Return to Mexico III

I have realized that if I am going to get to the point of this story before I leave in two days (ie. why I am going back to Mexico), I need to move ahead quickly.

Two events in the fall of 1985 shook up the unstable status of quo of my broken family. The first was the huge earthquake in Mexico City in September. The area where we lived did not see major damage, but the devastation in the other parts of the city was striking. Events like this force individuals to reexamine their lives, and we were no exception.

The second event was when my aunt (my father’s sister) pulled my mother aside and told her that she needed to get on with her own life. She also told her that she should not wait for my father to come back. When pressed, she informed my mother that my father was living with someone else.

After this news, my mother asked my sister and me how we felt about moving to the US. I wholeheartedly welcomed the idea. The pollution and overcrowding of Mexico City was beginning to overwhelm me. Moreover, I had always felt like a foreigner in Mexico and I hoped that I would fit in better in the US (this did not pan out – but that’s another story for a different time). Most important, though, I though I could run away from the pain the whole situation had brought upon me.

Not wanting to uproot my sister and me in the middle of the school year, my mother decided to put off the move until our summer trip to the US. Afraid that my father would attempt to prevent us from moving, we did not tell him of our plans. We packed just the essential things we needed and sent them with a friend who was also moving to the US. In the summer of 1986 my mother, my sister, and I moved to California.

When my father found out about our intention to remain in the US, he was not very happy, but he soon accepted the situation. He said he would keep our house in Mexico should we want to come visit or if we ever wanted to move back.

My sister and I eventually did go back to visit and stayed in our old house. Over the years, however, certain things in the empty house began to deteriorate so that we could no longer stay there. For example, the water heater no longer worked, so we could not have a hot shower. On subsequent visits, we stayed with my relatives and eventually with my father and his new family (again, another story for another time).

On my last visit to Mexico, I returned to the house with Sara to show her where I had grown up. The house was like an eerie time capsule from the time we left. It was like a place frozen in time. During this visit, I realized that this unnatural tie needed to be cut. There were a few things my sister and I probably wanted to salvage, but the house needed to be emptied and sold.

Given the time and financial constraints of a graduate student, the need to coordinate with my sister, and probably further avoidance of the issue, four years went by before my sister and I planned the trip to empty the house.

On Wednesday I will board an airplane to Mexico to confront some of the skeletons in the closet of my past and on Friday my sister and I will enter a place where it is still 1986 to salvage some memories and discard others. Hopefully we will clear the air of an old house and allow it to become someone else’s new home.

It will undoubtedly be an emotionally difficult time.

I doubt I will be able to post from there, but I will share what happened upon my return.