Ten Things You Wouldn't Guess About Ibis Based On This Photo



My husband, before he was my husband, circa 2005

 1. That shirt he’s wearing? It’s pink.  (It is, in fact, just one of several predominantly pink shirts he owns, including his beloved Lucky Shirt and the legendary Shirt That Doesn't Even Match Itself.) 


2. He is not now, nor has he ever been, in any way involved with gangs or organized crime.

3. He loves baby animals. Fuzzy puppy dogs and tiny widdle baby chicks and so on.

4. He’s been known to cry.

5. He enjoys a nice cold…glass of milk.

6. If you give him a present--anything, a pair of socks, an ugly-ass stuffed animal, an I-heart-San-Francisco mug--he will treasure it forever because you gave it to him.

7. He’s a Michael Jackson fan.

8. He gets genuinely excited about any and all flowers, fruits, vegetables, and herbs that I manage to grow.

9. He can work the night shift, from 9 pm to 7 am, and then come home and play with the baby for hours, or take us out for breakfast.

10. He was once described by a young friend of ours as “just like The Rock , but softer."  And that was just about right.

One About Doña Charo

In my mother-in-law’s wedding photos, she looks scared, and determined, and too young, and beautiful. She was. She was seventeen, and a long way from the isolated village in Chiapas where she grew up. She had only worn shoes for the first time three years earlier.


She’s the oldest of seven. From the time she learned to walk, she was taking care of babies. There was never enough of anything but tortillas and kids and hard work and good hard trancazos for anyone who didn’t obey. Her father grew corn, and most years, sold the harvest in the city and then spent the profits on prostitutes and liquor. Her mother took in washing and scrubbed till her fingers bled.

She had to leave school after third grade, even though she wanted to study. There wasn’t enough money even to buy her pencils, much less clothes. One of her small brothers wore, for an entire year, nothing but a man’s button-down shirt that hung to his ankles. Her own dresses were lengths of cheap fabric chopped into rough dress shape with a machete. They didn’t own a pair of scissors.

She came to Salina Cruz as a teenager to live with a godmother and learn to be a seamstress. When she met her future husband, she had one question for him: “How many children would you expect your wife to have?” He said “One or two,” so she married him. Ten months after the wedding, she had Ibis; five years later, Patricia. Plenty.

She’s still beautiful, with lips any Revlon model would envy, and a smile so dazzling you don’t notice there’s a tooth missing towards the back until you’ve known her for a long time. There are lines on her face, but they’re lines of sadness and worry and laughter and resignation, not bitterness. She loves her parents, despite everything. She loves her husband, even though she didn’t, when she married him; now they go to prayer group together, and they make each other laugh. She loves her children, and her children-in-law and grandchildren, passionately. She cries more frequently than anyone I know.

Lest I appear to idealize her, let me say that she does, on occasion, drive me crazy. Still, she’s come through years of privation and pain and putting herself last, with her heart in working order—and not all her siblings were able to do that. She’s had to be strong every single day of her life.

She’s pretty amazing.

In which I begin "blogging"

Why cafe con leche?  What does coffee with milk have to do with anything?

It's the oldest joke of our relationship:

Cafe (aka Ibis Gilberto):

Leche (aka Teresa or Tere):

Cafe + Leche = Cafe con leche, also known as Isaias, Chai, Birdy, Isaiah, and Zay:

We moved last year into a little house on the boundary line between two small towns outside of Oaxaca City, just in time for Isaias to be born at home.  Our immediate neighbors are a cornfield, an empty lot, another empty lot, and a lonely older man who trades plants with me through the fence when he's sober, and mumbles apologies and hides from me when he's drunk. 

Last winter, Luis, who's twelve and stays next door with his uncle during the school year, saw the devil in the road outside their house.  They knelt down in the yard and prayed until morning, when they matter of factly informed us that the devil had come around.

I'm alone a lot with Baby Isaias, while Ibis works, and so far the devil has left us alone.  Our only visitations have been from birds: a huge white owl landing silently on a fence post late at night.  A hummingbird perched on a branch of the lime tree, its tiny toes no thicker than lines drawn with a pen.  Little red birds with black masks and capes, like avian superheroes, chasing down bugs on the wing.

We're officially off the grid, both by choice and necessity, as there's no grid just here to connect to.  It's a lot of work, and less a state of permanent eco-revolutionary awesomeness than the long slow piling up of days, buckets of water hauled and enough, or not enough, sunshine to reun the computer or the blender. 

We're not purists by any means; Ibis, for the time being, has to work in Oaxaca City, driving back and forth regularly.  For my part, I had a happy dream the other night about a place that was combination daycare-laundromat-coffee-shop-with-wireless, which about sums it up.  And that's not even taking into account the huge carbon footprint our super-long-distance international courtship racked up. 

Still, our hope is that all three of us, but especially Isaias, will find something--Something--different and worthwhile, living in a place where people who speak fluent Zapotec outnumber people with master's degrees about 50 to 1, where the knowledge of when to plant the corn takes precedence over the knowledge of how to connect to the Internet.  Where twitter is a thing the birds do in the lime tree, in the carrizo, in the jacarandas. 

So begins our story: it's about building a family with two languages, two cultures, two colors, about trying and failing and trying again to live sustainably, about growing into home.  Here we go...