Mother's Day

Today is Mother's Day in Colombia, same day as in the US. It's as important a day, or even more so, here than any other days - Children's Day (Dia del niño) which was just last week, Father's Day, Secretary's Day, etc. Ads have been up throughout the city for weeks, and although Giovanni isn't as close to his mom as most Colombian families are, we decided to make the hour long trek (though mostly just to appease his sister) all the way to Bello, a suburb of Medellin where his mom lives. After wishing my mom and stepmom a happy mother's day, and making sure my mom was satisfied with her early Mother's Day gift (a kindle!!) we set off on the long bus journey to Bello. Now Gio wasn't really dying to go, as he had just seen his mom, who he usually see only a few times a year, one week before when he helped her move house. That was the 2nd time he's helped her move this year. The woman cannot keep still - and I thought I was bad! I've helped her move twice in the two years I've lived here alone. But we went there anyway, to celebrate with Giovanni's brother and sister, eating fried rice and sliced bread as you do in special cases like this one.

When people ask me about my relationship to Giovanni's mom, it's a hard question to answer. Do we get along? Well sure I guess so - when she remembers my name and doesn't call me Ana, the name of Giovanni's ex-girlfriend and the mother of his son, and also the name of about 50% of Colombian women. It's a weird relationship that Giovanni's mother has with her children, and I don't think their upbringing is unlike many people here. I've come to realize lately that I do not know one Colombian who grew up in the 80's who did not have a rough childhood. And by rough I mean whose dad wasn't involved in some sketchy business, who didn't get beat as a child, who didn't have to move multiple times because their family lost all their money or it got too dangerous in their neighborhood. These people can have the worse kind of living situation, with parents who don't see them as children, parents who give them away as babies because having a child sounds good in theory but in reality they can't handle it. Yet these children, now adults, continue to love their parents. They continue to feel that need to support them, to call to check up on them, to do what they're supposed to do as children because hey, they're alive aren't they, they didn't die of hunger.

When it comes down to it, it is hard to let go of those biological ties. I don't think it even has so much to do with the fact that the family unit is so important in Colombian culture, I view it more as a guilt-culture. People here are motivated to go see their parents by guilt, by this idea that these people brought them into the world, and how can you just abandon that? This ideal is easily viewed everywhere you look - on the bus where a guy entertains passengers with a few songs horribly out of key, but still panhandles a few bucks, in stores where returning an item for whatever reason is unheard of, in relationships with submissive women and machista men. In some ways this kind of guilt-ridden society can be viewed as a positive though, because citizens feel a moral obligation to do good, and to help others. An ever-occurring example: ask someone on the street for directions, and they don't just tell you how to get there, they take you directly to your destination.

In the case of Giovanni and his mom, I can only accept it, because changing this type of Catholic-infested society, even though one rejects it outright, is not something I set out to do.