Lost and Found

Oh wow. I had totally forgotten that I even had this blog. In my conscious mind, at least...

I am still exiled, still here in Burgos, still not entirely at home here, after nearly, what? Eight years? But, this is not the city's fault. I float around wherever I am: I am one of those people that Cristina Peri Rossi so masterfully described in that story in which some citizens wander around floating about 6 inches from the ground, while the rest of the city folk walk with their feet firmly planted...

Or maybe I am just too lazy and too shy and too cowardly to try to make the city my own, or myself part of it. I still get lost, I still do not know where the three buses that stop IN FRONT OF my apartment building go. Well, I do know the endpoint of one of them. And that it goes by the hospital at some point--I guess that that is useful information to have...

I believe that the last time I wrote here, my daughter was not even a toddler. Now she is five years old. I am still a mother. Obviously I always will be now, even if she died, I would be a bereaved mother... but I mean, identity-wise. My primary identity is still "mother", and I constantly debate with myself whether this is good or bad for Aitana. For myself, I know the answer is "bad". I need to have multiple identities, not a primordial, central, hegemonic identity. I have no real job; I have no real life outside my motherhood; the only friend that I have made here is the mother of one of my daughter's friends... I believe that I usd to be "friend" and "daughter" and "girlfriend" and "student" and I dunno, other things. Now, I still am some of those, plus "wife", and "academic translator", but all these pale next to the central, overwhelming and underwhelming "mother" that I have become. My mother herself was so much more than just a mother, and I learned to be a person from her. I feel that I am short-changing my own daughter by providing her a horrible example as a woman... I wish that in time I can recover myself enough to change her perception of the primary woman in her life, into a complex vision of a complex person. Woman as complex, multi-layered, a being with a multi-identity-embodiment, and not a mother-wife, which is what she mostly sees now. Which is all I am now. And I am both better and happier at one of those two things, truth be told.  I must strive to be "writer" and "friend" and "thinker" and "daughter" again. Even if "professor" and "historian" are out of my reach, those others are not, and I should not give them up... patriarchy and a ridiculous labor market cannot hold me back!

Hell, I could also try "blogger".