Nomad - A Survival Guide for Wilderness Seasons

CHAPTER 2

SEEDS, TREES AND FINDING LOVE

 

She Said So

I was about 19 years old when my great-grandmother, Leoncia passed away. She was a sassy old woman with white hair who I only knew as Mama Gorda (Big Mama). I spent countless weekends with her and being in the presence of our matriarch gave me a sense of security. I hardly spoke any Spanish, and her English was pretty bad, but we understood each other. I’d sit nestled in front of her TV surrounded by the smell of Vicks Vapor Rub and Cuban food, watching telenovelas, while she yelled from the kitchen in her broken English, “Come and eat!” and, “Stop watching basura (trash).”

 

As she got older and more fragile, she would hold onto my arm to steady her walking. She would grasp my arm tightly, and we would just smile at each other. She would then tell whoever was around how beautiful and tall I was and how they should let me stay with her longer. I can still remember the day she passed. As we neared her hospital room, I could hear the sounds of Cuba from the hallway. I guess they wanted her to feel at home by playing that kind of music. My grandmother, her only daughter, walked into the room and immediately turned it off and with tears streaming down her face said, “We are not in Cuba anymore!” It was a moment I will never forget because it caused me to question everything I had ever known about my family. Why was she angry? What happened in Cuba? I quickly pocketed the questions swirling around as my mother and grandmother kissed Mama Gorda for the last time, and as quickly as we entered the room, she breathed her last breath. As they stood around her, I watched as her stunning porcelain skin faded away and the reality that she was gone sank in. The mighty oak that had brought us so much shade was now gone.

Mama Gorda’s funeral was just as emotional and confusing as my grandmother’s behavior in the hospital. I watched my grandfather weep and wail on top of her casket. He lost his mother when they left Cuba, and Mama Gorda, in some strange way, had filled that mammoth-sized hole in his heart. She had always been with them in some form or another, and her loss seemed to affect him more than others. I didn’t understand his reaction because, honestly, I thought he didn’t care for her.

 

I sat with my cousins and watched as others walked past the white casket to pay their respects. My eyes locked onto my grandmother as she sat stoic and unmoved. Her stillness in this storm seemed peaceful and purposeful. Like she was waiting for something or someone.

Whatever it was, it moved me. And though I’d spent countless teenage years being embarrassed by her, I’ll never forget that moment that I watched her grieve the loss of her mother. In that stillness, I realized the depth and breadth of her strength, and all I wanted in the entire world was to be like her. Her eyes finally settled, and she caught my gaze. As the tears rolled down her beautiful face, she smiled and blew a kiss towards me and mouthed silently, “Don’t worry. Everything is going to be okay.” And I knew it would be because she said so.

 

Planting Seeds

It’s funny how when you are young you think you know people, and you understand life and all its complexities. Youth, at times, even allows you to believe the lie that you know yourself. But the truth is, knowing yourself takes years of suffering and loss and laughter and joy. And even then, after all of that, you still evolve into something else. Mama Dulce knew that well. I didn’t know much, but what I was sure of was that Mama Dulce had slow danced with loss and sadness more than anyone should, and now her mother was gone. But like the losses she’d survived before, she knew that all loss meant was that another chapter was beginning.

I wish I would have listened better and understood the wisdom and strength that was surrounding me and praying for me during those early years. Instead, I spent most of my teen years trying to find myself and running from the story that I would one day tell. The good news was that Mom and Dad seemed to find a rhythm once we arrived in Florida finally. The bad news was the constant change and shaking did a number on me, and I lived with an unsettledness in my soul.

 

I’d spend most of those years talking back to my grandmother, who I somehow had forgotten was my home base. Her old world logic that I embraced as a child now embarrassed me, and I felt it ruined any chance of me fitting in. I am sure all kids go through it, but between the ages of 12 and 17, I did everything I could do to be free of what I perceived as my family’s traditional thinking and dysfunction. Even if it meant hanging out with the gang kids at school and becoming everything that my family had tried so hard to shield from us.

