Content warning for intimate partner violence.
Whether we celebrate it or not, Mother’s Day offers a valuable opportunity to reflect on what we’ve inherited from the women before us, what we choose to embrace, and what we decide no longer serves us. In this story, I share a bit about how and why silence was passed down through the women in my family and my decision to break from the cycle.
From Silence to Liberation
“Esta es mi hija,” this is my daughter, was one of the lies that Fernando Blanco, my grandmother, Sofía’s soon to be husband, told to border officials. He had taken her from her family in Nicaragua and brought her to Costa Rica to become his teen bride.
It was 1916, and though much of the foreign world was consumed with conflicts and war, my then fourteen-year-old grandmother had more immediate concerns than what was happening across the ocean. As she crossed the border into Costa Rica, the false sense of safety promised by the charming Fernando vanished. She quickly found herself in a violently abusive relationship.
My grandmother gave birth to three children in four years. Each pregnancy’s length of nine months, despite the nausea, the swollen feet, and the pain of childbirth, to my grandmother, were periods of peace.
In those months, Fernando’s hand was on her only to caress her, to feel the kick of their child.
Abuela Sofía would recoil slightly each time he reached for her, fighting the urge to flee from her husband’s thick, calloused hand. She was weary of the affectionate gesture and dreaded childbirth as she knew shortly after a baby came, his touch would rapidly turn hostile and leave her bruised.
Abuela Sofía couldn’t speak up because for her to speak up was to risk her safety and that of her children. She was in a foreign country at a time when women had no rights, and she had no access to resources. Recognizing that advocating for her and her children’s needs was not an option, my grandmother suffered in silence until she was finally fed up.
Late Friday nights were always the most difficult. After a long week of work, Fernando frequented the local taverna in search of camaraderie with the barrio’s other miserable husbands. Together they riotously laughed as they consumed guaro. Instead of liquid courage, he grew full of liquid cruelty. His hands developed an itch that could only be satisfied by beating whoever was up when he got home.
The children knew to make themselves sparse on Friday nights by pretending to sleep. Their eyes were tightly shut, their little fingers gripping sheets up to their foreheads, praying that tonight was not their night. If it wasn’t their night, though, it was Mami’s. They winced and held in each gasp as they could hear the thuds from Fernando hitting my Abuela Sofía.
The silence settled in the house like a fog after each beating, and the kids slowly loosened their grips, exhaling a sigh of tragic gratitude. The pain was not theirs tonight, but they wondered about the state of their mother. My grandmother always followed the prior night’s beating with a
strained grin and shoulders held a little less high than the day before.
It was the middle of the rainy season in August when my grandmother decided she was done with life as it was.That day, the showers played their melodies on the tin roofs of the barrio. Abuela Sofía walked along this muddy, shallow river, her children splashing ahead. She drew in a breath, closed her eyes, and considered her life and the life of her children, only to feel overwhelmed with sadness as her heart sank within her.
Meanwhile, the giggles and sand splattering between the toes of her children reminded her of the girl she once was before years of abuse consumed her. Abuela Sofía knew she had to come to a decision. Her life could not continue like this. No, not just her life, but the life of her children could not continue as it had been. She resolved that if she were to be broken, it would be not by the drunken hand of her husband but by the path of a free woman.
She gathered her three older children with her newborn babe and faced Fernando before he left for the tavern the following Friday. Her shoulders were the farthest back they had ever been. She held her baby tight against her still-tender breasts, and with a deep breath, she looked into Fernando’s icy blue eyes and declared, “Vete a la taverna, pero no estaremos aquí cuando regreses.” Go to the tavern, but we will not be here when you return.
Fernando listened as the wrinkles in his forehead dug deep into his skin from frowning.
“No vas a durar nada,” he replied, with a cold and calm tone. “You won’t last. As soon as you see your plates empty, their throats dry with thirst, you will return.”
“I’ll starve before I walk through this door again, Fernando,” Abuela retorted.
“Then get out. I cannot wait to see you turn into a common puta in the streets just so that you can keep my hands off of you. How many more men’s hands will you be subjected to once you leave? Did you think about that? This life with me is as good as it gets, Sofía. Remember it because you and your children will never have as good a life as this.”
Instead of responding, my grandmother grabbed her children and left. “Vamos, niños, we are safe now,” she affirmed as they began their walk away from Fernando. They had a life filled with financial challenges ahead, but to my grandmother, living in poverty and at peace was a life of wealth.
At that point, Abuela Sofía reverted to silencing her feelings. This was how she protected her children from fears and worries. Having become the sole provider, she vowed never to let anyone see her pain. The only time she spoke of Fernando was to caution her daughters against letting men hit them, reminding them that they are better off poor than with un hijueputa (a son of a bitch) who beats women. Aside from that, she quietly bore the emotional burden of years of being taken from her home, years of abuse and raising her children alone, amidst financial insecurity.
My mother, Amable, was born years after my grandmother left Fernando, in 1939, and migrated to the United States from Costa Rica in 1969 as a thirty-year-old single mother with four kids.
From my grandmother’s story, my mother learned to take no physical abuse from men, that it was better to struggle financially than to be beaten. However, another lesson passed on was that speaking up for herself could lead to grave consequences, and being an undocumented and unwelcome immigrant in a foreign country where she did not speak English, she avoided making many waves and expected me, her US-born youngest, to do the same.
Most of my family who migrated to the United States from Costa Rica did the same. As they arrived, they brought music, food, culture, and silence.
We did not discuss many things. Mental health and addiction were not topics not up for discussion. Sure, if someone drank too much, they were labeled a “borracho” (drunk) or a “vago” (lazy person), but that was where the conversation ended, at a label: no discussion, no digging, no examination, no reflection.
So when I found myself in the throes of addiction to alcohol, I continued the family tradition of silence. However, the quiet was stifling, and I was slowly losing my breath. I was suffocating. Silence may have worked as a tool for survival for my mother, grandmother, and the women before them, but it was killing me.
For years, I didn’t step outside myself to examine my situation and realize I was not in my mother’s or grandmother’s shoes.
I was born here in the United States. At the peak of my addiction, I was a teacher, the Kentucky State Teacher of the Year! I had a job with access to medical benefits that I could have used to help me treat my addiction to alcohol, but I let the old idea of the strong silent working woman keep me quiet.
The longer I carried this secret, the farther I distanced myself from help. I was rapidly drowning in my alcohol use, with eight trips to rehab and a diagnosis of alcoholic liver disease. The pressure to keep quiet kept me from healing until finally, in November 2020, I opened my mouth. I used my voice to speak up against the stigma of addiction and stopped comparing what I needed to do to live to those who came before me.
I tapped into the power that the silence had stifled and asked for help.
I had to release the norm of secrecy to save my own life, and now, I’ll make it my mission to always speak openly about overcoming addiction. This Mother’s Day, I thank my grandmother for doing what she needed to survive, and my mother too. As a first-generation American, I’m grateful that the silence ends with me.
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