Love Notes | Season 3 - Week 3

“I got my inheritance from my great grandmother and turns out I’m rich…”

Get in here, Girl,

This one is emotional, about an evening I spent getting rich with my grandmother this past summer. A summer where my husband and I had both lost our jobs and an unexpected pregnancy so, I did what I always do when I’m lost, I go home.

It had been two years since I last returned to Puerto Rico, and what initially felt like a retreat from our unrecognizable lives became a return to a fundamental part of myself I didn’t know I had been missing.

Let me set the scene:

A one-bedroom apartment in an elder’s residence. Caso Cerrado playing on the TV. The rhythmic squeak, squeak, squeak of abuelita’s rocking chair and the distant song of the Coquí carried in through the open window by the island breeze.

Through the rustling leaves of a palm tree, the moonlight bounced off of something that seemed to have been sitting there for ages though I’d never noticed it before.

“Wow, Abuela, ¿qué es eso? ¿Funciona?”

I lifted the antique Singer sewing machine, midnight black with a golden etched frame, shocked by its density. It seemed relatively light from the looks of it, but it’s weight now confirmed it hadn’t moved in years. (There’s no way abuela can move this.)

“That was my mother’s sewing machine,” abuela said with a smile that revealed she was either excited to have someone to tell or relieved to have someone lift it from it’s corner and finally bring it close to her again.

My heart sank. I suddenly realized I knew almost nothing about my great-grandmother and simultaneously felt shame for never asking.

The urgency to learn it all took over.

Abuela and I spent the rest of the evening into late night looking through old pictures, hearing stories of who she was and how she lived. The sounds from the TV, the tree frogs, and the breeze now white noise to my endless questioning and abuela’s spirited voice.

As it turns out, my great-grandmother was a master seamstress. A woman always dressed with the best hems in her pueblo. Never caught without a dress that snatched at her impossibly tiny waist, which had borne 11 children. Pleated to perfection and cut off just above the ankle.

So beautiful were her pieces that she eventually was requested to sew the dresses of many women in her town with this very machine, standing timelessly in front of me.

And, though her primary role was mother she built recognition and a business for herself from her passion and talents.

(It was giving: starting an art business during postpartum. 🫢 Chills, I know!)

But then I learned something that felt like I was suddenly staring into my own eyes reflected in a mirror.

My maternal great-grandmother was also known for breastfeeding the infants in town whose mothers had passed during childbirth.

A rush of emotions came over me as tears gathering at the corners of my eyes.

Although learning that she was an entrepreneur alongside being a mother felt validating for me, realizing that a woman I directly descend from gave from her own flesh to children in need in her community was a self-recognition unlike anything I had ever experienced.

And unlike anything I could have needed more this very summer.

For the past 3.5 years, I’d been mortified by my response to the world’s silence in the face of the most heinous atrocities committed against our most vulnerable: our children.

I couldn’t understand my inability to compartmentalize my distress the way everyone else seemingly could. I wept daily for the children of Palestine, Congo, Sudan, Lebanon, Iran, the U.S., Haiti, Puerto Rico, and beyond and now, after unexpectedly expecting, I grieved the second child I didn’t have.

Couldn’t have?

Shouldn’t have?

Especially in a world like this?

For years I lived with an internal turmoil that eventually made this world and who I am in it unrecognizable until I went home.

The release of my “18,000 PLUS” print design that raised hundreds of euros for children affected by war.

 

Learning about my maternal great-grandmother flipped the narrative that had been snarling in my head for years. It, like abuelita’s smile, revealed something to me: The way I champion the rights of children everywhere has always felt deeper than simply becoming a mom myself.

Finally, I understood why.

I come from the cloth of a woman who sacrificed herself for them.

Her sewing machine and her stories may not have been passed down to me until now, but somehow, generations later, I am still carrying the thread she sowed into her community while her ambition, her instinct to create, to nurture, to extend herself beyond the boundaries of her own life and give something of herself and her strengths to those in need had been woven into me.

I may only have one child, but my heart carries all children and that is my richest inheritance.

Until next (tea) time, ask the questions that will bring you closer to your richness.

PS— Don’t miss my next Love Note where I get equal parts vulnerable, introspective, and chismosa with you every Sunday. Subscribe here!