I feel like I’m going crazy at least two or three days per month. Is this what womanhood feels like?
As I wash the dishes and look over the boiling pot—ah, it’s dripping again—, I start to understand some of the reasons behind my mom’s unhinged behaviour (at least that’s what I would’ve labeled it back in the day).
My mom was not a bad mother, let’s start there. Was she a good mother? No, but she wasn’t terrible either. Only bad enough for me to cry uncontrollably every time I watch Brave, or to get teary-eyed when I see a mom fighting with her teenage daughter at the mall. Surface-level bad parenting, that’s all.
Bad enough for me to carry the wounds and hold grudges against her, even though it was so long ago that she yelled at me that she made me become the self-hating perfectionist I am, and other things that I will never forget, but always try to forgive.
Anyway, as I stir the boiling pot again (for how long does it have to boil? It’s been half an hour, and this chicken is not cooked yet), I understand that, if I had to work a full 9-5 (actually 7-7, because the Mexican workday is quirky like that), I would also be angry at the world for having to cook for my two daughters. And I think to myself in this long essay that I’m writing in my head as I live the domestic life I never thought I would live: is this the inevitable destiny of every woman on Earth?
God, I’m so dramatic but I can’t help it. I feel insane. In my mind, I’m so angry about everything. I can’t stop imagining arguments with everyone around me. I’m angry at my friends that I’m cooking for (who also cook for me many times, but, for some reason, I’m pissed off at them now). I’m angry at my mom for not teaching me how to cook. I’m angry at myself for thinking I would never need to become a housewife and then suddenly I kind of am—why?
I thought I’d never become my mother.
I thought, perhaps naively, that I was better than her, and her temper, and her irrationality, and her bipolar disorder, and her laziness, and her lack of patience. But suddenly, I embody all of these traits, all of them at once, heavily pushing me to the ground and remembering me that everything I mocked of her, I inherited, and I cannot escape it even if I move to a city 8,000 kilometers away from home and I pursue a degree that no one in my extended family has gotten.
It doesn’t mean anything, even though I thought it would make a big difference. It doesn’t. Life is still life, a house is still a house, I still have to cook, and clean, and wash, and keep myself alive. No illusion of superiority can overwrite that. No life choices can redefine what a person is meant to be.
I can keep lying to everyone back home, and say that my life is perfect and that all problems end when you move out of your parents’ house—because that is the end goal, right?
Until it isn’t, and you’re watching over a boiling pot wondering if you should call your mom on speaker while cooking your chicken and washing the dishes (because that’s what she would do when you were little.)