I. Enemies

I remember my mother telling me of how when they first arrived from Cuba, my grandfather forbade any celebration of Christmas, knowing how many were dead or dying at home.

By the time I came of age, learning to play dominoes at his and my grandmother’s side, I knew there were only three real enemies in the world: Castro, Kennedy, and the Russians.

So, imagine my state of shock when my mother, in response to the US cozying up to Russia in a delegation led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, himself the child of Cuban exiles, told me that what I was seeing was not some burgeoning alliance between the US and Russia, but an act of “keeping your enemies closer than your friends.” My grandparents, I pictured, rolling in their graves.

My mother has been, and is, fiercely American. One memory I have engrained from high school was when she picked me and a group of my fellow field hockey teammates up from practice. Waiting for her to arrive, it came up in conversation that my mother was Cuban, born in Cuba, so I was half-Cuban, whatever that meant. My friends were incredulous. After the minivan door slid open, they asked her immediately while piling into the bench seats, if it was true. My mother proudly replied “yes” and then added, “but I don’t have any accent.” Implicit, of course, was the narrative of us and them, of being a certain kind of immigrant compared to the rest. She blended in perfectly, and as her child, I did the same.

Living her teenage years in Beatlemania in her newly adopted country, my mother not only deeply loved Paul McCartney, she also had a record of one of JFK’s speeches. This was nothing short of treason in her parent’s house, and if the record wasn’t thrown away (this part of the story is unclear to me), she certainly was scolded for having it and not allowed to play it. She may have even received the belt for bringing it in at all.

Though I’m in my 40s and have voted Democrat in every single presidential election, my mother still thinks of me as in some sort of teenage rebellion that I will one day snap out of while she espouses to me the often misquote attributed to Churchill that the wise become conservative with age. It seems just as unlikely to me that Churchill’s definition of conservatism would include the present state of the alliance between Great Britain and the US. If only I would grow up and stop reading that liberal rag, The New York Times.

Most nights, my mother sits watching Fox News and her MAGA hat hangs by the front door next to their laundry room.

The first president I ever remember seeing on TV was Ronald Reagan. To me, he was a president before I learned he was an actor, too. We watched him while eating dinner, the TV perched above our kitchen table. The TV was almost always on in our house. My mother said it was like a companion to her growing up as she did, with her immigrant parents trying to make sense of a new country, with new laws, customs, and language.

I live in the DC suburbs and nearly everyone I know fears losing or has lost a job, — or if they have the good fortune to keep their job, they are stymied at every level to do their job. It is soul-crushing. Many of their kids go to public school with my oldest child. I see them at the playground, the grocery store, the block party, the Halloween parade, etc. We all wear a similar face these days. I can only explain it as “weary downtroddeness.” When I read the news, I immediately live it when I talk to my neighbors. There’s no escape. Yes, those federal workers, the so-called “enemies of our deep state,” are the same people who coach my kids’ soccer teams on the weekend, who bake or buy goods for the PTA fundraiser, who help plan the classroom Valentine’s Day party with me. Even as these activities continue, there is a heaviness in the air. At times, it sucks out all the other life-giving oxygen in the room. I feel desperate for it not to.

Most nights, I avoid reading or watching the news, having spent many daylit hours in it.

Sometimes I wonder how did my grandparents feel watching the institutions around them, however flawed and corrupt they were, collapse violently under the dictatorships of Fulgencio Batista and then with Castro. I think often of one of the few photographs I’ve seen of my relatives celebrating my aunt’s quinceañera in Havana, an elaborate affair, just months before they left the country for good. In a normal time, the party would have been a nighttime event with a live band, endless drinks, cigars, fancy gowns, but out of caution for everyone’s safety, my aunt’s party was held in the daytime with no music, the men in dark suits, and the women in short jackets cinched with bows and ridiculously large lapels. So, life went on, albeit differently and more somberly.

After all, just a few months earlier, the man wearing olive-green fatigues had come down victorious from the mountains wearing his trademark square cap and said “temenos gran planes” to a cheering crowd who chanted back “paredòn!” “to the wall,” which meant death by firing squad for their enemies.

II. Alliances

Recently, in a rare moment of revealing how I truly felt, I told my mom how sad and worried I was about my friends and neighbors losing their jobs. Pausing only a moment, hesitating at first to say to me “this may be too soon,” she recounted the story of Reagan coming into office in the months before I was born. At the time my parents were living with my father’s mother in Colorado. My older sister was then only a toddler. My dad was supposed to take a new job at a government agency and move to DC, but Reagan issued a hiring freeze on all federal employees. The job offer was rescinded, and for a few more months they stayed put in Colorado, until my dad got a job offer in New York City, and by that time, my mother was pregnant with me. “You know it all worked out in the end. These things have a way of doing that,” my mother tried to reassure me in the way even well-meaning people do when they can’t empathize with you. I felt let down and also foolish. Didn’t I know better by now?

