A Prince Was Born

My family has an interesting and dysfunctional dynamic between women and men. I don't know when it all started, but the earliest story that I have been able to pinpoint goes back to my grandmother. She had a few daughters, and somewhere along the line she had a boy.

My aunts don't remember much about him, so we can only hypothesize that possibly my grandmother hadn't yet tipped over the edge into (what we suspect was) mental illness. I take that back-what I suspect was mental illness, because almost everyone else in the family is so deep into denial that they think that she was merely tired from having so many children. I haven't heard much about the family dynamics at the time that this little boy was around, but I do know that a tragedy occurred that until this day has marked our family like a curse.

One day my grandmother was coming home from the store and my older aunt and the boy were waving to her outside of the third story window. The boy , as everyone in the family called him, was so excited that my grandmother was coming home that he began to jump up and down on the bed. Suddenly, he flew out of the window and tumbled three flights down, only to hit the ground and die at her feet. They say that after that day my grandmother was never the same again.

My grandmother got pregnant, year after year, trying to have another boy to replace the boy that she had lost. Over the years she had eight more girls with who knows how many men until she finally had another boy, the little prince that she had been waiting for ever since the day when she lost her precious little boy.

The joke in the family is that on the day that my uncle Arturo was born... a prince was born.

Arturo wasn't just an ordinary prince-he was a special prince who had everything handed to him on a platter while his thirteen sisters were practically starved to death in order to give him all his little heart desired. My mother was less than a year old when the little prince was born, and rumor has it that my mother was completely left in the dust as soon as her precious baby brother was born.

Arturito, as everyone loved to call him, was allowed to live in the house with my grandmother and the husband that she kept until he died. The man wasn't his or my mother's father. My mother and some of the remaining sisters who had not already ran away with men at a young age lived in the house next door to them.

The girls' house had no running water, no electricity, no food, and a leaky roof. The girls ran an extension cord from the main house to their house and would all sleep together in a bed with a blow dryer to try to keep warm. Because there was no running water, they would all have to go to the bathroom in the coffee cans that they would keep outside in the back of the house.

The girls had no food in their house and would sometimes sneak over to the main house when no one was home to try to sneak a piece of food. They knew that every night the prince was served a home cooked meal by my grandmother and that there was bound to be leftovers. Eventually my grandmother caught on to the fact that they were stealing food and a large chain with a lock was placed around the refrigerator. One of my older aunts was able to get work in a local store when she was fourteen, and she would steal cupcakes every day to bring home to the other sisters so that they would have something to eat every day.

At some point, my mother and her older sister were moved back into the main house with my grandmother, her husband and the prince. My mother and her sister were given a small bedroom and were told that they were not allowed to use the lights in the bedroom. They also were not allowed to take a bath, because the prince needed all the water that he could get and money was apparently scarce.

My mother and her sister would go for days on end by taking baths in the local stream, but at least once a week they would sneak into the bathroom to take a quick bath. While everyone else was eating, my mother and aunt would both go into the bathroom and when each one of them flushed the toilet, they would let out a little bit of water in the tub. Then, they both quietly bathed in the itty bitty amount of water that was in the bathtub. They eventually were caught at their game and had the daylight beat out of them.

Somewhere along the line, some men from the government (who knows who they were) found out that my uncle was extremely intelligent and they came to take him to who knows where but my grandmother would not let him go. It was at that point that my grandmother told my aunts that they were not allowed to study or do their homework anymore for some reason. If they were caught studying, reading or doing homework, the daylight was beat out of them again. My mother and aunt used to steal batteries for flashlights so that they could do their homework and read my uncle's many books in their damp, moldy closet at night.

One day when my mother was more or less in junior high, it was raining heavily. My mother walked miles and miles home from school in the rain, and just as she was approaching her street, she looked up to see a car driving down the road. She could barely see from all of the rain in her eyes, and she could barely walk as the road flooded, but she managed to catch a glimpse of her mother driving by with her brother, waving in the rain. As the car passed, it covered her in mud.

That was the day that my mother decided to run away from home and live with one of her sisters, never speaking to her mother again until I was almost sixteen years old and her mother had a massive stroke which left her senseless.

My mother eventually met a man who promised her the moon, giving birth to me when she was 21 years old. Three years later, she gave birth to a boy. Two weeks after his birth, the son of a bitch left her high and dry.

And the cycle continued. But that, my friends, is a whole other story that is best saved for another day.