Ay, Ama!

My daughter looks at me like I am the most fascinating creature in the world. It’s pretty amazing. I’ve never had someone gaze at me with so much love. I keep reminding myself to soak it up now because the day will come when she no longer looks at me that way.

When I was little, I remember thinking my mother was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen (I still think that). She lit up the room just by being in it. Whenever she was gone I couldn’t wait to see her again and when she was with me I couldn’t get enough of her…until, she started embarrassing me. I still thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world, but sometime around elementary school she started doing things that mortified me.

Taking lunch to school was awful! Everyone else had cute lunch boxes or little lunch size paper bags with their names written on them. My mother thought it was silly to spend money on such things when she could pack my lunch in empty plastic Roman Meal bread bags or full size brown paper bags. Oh, if only the humiliation ended there! Everyone else in elementary school had sandwiches (some of them even had the crust cut off), little individual packages of chips, and a cold drink (something cool like a juice box, Capri Sun, or Coke). What did I have? An egg burrito (eggs for lunch-oh, the shame), a handful of crushed chips wrapped in a paper towel, and some generic warm soda (if I was lucky). That’s when I applied for the school lunch program.

In junior high school my mom would drop me off at school. Sounds nice, right? Well, it would have been except she can’t seem to get anywhere on time, so I was late to first period 17 times. Oh and you should have seen what she looked like when she dropped me off. This was in the 80’s and my mother wore lots of hairspray and makeup that she did not wash off before going to bed. Somehow, she thought it was acceptable to drive me to school with half of her hair smashed up against her head while the other half stuck straight up and a face full of day-old-slept-on makeup.

One day she drove me to school wearing a bathing suit and no shoes. The car stalled in front of school and she had to get out of the car and ask strangers for a jump start. We lived in the San Fernando Valley and in the summer even in the mornings it’s hot. She was standing barefoot on the street jumping up and down in a bathing suit because her feet were burning on the asphalt. I told her I had to go to class and slinked away as unnoticeably as possible. I was relieved that no one I knew had seen us until I got to 5th period and my math teacher said, “I saw your mother in a bathing suit this morning”, in front of the whole class! Tragedy NOT averted. That’s when I started taking the bus to school.

High school was better because I had more independence, but she still found ways to mortify me. If I was even a little bit late getting home after a night out, whoever was dropping me off would have the pleasure of seeing my mother standing outside wearing a horrible orange sleeveless bathrobe, smoking a cigarette, just waiting to yell at me in Spanish. That’s when I got my driver’s license and started driving myself home.

The funny thing is that now I treasure all of these memories and they make me love my mom even more, but when I was living through the experiences I was horrified. I would just look at my mom and say, “Ay, Ama!”

I know my “Ay, Ama!” moments are coming and I’m kind of looking forward to seeing how I’ll embarrass my daughter, but for now I’m enjoying being the perfect mother in her eyes.