May, Mother’s Month.

Things collided this month of May, some very important feelings I do not know how to hold inside of me, so I am having them live together here, see how they look together.

A few months ago I got into The New School and I am preparing for my masters program. Yesterday I found out that I got a merit scholarship to cover for 100% of my tuition.

Last Sunday was Mother’s Day in Spain, where I am from.

In two weeks, at the end of May, it will be a year since my mother passed away.

I just want to tell her about The New School and me moving to New York. Everyone in my family is proud and impressed and I just can feel how happy she would be too.

I wish I could talk to her.

My mother and I grew up incredibly close. Us, closer than any of my siblings to her. Perhaps because I was the littlest I was always the baby for her. Her hugs have always been so warming, so loving. My safest place was on her belly, always.

In coming into my womanhood, in my mid 20s, problems arose. It makes sense to me that when you are confronted with the woman you are growing to be, you think about the woman your mother is. Her as a woman, separate from her as a Mother. We grow and make different decisions, the relationship turns into finding kinship in the things that we choose differently. This lead to years of no contact, on and off.

However many the difficulties I feel like her love for me has always been so grand I cant think a recipient can be large enough to fit all the feelings she had. She was a star, not a Hollywood star but more of an ever expanding glowing star in the sky, an endless giver. Of course, an endless giver is not perfect, it comes with flaws, but her love was so big, bigger than her life. She passed away very young but I still feel her love is still here, just like stars shine long past they are gone.

I just wish I could feel her close again.

I am an avid traveler and she said to me, I remember, in our last phone conversation, that I must take from her this wish for traveling, from discovering, the thrill of adventure. I do, we are so similar in that.

She has always been so proud of my accomplishments.

She was my biggest cheerleader, I can still think of the words she probably would have used.

Alaaaaa! como me alegro! Que guay! Joder!

I can think of how she would tell everyone, about me moving to New York, going into Parsons, getting a full ride. Que de puta madre! Haha!

We were not always close, it was not always easy, she was not always easy.

However, we are coming to a year of her not being in my life, and I still want to take a moment to show gratitude. Me and her became incredibly different women, but I took the best in her, and some of the worst, and I learned so much from being her daughter and having her as a mother. She was the biggest lesson I’ve ever had. It is the gift of learning to have a mother. A mother than beside being a mother she was a woman.

A loving woman, a complicated woman, an artist, a painter, a dancer, a disabled woman, an abused woman, a brave woman, a traveler, a cheeky woman, a protective woman, a loved woman, a lying woman and an honest one, a misunderstood woman, a unique woman,

a wild woman,

a wild woman,

a wild woman.

A billion things, now far in the sky. A star, combusting, shining, even beyond her life.

Te llevo en el corazón coquito.