The swift, offhanded way though that she could dismiss a family losing their income, however, is what took my breath away, perhaps because it felt so personal. That firing a person for no good reason after so many years of work and dedicated service appalled and offended me. Additionally, firing a person because they are a perceived enemy of the administration is cruel, unscrupulous and it greatly worries me. Notwithstanding that the two situations of a hiring freeze and firing someone already working are completely incomparable like apples and oranges. Luckily for both our sakes, my kids interrupted the call before I could speak.

Sometimes I wonder how did it get this way? Our inability to speak honestly and her hardened outlook. At what point did convincing herself that what she was seeing wasn’t in fact true, and that turning a blind eye to the suffering of others was preferable, if not easier.

Sometimes I wonder is this a new chasm between us or was it always this way, and just been revealed, another uncovering in the great revealing nature of our time? How deep does our alliance with each other as mother and daughter go? Is it deeper than her alliance with Fox News or Trump, or if not deeper, then how much can it withstand amid the ever-present pummeling showing us how much we differ?

Like the photograph of the quinceañera, our relationship goes on, albeit differently and more somberly, and when we let our guards down, more antagonistically.

One night recently, my mom sent me a text of a political cartoon, a rare moment for her of breaking the usual texts she sends me and my sister of “14 Stylish Ways to Make the Most of a Small Front Porch” or “10 Strength-Training Exercises to Shrink Your ‘Apron-Belly.’” The cartoon is captioned “Future Government Workers” and depicts a teacher giving a pop quiz to her students, the federal workers. The teacher says, “Pop Quiz: list 5 things you did last week” and the workers who are drawn as kids at their desk cry “This is harassment! We’re being bullied!”

I responded in text that I found nothing humorous in people losing their jobs, being threatened, and treated without dignity. I was thinking of the real people hurting in my life. She was thinking of conservative news sound bites pedaled by TV pundits. She responded to my text with “Don’t lose your sense of humor. Laughing helps.” I shot back, “Don’t lose your sense of moral decency in willful subservience and blind allegiance to a man.” No response. And so, the chasm between us continues to widen, and we have not talked about politics, or talked very much since.

III. Guilt

When I have exchanges like these with my mother, I feel a shot of adrenaline not unlike the feeling I had when I got an extra ear piercing in high school and successfully hid it from her for over a year. I also feel an extraordinary amount of guilt and sadness that our relationship is not more loving and open. I wish I could talk to my mother about so many things that are important to me — my fears and worries, hopes and dreams, but I cannot. When I hear from friends who have close relationships with their mothers, I feel tinges of jealousy.

I don’t want to be the ungrateful child, the condemning, repulsed teenager, the set-in-her-ways righteous adult. But I’ve been all those things to my mother, because I am one of the rare voices of a different point of view she hears, when and if I choose to use it, when and if she chooses to hear it.

My mother raised my sister and me at home, often alone, since my dad didn’t have that “cushy” government job, but was paid more that he would have anyway for working long hours and traveling a lot as an attorney in NYC — all of which took him away from his family. I have a lot of respect for her staying at home. Being a stay at home mother is hard and often thankless, unseen labor. To some extent, I have followed her example, choosing to stay at home while raising my two kids at least while they are young.

Part of the reason I have chosen this path, a path modeled after her, is because I would rather not pay someone else to raise my children with their values. Of course, in our current moment, it is because of my privilege to be able to choose to stay home. A privilege not without costs, worry, or guilt for me or my family, but a choice I get to make nonetheless.

Parents raise their kids with values like not to cheat, or steal, or lie, to be kind to others, to have manners, to speak up against injustice and bullies. To be clear, I was also raised with these values. When I was about 5 or 6, I stole a 25¢ seahorse from a beach shop while on vacation with my family in Newport, RI. My mother marched me back to the shop, red-faced and blubbing, to return the seahorse and apologize to the owner. I can still remember the owner’s face, somewhat aghast at the scene, at this snotty, teary kid dragged in by her mother, saying “oh no, she can keep it.” But my mother held firm and I learned an important lesson.

These values are sorely lacking by Republicans today, because if they held true to them, they would not be making cuts to social security, Medicaid, food stamps, veteran benefits, and so on. They would not be abandoning our historical allies and forging alliances with despots. They would not be felling trees, rolling back environmental protections to our water supply, insulting women, making fun of the disabled, and generally dehumanizing whole groups of people, immigrants, gay and trans, and so on. More troubling is that there is no indication of remorse or guilt from Republicans on whom they are hurting. As Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnik memorably told an interviewer his 94-year-old mother-law wouldn’t care if her social security check didn’t come, which just shows not only how out of touch he and the administration are with the majority of people who receive social security, but also of how merciless they are. Most children could tell you what they are doing is just plain wrong.

My kids are young, so they have not asked more nuanced questions other than what boils down to “why is Trump so mean?” But I think the simplicity of that question, like so many questions my children ask, is telling. When did meanness become vogue, acceptable, condoned, expected, ignored? When did the bully at the playground (the one who is so weak he needs a squad of others at his side to do his bidding) become the leader of the most economically rich nation of the free world? When did the exceptional become unexceptional in the line of failing democracies overthrown by authoritarianism?

