Menudo, la boda & from here to there.

When we’re placed on this earth, we can stay where we are and lead a life that fits into the natural landscape, or we can push ourselves away from our landing point and turn ourselves into a completely different animal. If we wind up far enough away from where we started, we can always look back over our shoulder and see the winding path we took to get to where we are.

If you’re adopted, though, the path between where you started and where you ended is as credible as the trail you traverse when you pedal like crazy on a stationary bike. You never really went anywhere, and yet, here you are. Sometimes, you can see Point A and Point B, but they never quite seem to come together.

It’s especially hard to bring these two points together when there are no set rules for re-establishing the relationship with a biological family. I’ve been in contact with my biological family for about ten years now, and the dynamic and the strength of our connection is constantly shifting. This month, I brought my fiancé and my daughter to El Paso for my cousin’s wedding, and it was the first time I had anyone with me other than Malena. Thomas became sort of a grounding rod back to myself as I stepped into the dimension of the “other me”. The “other me” is where my name is Mari, and not Mary. I’m Mexican, but I’m not. It's "home", but it really isn’t. This is my “family”, and yet the connection between us is often as tenuous as a spider’s thread.

We flew to Dallas, and then drove 9 hours to El Paso, since gas is currently cheaper than airfare. We got off the plane and into a car, and there was nothing around us but scrub brush, trucks and oil fields. Right outside of Stink Creek Road, just west of Sweetwater, the GPS read that we should continue east and make our next turn in 421 miles. It was boring in the sense of "I wish there was something to look at", but not as bad as sitting in the lotus position for nine hours trying to quiet your mind-boring.

In El Paso, the wedding seemed more American than Mexican, but the food inbetween was exactly what it was supposed to be. Thomas had his first experience sitting at a table with a dishtowel covering the hot tortillas. He tried his first margarita (didn’t like it), and ate menudo (chiles, hominy, and tripe), (definitely didn’t like it).

Malena was a flower girl. She looked beautiful and behaved badly. She also felt a little ostracized from the other little girls, since she was the only one who didn’t speak Spanish. I felt her frustration. I watched her, wanting to jump in and run across the dance floor and chase the other girls around, but they left her in the dust and wouldn’t let her in. There’s just no explaining to a 4 year old when these things happen. She was bored, and I felt bad for her.

The bride and groom were beautiful.

I took my grandmother for her first manicure. She told me she liked Thomas because he didn’t look down on them for being poor. I don’t think Thomas truly grasped the life my grandmother’s led, crossing the river every day when my mother was young to clean houses in Texas illegally, or how they used to live in one room without a real roof, or my grandmother losing her first child to malnutrition because there just wasn’t enough to eat. And another to illness. And my mother to a gun.

I’m never really sure what they think of me or how they see my life. I’m not sure how easily Point A and Point B fit together, but I’m glad we went. And I’d give anything for a big bowl of menudo and a dishtowel full of hot flour tortillas right about now.

Space - My Final Frontier

The boyfriend flew in 10 days before Christmas so we could attend my cousin's wedding in El Paso, Texas.

For his Christmas gift, I made a small booklet tied with a red ribbon, detailling a trip I had arranged for the two of us. I rented a convertible so that we could drive up to Cape Canaveral and visit the Kennedy Space Center, which he's wanted to do since he was 10 years old. He had even managed to talk his teacher into letting the class out early that year so that he could go home and watch the shuttle launch.

Can you say "nerdy"? I think you can.

The car was fantastic. It was a 2009 model, and it was a little windy at 6am when we took off, so we bundled up and put the heat on so my toes would be warm. It was the first day I had been feeling better after a week and a half with some terrible daycare flu, so I was happy just to be upright and outdoors.

I had booked us on the NASA Up Close tour, which drove us all around the space center and near the launch pad. He was pressed up against the tour bus windows - I snuggled up and took a little nap. Space, schmace, I was tired.

We broke for lunch and I laughed for a good half hour at his misinterpretation of "Automatic Door". I walked out just before Thomas, carrying my food on a tray, and hit the handicap button with my elbow to open the doors. Thomas saw the words "Automatic Door" and the open door and sauntered out after me... not realizing that he should have pushed the button, the door closed around his wrists. He couldn't pull his hand back, because both hands were holding up a tray, and I couldn't get up to help him because I was laughing too hard. So for a good minute, all I could see was a tray jutting out of a door, and both of his hands clenched around the sides, and the door stuck around him while I tried really hard to stop laughing.

After lunch, we moved over to the viewing bleachers. It was a beautiful day - in the upper 70's, and sunny, with a really nice breeze. We were laughing and joking around, when I suddenly heard the clunk of his knee on the metal bleachers and realized he was proposing. We had talked about this for a while, and the ring was a ruby and diamond ring I had picked out, but it was incredibly sweet nonetheless. He's wonderful. And he got to get engaged on a NASA property, and is now King of The Geeks, as far as I'm concerned.

So I'm gittin' married. :)

Thank Heaven for Little Boys

In my pre-kindergarten years, I attended what was then called "nursery school". I was a precocious kid, and clearly remember avoiding a certain group of girls due to reasons of overt girliness.

