Anonymous

When I think about the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, I don’t think of a place, a thing, or even nature. The first person who comes to my mind is my mother.

Not the way she looks, although she is a beautiful woman and she would want me to say that. I mean the way she moves through a room. The way she takes over a kitchen that isn’t hers. We went to my aunt’s house for Easter and within ten minutes my mother had rearranged the counter, found a better knife, and was telling my aunt that her garlic was too old. My aunt has been cooking longer than my mother has been alive. Nobody cared. That’s just how she is. She walks into a room and the room becomes hers.

She raised four of us in a two bedroom apartment. I shared a room with my three sisters until I was 11 and I never once heard her complain about space. She made it work. She always made it work. When there wasn’t enough food she would say she already ate. I believed her for years. I don’t know when I figured out she was lying but I remember the feeling. It wasn’t sad exactly. It was more like, oh. That’s who has been keeping all of this together.

People talk about their parents getting older and it scaring them. I get that. But what gets me is when I see her doing something small and I realize she has been doing it my entire life and I never noticed. She folds towels in thirds. She always has. I moved into my own apartment last year and I folded a towel in thirds without thinking about it and just stood there for a second. I didn’t even know I learned that from her. I wonder how many things I do that are actually hers.

She calls me every morning. Every single morning. She doesn’t have much to say usually. She asks if I ate, she tells me about someone from church, she says okay mijo I’ll let you go. The call is maybe four minutes. I used to rush through them. I don’t anymore.

Last week I was on the train and I saw this older woman helping her grown son fix his collar before he got off at his stop. He looked embarrassed. He’s probably 35. She didn’t care. She just fixed it and patted his chest and he walked off the train. I almost called my mother right there. I didn’t because I wouldn’t have been able to explain why.

I don’t have some big point here. I just think we don’t say this stuff enough while the person is still around to hear it. I’m not going to send her this because she would cry and then call all four of us individually to tell us she cried and then it would become a whole thing. But I’m writing it. She’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. I don’t think she knows that. Maybe she does. Either way I’m glad I said it somewhere.