My mother comes from a long line of people who left everything behind. It’s impossible to talk about my mother, Angelica DeLaCaridad Gonzalez Bechtold, without talking about this history, all that came before her, and her own mother; Angelica DeLaCaridad Velazquez Gonzalez. From Castilian Spain her ancestors emigrated to the Canary Islands before settling in Cuba. Angie Senior left Cuba for New York and there gave birth to her three daughters, my mother as the first. There is much information I’ve gleaned only from the whispers and rumors of the occasional late-night conversation when even the Cubans forget their tight-lipped nature.

For a people so secretive and so seemingly willing to throw off the shackles of their history, Cubans are very proud of their heritage. When I got married, my wife kept her last name, and it prompted a story from my mother. She recounted that her own mother told her she had to take her husband’s name, not out of any patriarchal assumptions but because “the world doesn’t need another Gonzalez.” And yet that same woman gave my mother the same first and middle name as herself, the same name as the women in Cuba; Angelica DeLaCaridad, named for the Marian apparition who has become the patron of Cuba.

Almost anyone that claims a Cuban heritage is some mix of three ethnicities: Castilian colonizers, the slaves they brought with them, and the indigenous people of the island. My mother’s mother is solidly Castilian. Supposedly they come from the kind of old money that still cared about “good breeding” even when they emigrated halfway around the world. My mother has light skin, and straight, jet black hair, now streaked with silver. She is tall and ethnically ambiguous; she is the kind of woman that even now at 60 everyone tells her often how beautiful she is.

I have a picture of my mother sitting at the dining room table at a house we lived in 3 or 4 houses ago depending on how you count. It’s most likely taken on a smartphone, but an old one, maybe a first-generation iPhone. The lighting is a little bit off even though the picture quality is good. My mother almost floats in the darkness under a hanging lamp. She has a bandana around her dark hair, and she’s making a questioning gesture with her long fingers, adorned with silver rings, elbows on the table. I come across this picture sometimes, maybe once or twice every few years, but the image is burned into my brain. She looks mysterious, possibly powerful, and yet so inviting. This is often how I see my mother.

One day my brother and I were going down Wikipedia rabbit holes and ended up on the page for “Numbers Station.” Being boys at the time obsessed with soldiers and spies, we read passages back and forth to each other, clicking links, going further and further until we heard our mother stop walking on her way through the room and go “oh. hm.” We turned to see her looking right at us. “Say that again? what were you just talking about” a tone more curious than anything. We filled her in on our findings and she recounted to us her memory of an uncle she hadn’t seen in years. She used to visit him in Miami as a child and he always had a station playing in the background; a radio station continually broadcasting strings of numbers. My mother was young at the time and just thought it was silly, but every now and then he would make the kids quiet down and he would turn up the volume, listening closely to the voice for a minute or two before turning it back down to background noise. This was a tactic used by sleeper agents in foreign countries around the world to convey coded messages. Whatever his role may have been, he was apparently never activated; and he never returned to Cuba, but he never forgot it. This is how the Cubans are.

More recently, maybe during Trump’s first election campaign, my mother recounted a story of being sent to answer the door and to tell whoever was there that no one else was home, despite there being five or six adults in the back room. She said that this happened maybe two or three times and each time the adults in the back came to greet the visitor once they heard whose voice it was. She has no idea what might have happened if it had been someone else, but to see these memories through the eyes of my mother as a young girl in the mid 70s is jarring. “I was scared,” she told us, “not because of who was at the door, just because the adults were talking to me so seriously.” I suppose for a child it can be hard to tell where the danger is coming from. And by the time she was an adult, the information had been lost to history.

Now on to who she actually is. She is a nurturer. And I say this not because she’s my mother; there are plenty of very good mothers who have some other virtue at their core. The story of how my siblings and I came into the world goes like this: miscarriage, miscarriage, my older brother, miscarriage, miscarriage, me, and then, when another mother was proven unfit, my younger sister was adopted. I couldn’t begin to tell you how many of my brother and sister’s friends, partners, and acquaintances lived with us for various lengths of times when I was little; sometimes for days, sometimes weeks, sometimes years. Sometimes we find an old Christmas or Thanksgiving photo and have to remember who the extra person is.

My whole life my parents have had huge dining room tables, sometimes too big for the house, and always with the ability to expand it. We ate dinner together every night when I was young and on these nights when there were no visitors there would be two or three empty seats. On weekends they would be filled by a neighbor or relative or friend, and on holidays (and any other excuse my mother can find to celebrate) a leaf is put in and the table piled high with rice and beans, corn fritters, empanadas, and yucca. If you visit my mother you will not leave her house without sitting down at her table, without having a cup of coffee, nor without a long conversation. And by the time you’re home, she will find you on social media, follow you, and send you a message inviting you back soon. If she only had a slice of bread and you showed up at her door you would be eating a meal of 3/4 of that slice of bread with her eating a piece just because it might be rude not to share a meal with you.

There is a lot I don’t know about my mother, partly because I’ve never asked, and partly because she never said. There are traumas and joys that I know about, mostly comical stories from her youth. I know that one night when her and my dad had just started dating they were in a poorly lit alley with a group of friends. It was late at night, and everyone was drunk enough that no one can remember what started the argument, but when a punch was thrown at my dad’s face he ducked it, not realizing his new girlfriend was right behind him. She was unconscious for several seconds before recovering. She has talked about going into the street in Brooklyn with her father’s wrench to open up fire hydrants in the summer; dancing in the flowing water to beat the heat. She has said little of her modeling career, but we all know there are few points in space and time as harsh for a young woman as New York City runways in the 80s. When I was having trouble in high school I was riding in the car with her one day and she told me she had been kicked out of one school as a teenager. I still don’t know what she did to earn that punishment, but I know she swore me to secrecy for fear that my dad would find out she had told me.

“You’re gonna miss me when I’m gone.” This is the phrase that epitomizes my mother to me. It’s a little silly, it’s a little confessional, it’s a little assertive, and it’s very true. But then there’s also her other often-repeated refrains of “Mother!” and “Freakin!” the truncated swear words she’s used all my life. I wonder did she train herself to not use the full words when she had kids or did she, like I now do because of her, only ever use these versions because it feels like they pack enough (if not more) punch already. Hearing her say them in her thick New York accent tells me the first is true; my mother swore like a Brooklyn sailor as a young woman. But it’s true for another reason; that she put her children above herself, that she sanitized herself, put her own very strong personality at the service of her children, that she protected us from all the things she was not protected from.

– Adam K Bechtold