Generation Y, Yoani Sanchez, 10 May 2015 – There is a memory I often escape into. At times of greatest tension, I travel back to that August morning when I held my son for the first time. If I feel overcome by fear, I visualize the tiny fingernails that had grown inside my womb, soft and bent around the tips of his fingers. I also calm myself evoking the backs of his hands, with the marks of amniotic fluid in which they were submerged for so long. I take refuge in the memory, feeling that no repression nor hatred can reach me, because I am protected by his birth.
Our children give us the gift of will. When our eyelids are heavy and the most powerful alarm clock cannot get us out of bed, it’s enough for them to whimper in their crib for us to wake up. If they come into the world while we ourselves are still students, they give us the confidence to believe that standing up to the test of motherhood means that no diploma can resist us. They, with their gaze and their questions, also force us to be less cowardly. How can we explain to a child the opportunistic silence, the masks, the faking it… without destroying, in these declarations, a part of the paradigm we represent for them?
Our children are always better than we are. So today, while in Cuban homes mothers celebrate their day, some surrounded by their loved ones and others with the sadness of distance, I am going to give my “little boy” a gift. It will be a small present, simply making lunch together, which will allow us to talk while he chops the spices and I start to heat the pan. Perhaps he will tell me about last week, or about some book or a girl that he knows. While we chat, I will sneak a peek at his hands, now larger and stronger than mine. I will compare the sounds of a baby with his current deep voice, and conclude that this man of today also gives me strength to continue, a great strength.
Twenty years have passed and I still don’t need any other present for Mother’s Day… I already have it, standing in front of me.
