which meant I couldn’t send money home and wouldn’t be able to pay my own rent; because I resented her so much; because I hated myself and didn’t want to be alive; because I believed I wasn’t worth it. But I couldn’t share any of this with her; instead, I thanked her and we got off the phone. My friends stood around me and we shared celebratory tequila shots.

* * *

When my mother moved to this country at 23 years old, her new support system consisted of her children, her husband, and her husband’s family. She didn’t know the language, she didn’t know how to drive, and she only had the equivalent of a sixth-grade education. My mother tethered her life and her children’s future to her husband, a man who had been sent to the U.S. by his mother in hopes that the change of scenery would force him to mature. Over the years, I’ve tried to imagine what it’d be like for a young married couple, 23 and 24 years old, with two daughters, 5 and 4 years old, to be in a new, strange country unable to return home. In my investigations, I’ve gathered that the root of their rocky marriage was my father’s desire for independence and my mother’s insistence on codependency. He probably didn’t want to be married and have children, while her Mexican upbringing taught her that husbands are the only way to a better life. These conflicting desires culminated in a tumultuous, violent, and traumatizing union in the U.S. — wherein my father, a permanent resident, had the upper hand over his wife and children, all of whom were undocumented. 

In their text on immigration and domestic violence, Edna Erez and Shannon Harper suggest that battered immigrant women are “forced to make an inordinately difficult choice between remaining in an abusive relationship or leaving. If they leave, they may risk their legal status, facing deportation, and losing custody of and contact with their children.” As a child, I saw this up close with my mother. I don’t know if she believed everything my father said because she had limited access to information or because she loved him. When my sister and I would plead with her to leave him, she’d look into our round baby faces and ask, “¿Y adonde vamos a ir?” Where could a mother of two, then three, then four children go without money, without a car, without papers? My mother feared shelters. She thought worse things would happen to us there. She tried leaving a few times. Often, it didn’t matter where we’d run off to, because my father always found us and brought us home — without a fight from my mother because she believed it would be different this time and she wanted a home for my siblings and me. Hope was all my mother had to her name. I don’t doubt my father used his power to manipulate my mother. I don’t doubt he lied to get her to stay or to keep her quiet. I have an easier time understanding my father as the villain of the story than I do understanding why my mother stayed. 

* * *

My memories of the beatings come in snippets. They were so frequent, I can’t keep them in order in my mind. I can’t remember if my mother sneaking us out of our apartment in the middle of the night came before or after he punched her so hard we had to take her to the hospital. Or if it was before or after he tried to make it all up by taking her on a date, then slapped her and kicked her out of the car. Or if it came before or after his near fatal drug overdose, which they told us kids was heat exhaustion. Maybe it was after she ran and hid under our kitchen table begging for her life, or before he dragged her by the hair across the living room. It could have been after that time he almost choked her to death, or when he beat her while she was pregnant with my brother, or when she got so drunk at my aunt’s house she walked outside barefoot and I gave her my shoes. Maybe we left after I caught her in the hall with a razor blade to her wrists. I still have night terrors of the beatings and I don’t know if they’re memories or if they’re just dreams.

When I was a teenager, what terrified me more about the beatings was the idea of becoming solely responsible for my three younger siblings if one day my mother decided to leave. By the time I was the oldest of four I was 13 years old, which meant whenever my parents fought, I had to give my 12-year-old sister instructions on where to hide, when to call 911, and how to keep the babies quiet. When their fighting was too much for my sister and me, we’d each carry a baby and go outside. I, like my mother, needed a way out. I planned for college to be my exit strategy. I’ve never had the courage to admit it but I believed that if my mother left us, if she saved herself, I wouldn’t be able to leave for college. I believed I needed her to stay with her children so I could make it out. 

