Family Questions Story

This is a snapshot of the flurry of lives, their words and stories, that tumble inside me.

Five Questions

1. What were the best five lives, the best five decades, the best five years, the best five months, the best five days, the best five hours, the best five minutes, the best five seconds of a moment of your family?

2. If you hear creaking mattresses over box-springs in the night is it ghosts or of the orgasms of unrequited lovers?

3. How many mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, grandma’s, grandpa’s, aunts, uncles have given their lives so that you may have a shot at happiness?

4. What happens to you when you see old photographs of your ancestors, do you fall in love with them or do you wish they could tell you their stories?

5. Do you know your grandmother’s favorite colors, her birthdate, the name of her first boyfriend, if she loved someone other than your grandfather and never left? Will you be like her, give birth to twelve children by a man she may not love? Will your love be that strong to survive anguish and wars?

Answers, everyone wants answers. No questions the questions.

My grandmother taught me that my success was the offspring of 1000 relatives and ancestors who failed, who struggled, who suffered and only knew happiness as a legacy she, she, they gave to me.

I carry the anguish of 1000s in my bones, I get to smile, laugh, be nourished, be hopeful, because they had no happiness, only disease, deaths, harsh work and tender lovemaking that birthed dead or dying children.

All my ancestors are light as an orgasm, as deep as my belly laughs, as clear as my tears.

When my grandmother tried to choke to death her husband she was trying to kill the woman she never became. She was a woman who loved women, who loved me, who loved plants and seeds, who took care of all children �" because no child could be illegitimate �" who only believed in horizons and where the waterfalls were her prayer beads.

She said: You will become a revolutionary of love, a revolutionary to destroy solitudes, a revolutionary to resurrect all the old ones who didn’t make it because they harvested someone else’s crops, cared for and fed someone else's children while theirs withered in the fields, while they tilled their lands for other people who owned them and the land of their ancestors, who were killed by work, lashes, hunger and hate, whose love was never honored, whose lives mattered because they, she, created more life and lives.

My grandmother said that she did not have children so that they would be slaves. She had children so that they would have lives, not hers, their own. And she would live in us, in me, in whatever life we chose. And then she would be free, lazy, drinking coffee, have more free time to debate Protestants and make her body the theology of the future.

My grandmother made love, made children, made life, made a new god of her body…

Author's Note

As spontaneous as a memory, finding a secret mass grave of disappeared loved ones, this is a snapshot with five questions posed to the reader and reviewer. Can you answer them, can you question your own questions and mine?