My Mom is Like a God

My mom is like a God; she expresses herself in the extremes of love and wrath. I remember my first real spanking. I had been spanked before, but this was justified.

We had just finished washing our clothes, so it meant about 45 minutes of drying left at the laundry mat. At this point, I had lost all hope, but saw something precious in the corner: an arcade game. I knew that if I asked my mom for arcade money, she would say “no,” so I instead asked for coke money.

The thing is, I suck at video games, so the seventy-five cents that provided less than two-minutes of fun was hardly the investment I expected it to be. I went back to my mother, who asked where the coke was.

“About that…I spent that money on a game…”

At that moment, she took off her belt and hit me with each spoken syllable.

“We-”

“can’t-”

“aff-”

“-ord-”

“vid-”

“-eo-”

“games!”

“¿In-”

“-tien-”

“-des?”

I didn’t know what hurt more: the actual hits or the embarrassment from having been hit in front of all the people from the laundry mat. That’s right, she didn’t care other people were watching, and she didn’t have the decency to at least take me to the privacy of the bathroom, but that’s how my mom is: fearless. She even abolished traditional role of a serving wife.

That’s how it’s always been: women serve men. The man gets what he wants in whatever portions he wishes. Men are served first, served more, served always. This is the “tradition role” of women in Mexico, and it has seen many generations. But my mom never gave into this, and that’s probably why I admire her so much. She even has my grandfather serving my grandmother—something I thought I’d never see, and something I’m still growing accustomed to.

She knows every employee at both Targets and all three Wal-Marts; some even give her their employee discounts. She knows every manager of all the groceries within an hour of our house, and has started a program that provides food from these grocers to people from our barrio, but has never taken any of these for ourselves, no matter how much we needed it.

My friends know her as “Ama” and “Mamma Soto.” She has been through an Usher, Nsync, and Ludacris phase; she’s currently gawking at Daddy Yankee, who has started her interest in learning reggaeton.

She’s all about the family; she’s the only person I know that visits her parents every single day, and calls when she’s out of town. In the three separate occasions when my father couldn’t work, my mother sold tacos to sustain us, and still had time to yell at us for whatever reason. In her spare time, she advertises me to her co-workers’ and friends’ daughters in the hopes that I’ll marry a Mexicana and have many Mexicanitos and Mexicanitas.

She could always tell when I had just entered a relationship.

“What’s her name, Daniel?”

“How’d you—”

“Is it Thuy? You’ve been talking to her a lot lately, you have a smile on your face when you do, and I called her—”

“What?!”

“Ya. She’s coming for dinner. We’re having caldo, and you can’t look like that, so go get dressed.”

Dinner went well.