16 aug 2026

mom & grandma / calexico, CA

and we all went to heaven in a little row boat / there was nothing to fear and nothing to doubt.

At three-thirty in the morning I knock the ash column into the sink and consider. 

Cough a little, think again.

Exhale, reconsider.

I let my mind peer into dawn as I observe the street through open blinds. I watch my neighbor pull his car into our building’s garage and attribute the sight to coincidence. Those have come in excess lately.

There have been instances where I can sense someone might be harboring knowledge that I believe I am meant to know. Very few and far between. Like an educational apophenia. A few weeks ago I asked this neighbor to tell me about his career. I tried to explain my lack thereof. I got the impression he didn’t know how to respond. He shared with me that he’s religious. I didn’t know how to respond. He comes across as unapologetic, but in a good way. 

In all its painful awkwardness, I do think that conversation went exactly as it was supposed to. I remember the gut feeling I had when I caught myself saying, “If it was up to me, I wouldn’t be doing this.” As if my circumstances were the result of anybody else’s actions but my own. 

I’m not sure that I still recognize all of the choices I made to get here. I thought that I would be brilliant. I wanted to impress everyone I’ve ever known and I didn’t want them to think of me any less than they might have already. There was fear and anxiety rooted in self-hatred, mostly— and pressure to succeed. Like most people I see success as a means to provide for myself and for my family. To take care of my mom. She’s never asked that of me. I just can’t say that I have any other desires in life than to repay her for everything she’s done. I used to have interests and hobbies and creative endeavors that I thought I’d never have enough time in the world to achieve. I used to want to travel and spend weeks at a time in foreign places observing and experiencing and enjoying and wondering. I used to have faith. At twenty-five, the concern that I will soon need health insurance of my own is well overdue, and also futile. What is there left to do but proceed? It must be a privilege to live with little else in mind except unburdening my mother.

I think back often to author Jason Reynolds’ response to being asked if there was anything in his life that felt like praying:

“[...] My mother is 79— almost 80. She's dealing with some health challenges, and these health challenges over the course of the last year [have] put me in position to be a caretaker. And part of that caretaking means that my mother I have to take care of very intimate things as it pertains to my mother. I have to wash her and I have to clean her. I have to, you know, I pull her panties up and… do all sorts of things that, to be honest with you, you know… I did some of this stuff when I was 18, when she was ill with cancer a long, long time ago. So, it isn't that it's jarring, it's that at this age, it feels different. And at this age, it feels in the midst of its burden— because it is that, if we're being honest— it is burdensome sometimes. It also feels like prayer. It feels like I'm praying at the only creator that I've ever actually, physically known, right? My mother. I'm bowing at the feet— I'm washing the feet of the only God I've ever physically touched. And… does it feel like praying? It feels like praying and everything else.

This is the hallelujah of all hallelujahs. And I really, really mean that. It doesn't mean it's not difficult. It's— it's painfully difficult. But I'd be lying to you if I didn't tell you that that difficulty is only a piece of this experience. Right? I went through this with my dad, as my dad was dying. We went through a similar experience, and I felt the same way. And to be honest with you, as a person who's not very religious, I've known prayer [as] these two moments and driving through the desert in Arizona, which seems so far away from these things, but it's not— it's the acknowledgement of a bigger thing, and the acknowledgement that there are bigger things to acknowledge. 

In Arizona, it's the mountains in the sky. It's the openness and the emptiness of a world unmuddied by buildings and architecture, right? Like, this is God, if I've ever known God. In my mother's bedroom, it's a similar thing. It's me acknowledging a vessel that has given me everything that I've become. And as that vessel continues to, sort of, to empty, right— it's seeping out and she's not on E yet, and she's fine— but E is coming. The tank is emptying, right? And to be there and to maintain this vessel, to maintain her comfort, to maintain her dignity by making sure that she's clean and cared for. Come on. I mean, what else? What else could prayer be? Prayer can't just be asking. Sometimes, it's me saying, ‘I'm so grateful for everything you've given me that me taking these forty-five minutes to bathe you is a very small drop in the bucket of the gratitude that I actually owe you, and I will do everything I can [...] to pour into this until I can't pour or you don't have a bucket anymore for me to pour into.’ What a gift. What a gift honestly. And I— you know, it hurts to say, and I can feel my tears welling up in my eyes, but seriously… I wish my mom wasn't going through what she was going through, but I'm so grateful to be there so that she [doesn’t] have to go through it by herself. She can go through it with what she made. You made the thing that is meant to come here and make sure that you're all right in the midst of this process. I'm going to help you slide on up out of here. I'm going to help you transition. I'm going to make sure that there's comfort for you. 

The least I could do after teaching me how to be bold, how to be caring, how to be sensitive, how to cry, how to be a person whole and unfettered by the pressures of this life. Come on. The least I could do. That is prayer. Freedom. Space. Like, that's prayer. For sure.”

… 

Around noon I started to drive up the coast. My only plan was to observe. Once I reached Malibu, traffic let up and I could finally get lost in the stretch of blue ahead while I let the highway carry me to Oxnard. I’d never been.

I couldn’t possibly assemble my words as gracefully as Jason Reynolds, or in any order that would fully express the responsibility that I feel to provide my mother with a life she has never known. It is my tithe to supply her with every comfort and convenience that money has to offer. To take care of my sisters and nurture our relationships above all else. I am her daughter and her baby but in reality she is mine. I see her through the eyes of her mother. I carry the weight of her childhood. She’s forgiven me for mine. 

When I was dismissed from university during the pandemic, she didn’t ask any questions. She didn’t berate me, she didn’t shame me. She’s supported me through every win and loss I’ve ever experienced. Time has distanced us from the life we lived in Calexico. Now we browse home stores for plants and on the drive home she’ll tell me that she can’t wait to retire and tend to her garden. For that to be her greatest longing breaks my heart and warms it simultaneously. 

In my grandma’s old Ford, it’s like I get to live her life too. Not the one that she had, but the one that I get to have, that maybe in some incarnation of life she could have had too. Driving her car means I get to bring along those memories of her picking me up from school or driving me to the grocery store to do her shopping, or on the way to department stores for a Sunday outing. It also means she gets to be a single childfree woman in college. She gets to enjoy a loving relationship with her mother and some semblance of peace without her father. 

I turn around in Port Hueneme and start heading South. I don’t have the courage to park and wander in the city but let myself imagine I had anyway. There’s still plenty of time left in the week to do all the things that could’ve been done today. At some point I’ll confront the fact that even though I came to Los Angeles to finish studying music, in doing so I’ve discovered that I don’t have what it takes. The thought keeps me torn in half. On one end I’ve put so much into this career path that it would be a net loss to split from it now. I would be giving up on myself, my younger self, my better self. On the other end, admitting that dreaming small is dreaming safe opens up the world in front of me. I don’t know where my passion’s gone, but I hope that when it returns it doesn’t resent me for choosing stability.