The violence and the reasons for the violence evolved as I got older. My father started beating my mother shortly after they got married at 17 and 18 years old. Both sets of their parents were violent with each other and both sets also struggled with alcoholism. At first, other relatives would intervene. “No, ya, asi no. Cálmate, hermano,” I’d hear my father’s sisters say. My instinct was always to cover my sister’s eyes. Eventually, there was less and less adult intervention, which meant I had to step in if I wanted my mother alive. I regret never being courageous or strong enough to kick my father’s ass. “Please, please, please, please, dejéla,” I pleaded, hating myself for having to be the one to beg for her life. I started calling the police even though we weren’t supposed to. The cops would show up, I’d translate, and depending on the cop they’d either take my father away or tell him to take a walk — it didn’t matter that my mother’s face was always bloodied. My mother never pressed charges, and she never let him spend more than a night in jail or at his sister’s house. “Pero dejélo,” I’d plead — begging her to save her own life and mine. “¿Y quien paga la renta?” Making rent was always, and continues to be, her burden. Even when her literal life was on the line, my mother knew that without money there was nowhere for her and her children to turn. 

* * *

Recently, a female student in her 20s came up to me after class and asked me to approve a video for her essay assignment on advertisements. The assignment was for my Introduction to Composition and Research course, where I ask students to choose an advertisement and do a close reading of the narrative choices the company uses to sell the product. Students usually choose typical ads from major companies like Nike, Coca-cola, Dove, etc. One student chose a commercial screened during Super Bowl 49 about domestic violence. The ad, titled “Listen,” features a voiceover using dialogue pulled from a real 911 call of a woman insisting on placing an order for a pizza until the operator understands that the woman can’t ask for help. While the phone call is happening, the camera pans throughout a large house showing a punched hole in one of the walls, broken class on the floor, dirty dishes, and household items thrown about. The ad ends with the NO MORE Project’s slogan, “When it’s hard to talk, it’s up to us to listen.”

My immediate family didn’t have such atrocious experiences with the immigration system. Instead, our trauma was crafted inside the privacy of our own home, where we believed we were one step closer to the American Dream.

My heart raced, my breaths shortened, and my hands shook as I watched the video. I widened my eyes, willing them to swallow the tears threatening to burst out of me. “Yes, this will give you lots to write about,” was all I could manage to tell my student as I  hurried to collect my belongings and rush to my office. When I made it there, I cried real, ugly, large tears. I covered my face to muffle my cries in case any of my colleagues were nearby — because, even though it’s been 10 years since the last time I witnessed my parents physically abuse one another, when I’m triggered, I’m a child again, calling 911, yelling for help while my father beats my mother, and no one comes to save us.  

* * *

In a photo taken one month before we left Juarez for Chicago. My mother sits on a blue bench in front of a house with a barred window. Her hair is dark and permed. Her smile is wide as she looks at my sister and me. Her hands clasp a soda or beer can. My aunt, in a red dress, with similarly permed hair, sits next to her, looking at her. My sister, my cousin, and I are at the center of the photograph. We wear matching outfits, my sister and I — brown shorts, white tops with brown stripes, white long socks and black Mary Janes. A month later, we’d arrive to Midway Airport in Chicago wearing those same outfits. In the photo, my sister holds both her hands to her mouth — biting the nails of one hand, using the other as support. She looks at something or someone outside the frame. My cousin looks in the same direction. I stand tall with my arms behind my back and smile directly into the camera. Whenever I ask my mother about her decision to immigrate to the United States she says she saw me and my sister the day the photo was taken and knew we had to leave. It wasn’t because she trusted my father was what was best for her; she left because she wanted my sister and me to have careers. “Tienen que mirar a lo alto,” she says to me. You have to aim higher. 

Women like my mother traverse worlds looking for a better life and what they find instead are entire countries telling them their lives aren’t worth protecting. Statistics vary, but generally one in four women and one in nine men experience physical violence from an intimate partner in their lifetime. One in four children witness intimate partner violence in their homes, according to cases filed in state courts. National statistics don’t break down into more complex pieces where I can find my mother, where I can find myself. There are four women and two men in my family. Four of six were undocumented at some point in our lives. Two of six have experienced physical abuse in our lifetime. Six of six of us have dealt with emotional abuse. Three of six struggle with alcoholism. Six of six live with a mental illness. One in six has diagnosed depression and PTSD. Six in six are still forcing the pieces of ourselves together.

