Thursday, September 26, 2013

Diferente.

A shocking number of years ago, when I went to Mexico for the first time, my host family asked if they could call me "Tere."  I said I'd prefer Teresa, really. 

It's been so many years I've forgotten my host father's name, but I remember him saying in Spanish--maybe the first significant Spanish sentence I ever understood perfectly--"We want to call you Tere, because in Mexico we think it sounds cold to call someone by their full name."  I thought that was weird, but I decided to go with it.  I never expected to spend more than those few months in Mexico, anyway. 

Fast forward to this past school year, in Oaxaca.  I knew I'd really started to assimilate because I reflexively shortened my students' names after the first couple of classes, if I felt warm towards them--"Fernando" to "Fer," "Mónica" to "Moni," "Karla" to "Karlita," "Adriel" to "Adri."

 
Now I'm in the U.S., teaching Spanish in an afterschool program as I search for the full-time job I know I will eventually find. I have a student named Victoria, a tiny, brilliant, little thing.  I keep calling her "Vicky," and she corrects me, and I catch myself thinking, "But that sounds so cold!" 
***
 
I told Ibis on gmail chat the other day--that's where our marriage mostly happens now--that it's weird being here, because people talk to Teresa, and Tere answers, and they don't even notice.  It's a homecoming, technically, but it's also not.  I'm sleeping in the room that I slept in when I was 11.  I'm volunteering at the same agency I volunteered at in high school.  There are memories everywhere, but I feel oddly detached from them. 
Maybe I'm just old.  But I feel like I'm also a little bit someone else.  Someone who sometimes dreams in a language I didn't even understand back them.  Someone who's done things so differently for so long that everything from Before seems about equally familiar, and alien. 
Ibis said he understood, because people see him and talk to him and think he's the same without us, but he's not; he hasn't even gone anywhere yet, but he's not the same person, either.
***

I'm volunteer teaching ESL to a group of Mexican women, mothers of young children enrolled in a nonprofit preschool.  Many of them have been in the U.S. for years, but still speak only bits and pieces of English.  They want to learn now because their kids speak to them in English and they don't know what they're saying. 


Yesterday they told me two remarkable things: one, that they wish I could teach them every day, because I'm their favorite.  That means a lot when you've applied to approximately five million jobs in the past four months and only some skeezy insurance company wants to hire you full time.   


They also told me that there's a flower called "Teresita."  It's one we have in our garden in Oaxaca--my mother-in-law calls it "paragüitas," little umbrellas, but according to my students, it also shares the Spanish diminutive of my name.  It's one I've never especially liked, but I guess I have to look at it differently now.   

I guess you never know where you might find yourself. 


It's poisonous!  It's medicinal!  It's...Teresita! (source)
 

 
 

Monday, September 9, 2013

Opting in, opting out.

I thought that maybe what I've been doing wrong is trying to follow my heart too much. 

I thought that maybe my heart was trying to take me to a place that doesn't exist, some sort of misty-mountaintop-multicultural-Renaissance-Faire-magical-realism-fantasy-land where people wear lots of colorful flowing garments and struggle nobly for Truth and Love and Justice (a place something like this, or this, except maybe with fewer orgies).  And that maybe, in order to ever have a chance at financial stability in the world we actually live in, I would have to opt into it and tell my hippie-dippy do-gooder little heart to shut the hell up. 
Here!  I want to live here!  (source)
So I started applying to jobs that didn't really interest me, and I got a job offer, and I couldn't stand the search anymore, so I spent the last couple weeks getting certified to sell insurance in the state of California.

I've also been volunteer teaching ESL to a group of lovely Mexican immigrant women, and working on my little novel, and playing cars and trains and dinosaurs and penguins with Isaias, and drinking a little wine and a lot of coffee with some of my favorite ladies, and running three miles a day, and working on Ibis's visa paperwork, and reading books by Pema Chodron.  I'M STILL ME. 