For me, these questions are also personal: when did I begin to lose my mother to Trumpism?

IV. Exceptions

When I scroll back in memory, I’m looking for an exception — an ah that was the moment, that was the critical turn where she was no longer the same person, conservative, yes, but also reasonable and empathetic. In my admittedly fantastical thinking, it seems like if I knew that, then I could mend the damage done to our relationship.

There is one moment I remember vividly. I was applying for college on my dining room table, paper applications laid out. The process was a contentious debate between me and my parents. They insisted I check the Hispanic box, since I could claim Cuban heritage. I protested, “but this isn’t meant for me.” I didn’t have the word for privilege yet, but I didn’t need to. I knew that growing up comfortably upper middle class, I was not the exception this box was meant for. It also felt like a lie. I didn’t speak Spanish and I really didn’t have anything to do with Cuban heritage except for two-week visits to Miami every other summer. I genuinely felt confused by the conflicting values I was receiving. I genuinely felt betrayed by my parents. It was the first time I remember seeing a crack in the foundation of values we shared. Here was a line I would not cross; here was a line they would.

In the end, I checked both Hispanic and White and wrote ½ and ½ in pen. It seemed a compromise and I really didn’t have a choice, but I was left feeling deeply wounded. Their viewpoint seemed to be “everyone else is doing it” which means you should too. My parents have always been against affirmative action unsurprisingly, except when it suited their children to use it to our advantage. It was not a question of right or wrong, good or bad. It was opportunistic.

In the chronicles of immigration to the US, Cuban immigration carries a glaring asterisk next to it as the exception rather than the rule. My mother’s family escaped a Russian-backed communist regime, because they feared they might be killed, or at the very least be impoverished, as the result of Castro’s “agrarian reforms.” These reforms were simply a way to take land away from the wealthy and put them under government control. This was accomplished through force or fear. The push and pull immigration factors at play for my mother’s family are not that different from families escaping impoverishment and violence in other countries, particularly from Central or South America to the US, and from Africa and the Middle East to Europe.

But if I make that comparison to my mother, her response is always, “but we came here legally.” It is a willful declaration of Cuban exceptionalism, of us and them. It casually overlooks the fact that her family arrived on one of the last commercial flights to the US (so not walking thousands of miles through treacherous jungles or floating on an overcrowded dingy in the Mediterranean Sea), that they were given “governments handouts” like the much chagrined black and white canisters of peanut butter Cubans didn’t know what to do with, and, of course, most importantly, that they were given a clear path to citizenship.

It's a story she has told herself about immigrants and it has allowed her to maintain a comfortable and willful distance from seeing people equally deserving of the opportunities she had when she arrived in the US. It’s a story reinforced when she watches Fox News, which at best makes the divide of us and them appear larger, and at worse, vilifies new immigrants as less than human.

I live in one of the most diverse neighborhoods in the country. The idea of deporting or separating families in my neighborhood horrifies me and conjures up the most terrible, disgraceful moments in our country’s history. The US has rounded up groups of people for being un-American, distrustful, diseased, animal, base, and criminal. I think of McCarthyism, Japanese internment camps, forced schools for indigenous children, migrant Mexican farmworkers known as Braceros subjected to eugenics inspection.

I think of my oldest child wondering about the empty desks in her classroom. Why are some of her friends afraid to go to school?

It is possible to love someone whom objectively you would not be friends with. This is something I’ve learned and quite possibly the only person who could have taught me that was my mother. There is not a single moment I can point to that shows how I learned that lesson; it has been my lifetime.

V. Curiosity

I do believe there will be some kind of reckoning, some kind of facing reality to the real pain and suffering caused by MAGA Republicans and my mother’s support of them, but it won’t be coming from me. She likely won’t be able to hear it and I am too sclerotic from my years of trying, though it doesn’t mean I can’t still push the needle a little in favor of love and understanding.

Right now, when my kids ask why is Trump so mean; it won’t be long before they ask why does grandma like someone so mean? They will ask from a genuine place of curiosity with no hope or agenda, no past grievances, or preconceived assumptions. And it will be hard for them to hold that the woman who loves them deeply can also be indifferent or act in ways that support causing pain to others.

They will likely wonder about their grandparents as I have wondered about my own. What was their part as members of the top 1% in creating the divide between the haves and have-nots in Cuba that paved the way for someone like Castro to come to power? I can ask that and still hold that they loved me very much and they suffered when they left everything they’d ever known and would never see again to make a future for their kids and the grandchildren they’d yet to meet.

I will continue to wonder, even if I think I know the answer and even if I never ask, how my mother is viewing this [insert latest horrific thing said or done by the Trump administration] right now. And if I were to stop wondering, I think that would be the true end to our relationship. Because not to be curious, not to pay attention, is not to love.

R.S. Ramirez is a writer living with her family in MD.

“Losing My Mother to Trump” originally appeared on Vox Populi.

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