Santa Madre

In the dream I was speaking to Margaret Atwood about mama, specifically about mama’s love.

Mama met my father in this country and the two married after only a month of dating. He immediately asked her to quit her job so she could stay in the comfort of home and cook, clean, and eventually help raise a family. Mama did not hesitate to oblige—she wasn’t raised to have a job outside the home. From the age of fourteen she cooked and cleaned for a household of fifteen people in Jovellanos, Cuba. This monumental chore was hers until she came to the US at the age of thirty-one, when she became responsible for the full-time care of her ailing mother.

It is surprising how in spite of all the years of training, there are many traditional Cuban dishes mama does not know how to prepare. She’s terrible at seafood, for instance, and her dessert repertoire is quite limited. No puffy, fried buñuelos; and she cooks flan in old bean cans, which make the dessert curdled and rustic-looking, and don’t give it the smooth silkiness a proper bain-marie container would.

From the time I was born until...well...until today, mama speaks of the love she has for me in terms of sacrifice: “I sacrificed anything for you while you were growing up.” And “all the sacrifices I made” and there’s the universal generalization “all mother’s, like myself, sacrifice a great deal for their sons.”

Not to challenge the fact that mama loves me—that much is clear—I asked Margaret Atwood what mama could mean by her idea of love as sacrifice, “What has mama sacrificed, exactly?”

“Well what do you mean by sacrifice? What IS sacrifice?” And Margaret continued,
Sacrifice involves giving up a way of being in exchange for a different way of being. Or it involves giving up a material possession for something we perceive as being a greater good, which is to say, something greater than our Selves, with a capital ‘s.’”

What about Jesus? I wondered.

“Exactly,” and her agreement comforted me. “ There is great grief involved in sacrifice, especially in the Christian world where a person sees this kind of sacrificial grief as comparable to that of the savior’s sacrifice for mankind. There is a sense that one must grieve deeply and one does.”

But do we grieve because that’s what we expect to do?

“Who knows? Anytime there is change there is loss, and since sacrifice entails change, then it must involve grief—to what extent, I don’t know, but it’s present.”

Having to adjust herself to my presence in her life, mama grieved the loss of the motherlessness that had accompanied her all those years.

“Precisely,” Margaret affirmed.

But what exactly WAS that life, besides being child-free? There was work, sure—there’s always work. Was there dancing and partying? Never. She was never the type to go out. She didn’t really have friends outside her sisters. She didn’t have a dream the way people do about their lives and careers. She just wanted to be a mothe, or so she says. So what sacrifice did she make bringing me into the world. What sacrifices did she make throughout my life? She never had to get a job, she never had to give up—

“you’re thinking in totalities,” Margaret offered. If she had more and then had less because of you, of course it’s sacrifice. But if she had less and now has more, you think there’s no sacrifice. Change is change. And grief is grief...even if what your grieving was a life you didn’t enjoy.

But just because there’s change in someone’s life, that doesn’t mean that person sacrificed anything.

“Right. There must be willingness. Facing the fear of change. It’s easy for some and difficult for others. But there must be will. She CHOSE to let the change happen and she chose not to begrudge it...no matter what. That’s the sacrifice. And in that way it’s a lot like the death of Jesus.”

I don’t think Margaret Atwood would ever really claim such ideas as her own, I thought, still dreaming, and my lucid realization ended the dream.