“We must acknowledge the lack of mental health resources [immigrant mothers] faced [in the U.S.] and in their native land. They were never provided effective ways to deal with their pain,” Nia Ita writes in the magazine Fierce. “As a result, our moms are burdened with their mothers’ traumas while holding onto their own lost childhood and relinquished dreams.” My mother made herself into a vessel to hold her own and other peoples’ traumas — her husband’s, her mother’s, her children’s. I often ask her to seek out a therapist and she says she has God. I tell her I’ll pay for it because I don’t know the kind of health insurance her factory job provides and she says, “No, mija. Ya te he quitado suficiente.” My own therapist often has to remind me I can’t unburden my mother of her trauma. Today, it very much feels like my healing is in conflict with hers — as if only one of us can make out of the pain we’ve experienced. Like when I was a teenager and needed her to stay so I could leave.  

* * *

The beatings didn’t immediately stop, but my mother wielded pots and pans to protect herself until they did. I don’t know what changed in her that made her fight back and speak up. Because I witnessed it all, it felt like she changed overnight. “No grito, asi hablo ya” is my mother’s favorite retort when my now grown siblings and I tell her that she’s yelling at us when she speaks. “It’s not yelling, it’s my new voice,” she says. When you’ve been forced into silence, physically beaten into submission, there isn’t a gradual progression to a louder, unbroken voice. As soon as my mother learned to love the power of her own voice, she roared through her apartment demanding we hear her. 

Guilt crawled from my gut and wrapped around my heart.

My mother, my sister, and I received our permanent residency in 2004, after 12 years of waiting and thousands of dollars spent hoping our applications would be processed. Having her permanent residency has certainly helped my mother find her voice. After 31 years of marriage, she hasn’t left my father and I choose to read that survival strategy as the way the lives of many immigrant women are complicated by a long life of poverty, cultural marginalization, and language barriers. Throughout my childhood and adolescence, I understood my mother’s act of staying as a terrible choice. As an adult, I understand how she, and many immigrant women in those situations, didn’t have a menu of healthy options to choose from. I comprehend the complexities involved now, but the little girl inside of me still feels like she chose him and not me. 

When I see my mother now, I don’t always know how to approach her. I still desire a relationship that isn’t ours — one that isn’t riddled with trauma, one where she can protect me. In all of my feelings of abandonment, I’m also still grateful for my mother and her sacrifices. Lately, I witness my mother’s persistence, vulnerability, flaws, and love from afar. I don’t need to understand her choices, but I also don’t need to be a part of them. Growing up, her greatest fear was forced separation — either by deportation because of our citizenship status, or by the state’s child protective services because of domestic violence. Our distance now is our best attempt at surviving all of that. 

* * *

Also in the Writing the Mother Wound Series:

‘A World Where Mothers are Seen’: Series Introduction by Vanessa Mártir
I Had To Leave My Mother So I Could Survive, by Elisabet Velasquez
Frenzied Woman, by Cinelle Barnes
Tar Bubbles, by Melissa Matthewson
To Be Well: An Unmothered Daughter’s Search for Love, by Vanessa Mártir

* * *

Sonia Alejandra Rodríguez is an Associate Professor in the English Department at LaGuardia Community College in NYC. She is an immigrant of Juarez, Mexico and raised in Cicero, IL. Her work has been published in Huizache: The Magazine of Latino Literature, Hispanecdotes, Everyday Fiction, Acentos Review, Newtown Literary, and So to Speak A Feminist Journal of Language and Art.

Editor: Danielle A. Jackson
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The Christmas Tape

SKIF Production / Getty, and Homestead Studio

Wendy McClure | Longreads | December 2019 | 18 minutes (4,618 words)

The Christmas Tape has always existed.

The Christmas Tape was recorded around 1973 or 1974. My dad thinks we were in our second Oak Park house, the one on Elmwood. I would have been 2 or 3. I don’t remember.

The Christmas Tape was our family tape, a seven-inch reel of holiday music played on an open-reel deck. The first four songs were taped from a folk-music show called The Midnight Special, which aired Saturday evenings in Chicago. I don’t know which one of my parents recorded the Christmas Tape, but I think it was my mother.

The Christmas Tape meant Christmas, which meant that everything was going to be all right.

Because the songs came off the radio — because whoever taped them had only a moment to toggle the RECORD switch — they all have their first few seconds clipped off at the beginning. Each one ends with a few soft thuds of fumbled edits before stumbling into the next song.

