Learning to speak
On Saturday and Sunday mornings, the Cuevas family gathers for breakfasts. Chilaquiles or enfrijoladas are always on the menu. We all live in different cities now. We all have our different families now. We don’t always get to eat breakfast together, but when we do, the banter is on.
We used to call the banter “navajasos and machetazos” (aka shanking and machete-ing). When there is tension between members of the Cuevas family, between the adults, everyone feels it and we come to family gatherings with blades blazing. It has gotten so bad in the past that even the oldest of the young ones, at age five, has had to tell the adults to calm down.
It’s getting better now, after a series of major round table heart-to-hearts, but we gained new vocabulary words and common phrases such as: ponte manteca para que se te resbalen las navajas (put butter on yourself so that the blades slide off), te dio el Sparta kick, Grandpa! (she gave you the 300 Sparta kick, Grandpa!), otra regla que nos ponen (another rule they impose on us), Rambo: Last Blood status, el que se enoja pierde (the one who gets angry, loses). It took ten additional years of heart-to-hearts around dinner tables and long late nights sitting in pajamas on the couch and lingering outside cars while we say goodbyes to resolve the tensions. But we all chose to make that commitment to each other. To put Love first, especially when it was toughest to do so.
There is a third generation of Cuevas family members now.
That said, the Cuevas women talk a lot about how we are going to teach these kids to speak up, to express their feelings in a way that doesn’t make them feel vulnerable, to communicate their needs without starting a fight, to resolve conflict in a way that makes their relationships stronger, to communicate not to protect their pride but to protect their humanity. As mothers, the Cuevas women used to struggle to be consistent with these lessons. As fathers, the Cuevas men used to leave it to the women to make these nuanced decisions. We are mastering this now, together.
We are not a perfect family. The struggle is real, painfully so. And that’s okay. We come from a long line of machismo and silent women.
We had to teach ourselves how to speak up and talk about our feelings without feeling weak for having feelings in the first place. We do our best to keep our relationships strong because over a lifetime of moving from place to place to another place to a different place to yet another place, our immediate family was the only thing we could call home.
And it is the first mother of the Cuevas family who demands nothing more than for all of us in the family to get it together and make every day that we share, a blessing.
And we do that best by listening with our heart and speaking with Love on our tongues.
I love writing about my family. They are such an integral part to who I am, to how I understand the world, to what I know about Love. One of our greatest points of tension has been communication. We often feel like we are speaking different languages in addition to different Love languages. We could have chosen to leave our frustrations at our feet, but my mother, and my father, refused to let us give up on our family so easily. Through pain, tears, pangs, unspeakable heartaches, we nearly perished. We are still learning to speak our family’s “lingua franca.” We’ve learned and I’ve learned through written reflections that it just takes putting Love first. If that isn’t up front and center, we’re not saying what we really mean.
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