 

In the 8th grade, after being bullied for an entire year, I decided to find and befriend the most hardcore chick in my school. And because I am my father’s daughter and a bit of a salesman, by the end of the first nine weeks, she was my best friend and attending church with me every Wednesday. She realized fast I wasn’t a bad kid. So when the crew I hung out with did gangster stuff, they only let me keep watch, or they’d send me on a fool’s errand to keep me out of harm’s way. Looking back now, it’s as if the God that sustained my great-grandmother, the God that rescued my grandmother, the God that protected my mother, was now watching over me. But I wanted nothing to do with God.

I was a good-hearted, tender kid, but internally I was sad and becoming very hardened. You wouldn’t have known it by looking at me, but I was sad. Sadness unchecked sent me searching, and it didn’t take long for me to gain the gangster-like reputation I so longed to have. It would take me years to untangle the mess. Gratefully, Mom and Mama never stopped praying and reminding me of who I was and where I came from. Their reminders were like a radio station that never turned off or a TV station that only played one show on repeat. God had a plan, and that plan led them to freedom, and one day I’d understand it all. But who wants to hear that at 15? Not me!

 

All I wanted was not to be the poor kid anymore. I wanted to dress like En Vogue from the Salt and Pepa Videos, watch Real World on MTV, make out with my boyfriend, play basketball and turn 18 so I could hit the clubs. Those were my life goals. I could’ve cared less about being Cuban and what they went through. At 15, being Cuban only meant I had an in with Latin guys, and in my book that said I was winning. High school was a just a blur of Quinceañera’s, cuss words, church youth group and getting kicked out of class. I was the cool kid on the outside but deep down still just a melancholy kid. Christmas of sophomore year, I racked up on wind suit pants, NBA jerseys and plenty of bandanas so I could continue my reign as the only chonga in my high school. Oh, dear Jesus, if they only knew I sang in the church choir on Sundays and nothing about me was a gangster! I was a full-on Monet, a masterpiece of deception. It looked impressive from afar, but the closer you got, the more discombobulated everything was. In January of 1996, the sandcastles I’d built for myself came tumbling down. I was involved in a fight that incited a riot that led to my brother, my cousin and I to be escorted out of the school by police, and later asked to leave the school quietly instead of facing public expulsion. Long story short, we were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and we were mistaken for someone else. To say I was undone would be an understatement. All that I knew and had spent the last four years building was now gone.

 

At 15, I learned that life is full of twists and turns, and if you drive fast enough, you’ll inevitably crash into something. I just wasn’t mature enough to understand that it was God in His kindness protecting me and knocking down my paper town. It was God who would now send me into what I thought was an exile. I was depressed, and I was alone, but the dormant seeds my family had planted deep in my soul to survive hard things would soon start to grow in this particular desert terrain. The roots my family had suffered to protect, would sustain me in this next season. I just didn’t know it yet.

 

Hi, Nice to Meet You.

You think I’d be used to it by now, that whole “starting over” thing, but I wasn’t. All I wanted to do was disappear. I hated everything about my circumstance, and I blamed God to the nth degree. I blamed my mother and father for not fighting for us to stay in our old school and get justice. I wanted the earth to open up and swallow me whole. Nothing in my new school and new surroundings were familiar, and all my old habits needed to die a quick death if I was going to thrive in my new environment.

 

So, I quietly and hesitantly tried to adapt. The cool jock from my old school was reluctantly being replaced with a band geek in my new school. That’s what happens when you get kicked out of school mid-year and mid-basketball season. You lose your eligibility to play sports. I was devastated, but I had no choice coming in mid-year, and I decided to rejoin the band. I’d played the trumpet in elementary and middle school. At the beginning of 9th grade, I found that being in the marching band no longer fit the persona I was going for, and I set my musical aspirations aside. But in this new place, a newfound independence awaited me, and I somehow fell in...