One of my earliest childhood memories is of a girl coming up to me one day and stating, in a whiny, sing-song voice, "Kimberly says she doesn't like you". Kimberly always had a dress on, and her hair was always neatly brushed and contained by a headband. She was always surrounded by girls who also wore dresses and tried to pick on other girls to make themselves feel better. I don't think I knew the term "henchmen" at that point, but I grasped the concept. I think we were only three or four years old, but if I hadn't witnesses the bitchy cliqueiness of my own daughter's pre-school class, I would have thought this was an invented memory.

So when Nelly Olson's flunkie tried to taunt me with "Kimberly says she doesn't like you", I think my response was a 4-year old's version of "fuck off". I might have thrown dirt at her. I didn't care. My two best friends were Andy and Andy. One Andy was taller than the other one. I hung around them because they were bullshit-free. We played with trucks and tried to go down the slide backwards, but they never teased me for losing a hair ribbon or not having pink socks.

Malena's been with the same group of girls at school for two years, and every day, there's some new drama about "Maya says I'm not her friend", or "Taylor says my pants are stupid", and I was getting really tired of wiping up tears over the bitchiness of three year old girls. Lately, however, she's been hanging around Spencer.

Oh, Spencer.

How I love Spencer.

Spencer was very quiet at the beginning of school. He has a head of curly hair, and looks like a thoughtful child. He and Malena quietly gravitated towards each other, and play together in peace. Two days ago, Malena started to spike a fever at school. The class went out to the playground, and Malena followed along while she waited for me to come and get her. When Spencer wanted to run around, the teacher told him that Malena wasn't feeling well, and she was going to sit at a table and rest until I got there. So Spencer said, "I'll sit with her".

(sniff!)

They have this beautiful kindness towards each other that I absolutely love, and I have so much love for this kid who is so sweet to my baby.

Spencer made me think back to Andy and Andy, and then over to Thomas and Thomas, today's versions of boys I play nicely with. They sit back in amusement while I run in wide, screaming circles. They listen patiently to my daughter's nuttiness. And they send flowers, or a lovely card, or the perfect gift just when you need them the most. It's funny how I keep going back to the kind, smart boys with good manners. I'm so lucky to have them in my life. And Thomas P., "adorkable" is never going to catch on. But I still love you both. :)

Gear thingies and balls

Today I met my parents over at the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art while the kid was with her dad. Since I've produced a grandchild for my parents, I'm no longer interesting on my own, so it was a rare opportunity to just walk around a museum with two grownups, and without a hungry-tired-bored 4-year old.

The only downside was when I parked my car in the municipal garage, and my driver's side window refused to roll up. For whatever reason, I had a drill in the car, and began removing the door panel while I waited for my parents to find me. However, the Phillips head bit wasn't long enough to take off the door handle, so the panel was only accessible via the tips of my fingers, a maneuver which also managed to break all of my nails. My parents were a fantastic wealth of information. "Push the button again!"

"Mom, it's not a slot machine."

"You don't know, maybe you jiggled something."

"Jiggle this, ma."

"I'll jiggle you."

"Would the two of you shut the hell up?" (that was my dad). "Push the button again."

A 200-year old man parked next to me, and noticed that my lights were on, so he shuffled over to the driver's side door of my car, where I sat on the ground, surrounded by screws and pieces of my door, and my parents tried to alternately manually pull up the window or pry the panel open further.

"Your lights are on!" the old man croaked, helpfully.

Yeah, ok, electric windows and all. You might notice the car is also running, and we're kind of mid-project, here. "Thanks!" I yelled back.

We continued, and two minutes later, I turned to see if there was a bag in my trunk for the spare parts, and almosts walked headfirst right into the old man, still standing there.

He looked at me, interested. "What's going on, here?"

Egads.

I was tempted to tell him that we were building a flying machine. But because it's so close to the celebration of the birth of our lord and karma's a bitch and all, I refrained from doing so.

Instead, I clunked him over the head with the drill and rolled him for quarters.

Eventually, I got my fingers far enough into the door panel to find some kind of gear thingy and managed to move that up enough so that the latch caught and I was able to close the window, but now I have to take the rest of it off tomorrow to figure out what's acutally causing the problem, before I get stuck in the rain with a wet left side of the head.

You know it will happen.

When we finally got into the museum, it was a nice relief, even the Carlos Luna exhibit, which seemed to have a dick and balls theme.

Don't take my word, for it, though.

The first painting we saw was gigantic, and I think it was 4 panels together. There were a lot of Spanish words woven in, and some Puerto Rican flags. I didn't know where the artist was from, but at first glance, it had a very afro-caribbean feel, especially with some urns in the middle of the exhibit that looked like Santería.



Some of the paintings looked more Mexican, with bulls, and a Dia de los Muertos feel to them... and especially when one of them had 'PINCHE' painted down the side.

"Mary, what does 'pinche' mean?"

"Uhh, it's Mexican, for 'fucking', mom".

"Interesting."

Then my dad walks up giggling and says "I just saw a guy with four balls back there".



Ok, everybody back in the bus.