Inherited Rituals
We don’t sip ayahuasca here, instead the witch gives my mother a glass bottle with distinct herbs to bury in our garden. While ants crawl and the worms wiggle among the dirt, my mom’s desires made physical are also present. I love the vagueness of her pedidos, how they encompass everything: Stop my daughter from being sad, let me remain close to my husband although he’s thousands of miles away, let my son be happy while getting over the death of his dog.
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Sometimes I try to talk to my mother about my feelings and I hurt hers instead. When I asked about the times she took me to the curandera, she says it was because I never ate. For as long as I can remember, my body has never been enough. Always too something. Too skinny, too fat, too much like my mother’s, too sick, too far from the place where I was born. For so long, my mother tried to fix my body.
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Mami will never see the buried bottle again; her prayers are gathered by the earth, coalescing until they come alive. Nearby, sprouting from the ground next to her desires, is a sábila plant—aloe. It’ll strip away the harmful energy of whoever walks beyond the threshold of our house. My mother has to keep it alive as if it were one of her children.
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When I was little, she’d feed me all kinds of home remedies, supplements, vitamins, and natural juices. She'd take me to the curandera and the old lady would burn a hard, stale tortilla and pray over me with the smoke swirling all around me so I’d eat more. When I still didn’t eat enough, my mother would sit next to radio in the morning and listen to a homeopath talk about the benefits of different herbs, teas, and infusions that might finally give me hunger. She’d go to the store and buy de-wormer to cleanse me from inside out. She’d feed me a tablespoon of olive oil and salt, she’d try to feed me an oatmeal smoothie, she’d try and try to feed me.
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We visited a river with a shaman to beg the earth some more. I sat in a freezing puddle, the water the flowing vestiges of once snow, reaching just below my belly button. There was no cleanse with sugar, pulp oranges, or soda that my mother was usually asked to do. We let the cold placate us, and the shaman asked us to leave a gift to the river. My mother and I left our rings, but I wish I had left a lock of hair. A piece of my body left for another body, sitting next to the one that I came from and pieced together my bones.
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The first time I felt fat, I was 11 years old. I don’t remember the first time I went on a diet, but I was 16 when I asked my mother to take me to Jenny Craig. I prayed for my body to change. I wonder if this is how my mother prayed when she’d take me to the curandera. Hoping this time, we’d have found the solution to my problems. That maybe this ritual or concoction or diet would be the one to fix my latest bodily affliction. When I was 20 years old, I lost 30 pounds in three months because I couldn’t eat. Cramps caused by IBS would keep me up at night crying because the pain was so intense. For a whole summer I ate half a turkey, tomato, and cheddar sandwich for breakfast and the other half for lunch. At night in between sobs, I prayed for my pain to go away, and yet every day I’d get more compliments about my changing body.
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How can I heal if my mother only taught me to reside in the place between praying and wishing? These days I am trying to heal rather than fix myself. A fix is done once—all done, see, all fixed—and healing is slow like roots from a tree seeking out water, heat, space to grow deep in the earth. To grow wide as my body desires because that’s how it prays now. It knows that fixing it is as useless as telling a river it needs to curve.