I thought, if I can do this stupid job and earn fifteen hundred bucks a week, and still be me in my free time, and send a big fat money order to my mother-in-law every week, and put something in the bank every week, that is good. 

I thought, I'll opt in a little, and just be present with the absurdity, and I'll learn something and it will be fine.  It's what I need to do for my family, because what my family doesn't have is money.  (Okay, and maybe I thought a little bit about how I could buy myself a couple pairs of really nice shoes, with fifteen hundred bucks a week.)        

So I passed my state licensing exam (with an 80% thanks very much.  I can tell you all about double indemnity and nonforfeiture options, if you want....What, you don't want?) and started training last Thursday.  I spent a couple hours with Cecilia (not her real name), watching her make calls.  I thought, I'll be good at this, this isn't too bad. 

Then I spent Friday morning calling all Cecilia's "Spanish leads."  She was thrilled to have someone who speaks Spanish and I was feeling pretty smug.  Few people answered the phone.  I set up one appointment, and Cecilia told me, "If we make that sale, I'll take you out to dinner!"  A few more people answered, but weren't interested.  Cecilia couldn't understand my end of the conversations, but she could see that I wasn't following the script. 

"Just stick to the script," she told me.  "Don't answer their questions.  If you answer their questions, you give them the control.  You have to be in control." 

I thought that was interesting.  I filed that away to think about later.

On Saturday morning, Cecilia had me making calls from home.  First two, no answer. 

Third call, a woman--who'd supposedly been referred by her mother--told me angrily in Spanish, "I don't know who you people think you are, but some woman named Cecilia sold my mother something that she thought was from her union but it's not, and my mother doesn't even speak English, and she thought it was a one-time payment but they're taking money out of her account every month, and that Cecilia belongs in jail."

I told her, "Thank you for telling me this, because if that's the way it is, I don't want this job.  I just started, but if that's the way it is, I'm quitting."  That's not in the script. 

She seemed surprised and grateful that I was a human being.  She told me some more stuff and I thanked her again and hung up the phone and sat there.  I looked at the sheet of phone numbers and realized I'd been speaking to Guadalupe.  I cried. 

This is what I think now: maybe this is an isolated incident.  But even if it is, if it had been my mother-in-law, or my grandmother-in-law....No.  Not "if it had been."  It might as well have been.  Even if it means another month without a penny to send to Doña Charo, or put in the bank, or buy cute shoes, even if it was just that one lady who was tricked, I can't do it. 

Sunday night was the Guadalupe moon, the thinnest possible crescent.   Today is Doña Charo's birthday, and I can't send her money, but I can honor her faith and integrity and honesty.  I called Mr. Insurance Man and read from MY script.  Feliz cumpleaños, suegra querida.

I learned a lot from this experience.

I learned that I don't particularly care about being in control, but that I sometimes cede control when it would actually be useful for me to take it. 

I learned that my desire to help people, while genuine, gets all tangled up with my desire to be nice and be liked, and that I have to put that aside sometimes.

I learned that I can master the absurd grown-up world if I just try to do it.  (Seriously, don't you want to know about nonforfeiture options?  Annuities?  Reduced paid-up whole life?  Anyone?)

I learned that if there's no connection, there's nothing.  If time is money and people are leads, clients, or zeros, there's nothing.  And I remembered all the people and places I'm connected to at the heart.

And now that I'm connected again, I keep stumbling into the Eternal. I'm in the Silicon Valley, but it doesn't feel so distinct from that misty-mountaintop place anymore.  

Maybe I will never have cute shoes or a comfortable bank account.   But I have a group of students who need me, a third of a novel that I'm pretty proud of, a son who wants to be a penguin when he grows up, a husband who is helping other people with their visa paperwork even as he waits for his own visa interview, friends who may even understand what I'm trying to say here, and a heart that I can go on listening to. 

Right  now it sounds about like this: