Carmen

by Lucy S.

This is a glimpse -- through my lens -- at the woman who calls me her fifth daughter, who I call my other mother, a woman who has been laboring for a long time.

In her mid-70s, Carmen still works, as she has worked almost all her life. A large part of that work now consists of caring for her mother Nieves, who will turn 104 this August.  They live together. The state pays Carmen a small amount to provide that care, based on the number of hours they allot. They allot less hours than they used to, though the care her mother requires has increased rather than lessened. The state has been cutting back its funding for many things. The state pays this because Nieves has no assets and qualifies for some care-assistance. Nieves’s mind is still strong, even now. But standing and walking are very hard for her; she can’t manage them for long. She needs help with most aspects of living. Carmen also still does alterations and other sewing for people, and sometimes she takes care of kids.

Carmen emigrated from Colombia in June of 1964 without her husband and three very young children. Her brother and his wife had already come, and that helped her obtain the U.S. permission to immigrate. She immediately got work at a sewing factory in L.A. In October, her spouse and son and daughters joined her. Soon her mother and father also moved to the U.S., leaving one brother in Colombia (who would decades later come for their mother’s 90^th birthday as a stunning surprise to Nieves.) Carmen kept working and had two more daughters.

She tells me for the first time that when her youngest daughter was four, she was taking classes to learn more English and pass the citizenship test, and a Japanese man taking the same classes was interested in her. He was teaching her the Japanese alphabet. “He was cute,” she tells me. Another time, on a visit here in 2005, she told me that there was someone she was in love with as a teenager in Colombia, but they were kept apart. Then, and again today, I was struck by the untold stories in the lives of people we know, even those we know so well – sadness and ghosts of yearnings and quietly cupped memories – unexplained smiles and stares into untranslatable distances of their own pasts, which can only be conveyed so partially. Carmen says that one day, her two older daughters came and called out to her, and the man said, “You have kids?” and she said, “I have five.”  It wouldn’t have developed into any kind of romance anyway. She had her children, and she was married, and she lived on the same property as her parents. It was only that she felt a little glad talking with this man who showed that he liked talking to her.

Carmen became a citizen in 1973, while they were all still living in East L.A.

In 1975, they moved out to the Mojave Desert town of Lancaster, where I met them. Gloria became my closest friend, and her sister Ana (eleven months younger than Gloria) also became one of my closest friends. I’d spend the night there, sleeping on a pile of blankets on the floor between their two beds. I always sat up talking too long, keeping us all awake. One time, Gloria said she was so tired and couldn’t stay awake anymore, and wanted me to just go to sleep, and she swung out her arm in frustration, accidentally slamming my mouth. She gasped and said she was sorry!  The three of us started laughing.  I always had too much to say and not enough time to say it. I learned so much there. Carmen taught me how to hold silverware properly. I used to grab it inside of my fist, and she would take hold of my hand tightly and make me hold it between my fingers and thumb, the way most people I know hold forks and spoons, and it gradually took.

In those days, Carmen still worked at a sewing factory, and she expected her daughters to have dinner made by the time she came back from work. Sometimes she came home with bandages around her thumb from sewing so quickly that she ran the needle through it. And it was hot in the factory during the summer. Her husband was self-employed doing small construction jobs, but the work was sporadic, and unlike her, he didn’t know English, which made it hard at times to get people to hire him. Carmen was the primary economic support of the family.

In my teens, I lived with them for a while. Carmen still worked at a sewing factory.  She laughed a lot and teased me (always, she has). But at times, when we went to parties and came home too late, we’d find her sitting on the living couch in the dark crying. Back then, we thought she was only overreacting and trying to make us feel guilty. What did we know then about the disasters someone can imagine happening to those they love?

Carmen tells me that she was taking classes at the community college when one of her other daughters got pregnant at 17 – classes in math and English composition and swimming.  I never knew she took those classes.  She says she gave up on classes after her daughter got pregnant because she felt so depressed. I think of how, if we’d known this many years ago, we might have dismissed her feelings with a terse logic: “Why? What does that have to do with it? Why would you stop going just because of that?” But now I say, “Oh… Yeah… Depression can do that.” And she says, “Yes.” 

I remember the baby shower later, and how Carmen seemed happy about the pregnancy by then. In recent years, she's often watched the boys of that baby boy born in the 1980s.

Later she went back to school to learn computer skills. In the 1990s, a friend helped her get a job as a materials handler for a company that made antennas for the U.S. Navy. Finally, she was making good money - $11 an hour.

Things were looking up when her husband died of a massive heart attack at 60. Around that same time, her company laid her off because they were relocating to the maquiladora area of Mexico to pay workers $1 an hour.  Soon Carmen moved to Florida to live with one of her kids and the family, helping take care of the babies. She later took a job with a wealthy family to be their nanny, on call almost all hours of every day. Finally, she returned to California to work as a live-in nanny for a single father, waiting until she was old enough to collect Social Security, then waiting a few more years for Medicare. She finally managed to buy an older small home for $115,000 when mortgages were easier to obtain and rents were skyrocketing. She has held onto it.

Carmen is one of the strongest people I’ve known. She’s 4 feet 8 inches tall – maybe less by now, with age – and she doesn’t look particularly strong. But she has lived all of these years, taking care of those who needed taking care of – kids, an extra “daughter,” grandkids, parents, and many other people’s kids. She can sew just about anything without a pattern. I love to watch her construct clothing or other fabric goods.

During one of my visits a few years ago, her mother Nieves (Abuelita) said to me in Spanish something with the word “fin” (“end”) in it, and for some reason, not listening well, I thought she said something about “fin de semana” (weekend). I smiled and said, “¿Qué? ¿Cuándo?” (“What? When?”) Carmen let out a delighted high-pitched laugh. Ana laughed, too, and told me that her grandmother had said it’s going to be the end of her life soon. Even Nieves laughed at the absurdity. Nieves has been saying that she’s going to die soon for decades. Today I told Carmen that I just heard that the oldest woman alive (or known oldest) is 115, and that maybe her mom will become the oldest later. She happily agreed.

Carmen tells me that if she knew how to drive, she’d take college classes now. She says it’s good to exchange ideas with each other, and good to be learning something. I tell her I must take after her, and she smiles over the phone lines and says, “Yes.” I do love to learn, as she does, and I do have five kids, too. But she’s worked so hard all these years, and been structurally kept out of college classes in too many ways. That is her loss and most of all, it is all of our loss. I’m one of the lucky ones who knows her, and even luckier that she is my “other mother.” Others should be so lucky. We need her voice and her ideas, even or especially at this point in her life.