Nobody knows these songs; nobody outside our family at least. My brother and I never heard them anywhere else, except on The Tape, and we assumed they came from some alternate Christmas universe.

They are, in playing order:

“The Little Drummer Boy,” by Marlene Dietrich, who sings it torpidly in German while a children’s choir mewls rampa pam pam! in accompaniment. (It sounds, really, like a mash-up between the pageant scene in A Charlie Brown Christmas and a smoky Berlin cabaret.)

“Mystery Song Number One,” one of two folk tunes on The Tape so woebegone and obscure that not even my parents could remember what they were called or who the hell performed them. We thought of this one as “Three Drummers from Africa,” since that was the refrain: Three drummers from Africa/ leading the way/ to play for the baby on Christ-a-mas Day.

“Mystery Song Number Two,” featuring a single guitar and the vocals of a slightly dour-sounding trio or quartet. Maybe called “Come Let Us Sing.” Maybe not even a Christmas song.

“Go Where I Send Thee,” by Odetta: For years my brother and I had no idea who the folk singer Odetta was, so for a long time this song was just a voice, neither a he nor a she, racing through the lyrics of raggedly and breathlessly and ferociously in a tempo so frantic and ecstatic that it matched our own Christmas! Christmas! excitement.

Last year I emailed my dad to ask who recorded The Christmas Tape, since he is the only parent I can ask now. He wrote back saying that he and my mom used to love The Midnight Special. “It featured all the folk songs that killed the 60s,” he wrote. It is the sort of funny thing my father likes to say these days, funny but slightly evasive. Does he not remember whether he or my mother recorded the songs? Does he mean he wanted the 60s dead? (Probably.) When I try to nail down family history details I get genial not-quite-answers like this that I have to work around. This is how I came to think it was my mom who recorded The Christmas Tape.

There used to be more to The Christmas Tape. After those first four songs, my mother recorded two popular holiday LPs, collections of carols and traditional songs by the Harry Simeon Chorale and the Robert Shaw Chorale, so that The Tape drifted off into the more conventional realms of “Silent Night” and “Angels We Have Heard on High” for the next two hours or so. Then it sounded more like any other family’s Christmas tape, if other families had Christmas tapes.

I don’t know why my mother decided to tape albums that we already owned and could easily play on the turntable; maybe she grew impatient with recording songs off the radio. Or maybe she wanted to create an expanse of unbroken time, free from the interruption of radio commercials or the need to turn a record album over. Time that she could live inside, with us, seamless as a snow globe.

It’s true the air seemed to change when the tape deck was switched on: a thick pop from the speakers and then an expectant hum, the world enhanced.
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Longreads Best of 2019: Food Writing

We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in food writing.

Mayukh Sen
James Beard Award-winning writer and Adjunct Professor at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute

The Chef Who Can Teach Us a Thing or Two About Grit (Julia Bainbridge, Heated)

I tend to agree with most criticisms of using the first-person in profiles: Who cares about the writer? Why the throat-clearing about yourself? Who asked about you when I’m just trying to read about Rihanna? It takes a writer of real skill, and very little vanity, to pull off this first-person trick. I marvel at the way Julia Bainbridge gently, unobtrusively inserts herself into this Heated profile of chef Iliana Regan. In doing so, Bainbridge allows the reader to understand the subject in fuller, more generous terms.

There is a current of melancholy that runs through Bainbridge’s piece, pegged to the release of Regan’s National Book Award-longlisted memoir, Burn the Place; you get the sense that the writer understands her subject intimately. (I should note that Regan’s memoir inspired a number of very fine pieces, including those by Deborah Reid and Helen Rosner. Read those, too.) Certain details — the nervous tug of a sweater, the smell of cigarette smoke and beer wafting from a bar — could’ve read like strained flourishes in a lesser writer’s hands, but Bainbridge uses these observations sparingly, bringing Regan to life. She works carefully, sentence by sentence, with some turns of phrase that stop me dead in my tracks. “The alcohol is gone,” Bainbridge writes at one point, “but the -ism remains.” Bainbridge shows that the first-person, when deployed correctly, can showcase a profile writer’s empathy, not their ego.


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