When Kamila put the pancakes in front of her three children, she added blueberries for eyes and an applause- inspiring smile made out of whipped cream. The nose was always big and red (“like Rudolph’s!”) as a fresh garden strawberry. There is a unique pain felt by parents who give their children
the love and attention they did not themselves receive. When Kamila, covered with powdered sugar, struggled to keep the sides up on the disastrous gingerbread house lopsidedly decorated with whatever candies escaped her children’s mouths, her three kids squealed with delight, hoping for a collapse. And at that table, she laughed and felt her own seven year Kamilaself there, too: her young self, awkward and in shadow, laughing less, entirely less free, but present with her children.
Everyone around her noted what an incredible mother Kamila was. There was Bath Time and Book Time and Singing Time and Blessing All Our People Time, when the kids would send often surprising blessings out to people who had crossed their minds. For every broken dish or accidental lamp crashing, Kamila practiced caring first about her child and second about the object. She watched as her children moved from momentary fear of being ‘in trouble’ for the accident, into a place of deep ease where they tried to help clean up or repair what was broken. That’s when Kamila felt the pain the most.
As a child, Kamila’s father had hit her every day with whatever object he could find. He liked to show off his terrorism to his customers who came to buy drugs. He’d be high, break something and bellow at her, “Did you do this?!” Her bruises were too frequent, her silence too telling, and finally someone at school noticed. Kamila was eventually placed in a series of foster homes. She dropped out of school and started working, met her partner and had a family. Her partner worked hard and long hours as a house cleaner to support them all. When Kamila set the table for herself and the kids, she had them use real napkins and she lit candles, even for lunch.
“Are you really, really, really thirsty?” she’d ask.
“Yes!” they’d chorus in anticipation.
She would turn around with a tiny shot glass filled with chocolate milk.
“This ought to do it!” How they laughed, even though (perhaps because) she’d done it a hundred times before.
This is how she had always thought it should be—yet in all her hoping and dreaming as a child, she never was able to fathom the immense, transforming power of safety and peace, how it becomes the vast, unseen hands that hold up the lucky. The ease with which her children left her embraces and scampered off into a life of discovery and growth left a part of her bereft, without the trademark confidence the steadily-loved enjoy.
Kamila’s seven year old son Roberto sat at the table with his sharpened pencil in his hand. Roberto watched his mother’s face carefully as she sat next to him. He began to understand that she could not help him complete his first grade homework. He didn’t know why she hadn’t learned these things in school, but he knew there was nothing his mother could not do, and do with joy, so he told her, “Don’t worry, Mommy. Someday you’ll be smart, too!”
Bath, book, singing and Blessing time was a little quieter that night. Kamila was paying attention to the
shadow fourth child inside her, so hurt at not being “smart,” at being forever left behind the happy crowd.
When the kids quieted down, she went into her bedroom, looked in the mirror and explained, just as she
had done a thousand times with her own kids, how that girl looking at her could do this, could learn and become what she wanted to be. How her neighbor kept telling her there were people in town from Carson Center’s Under Five Thrive, who would take her to the Adult Learning Center, help her watch the kids and help her come out and move forward.
“We can do this,” she told herself. And she did.
By JAC Patrissi
