Mari Sánchez Cayuso

Tag: Mothers

  • She is Prose

    In one photograph,
    my mother is carrying me.

    In the other
    I am carrying my son.

    Same age.

    Two women
    holding their children
    before life asked them
    to prove
    they could survive
    being left.

    She had me.

    I had him.

    And between us
    something was left open

    not a lesson

    not a punishment

    just the door
    life forgot
    to close gently.

    My mother was six
    when they left her.

    Six.

    A little girl
    in a room
    that was not home

    a bed
    that did not know
    her body

    a hallway
    with no mother
    coming through it.

    People always have reasons.

    Divorce.
    Distance.
    Survival.
    History.
    Fear.

    But children
    do not live
    inside reasons.

    They live inside rooms.

    They listen
    for footsteps.

    They learn the door
    before they learn
    the world.

    And still

    that child
    became my mother.

    The best mother.

    She is prose.

    Not simple.

    Never simple.

    Prose like rice.
    Laundry.
    Hands.
    A forehead checked for fever.
    Call me when you get there.

    Prose like love
    with its sleeves rolled up.

    She was a writer

    but before I knew
    her words on paper

    I knew the language
    she made in the house.

    Food.
    Worry.
    Sacrifice.

    The daily grammar
    of staying.

    She made motherhood
    her full-time work

    until it became
    the pillars
    holding up
    our house.

    Then there I am

    same age

    with my son
    inside my life

    still young enough
    to believe
    being loved
    meant being held.

    And life
    asked me too.

    Not at six.

    Not in a school.

    But in the room
    where a woman
    should never be left

    with a newborn
    and a body
    still open
    from becoming
    a door for life.

    I learned then
    what my mother
    must have known
    too early:

    that something
    can leave the room
    and still live
    in the body.

    But I stayed.

    Not beautifully.

    Not without fear.

    But I stayed.

    And maybe
    that is what passed
    between us.

    Not the eyes.

    Not the mouth.

    The terrible grace
    of becoming
    the place
    a child can return to.

    She answered
    with a house.

    I answered
    with my arms.

    Two women.

    Same age.

    Different photographs.

    Both carrying
    a child
    against the oldest
    kind of fear.

    And still

    nothing in us
    handed the child
    back to the dark.

    She stayed.

    I stayed.

    And maybe
    that is the holiest thing
    a woman can do

    after the door
    has taught her
    its cruelty

    stand there

    with the child
    in her arms

    and refuse
    to become
    another leaving.

  • Sixteen Years

    I keep showing up
    like I have not been emotionally
    dragged behind a moving car

    A dress that says
    I am fine
    in three languages

    A little perfume
    on the neck
    as if I am not allergic
    to everything now

    weather
    men
    dust
    memory
    the small humiliations
    of wanting too much
    from people
    who speak in crumbs

    This is the part
    no one respects enough how much glamour
    is actually discipline

    How many times
    a woman fixes her hair
    while her insides
    are somewhere in the corner
    throwing furniture

    How many times
    she paints herself
    back into a body
    because the world
    still expects her
    to arrive recognizable

    How many times
    she walks into a room
    beautiful
    because collapsing
    would be inconvenient

    There is a reason
    women are tired

    Not delicate tired

    Not take-a-nap tired

    Generational tired

    Bone tired

    Tired from being
    the continuity

    The meal remembered
    The appointment made
    The child answered
    The bill paid
    The birthday saved
    The grief folded
    and put somewhere
    no one would trip over it

    Tired from carrying
    the invisible inventory
    of everyone’s life

    Who needs milk
    Who needs medicine
    Who has a fever
    Who has practice
    Who needs a form signed
    Who has a meeting
    Who is breaking
    Who must not be told
    they are breaking
    because then they will break more

    Tired from holding
    the emotional roof
    over everyone’s head
    while someone asks
    why we seem anxious

    Anxious?

    Of course we are anxious

    We are keeping
    the whole sky
    from falling
    and still expected
    to choose earrings

    This is for the women
    who stayed too long
    because they were trying
    to be fair

    For the women
    who left
    because staying
    was teaching their children
    the wrong definition of love

    For the women
    who are still there
    counting the cost
    in the dark

    For the women
    who never married
    but still know
    what it is
    to mother everyone
    and be mothered by no one

    For the women
    raising sons
    raising daughters
    raising themselves
    between laundry cycles
    and legal papers
    and school mornings
    and grocery lists
    and the quiet storm
    of being the only adult
    who notices everything

    For the years
    we try to make a home
    out of a room
    where no one is helping us
    hold up the walls

    For the child
    that belongs to two people
    but somehow
    becomes one woman’s calendar
    one woman’s body
    one woman’s remembering
    one woman’s exhaustion

    And yes
    we try

    We try until trying
    starts to look like madness

    We try until our tenderness
    becomes a second job

    We try until we are managing
    the child
    the house
    the money
    the meals
    the moods
    the silence
    the resentment
    and the grown man
    who keeps needing instructions
    on how to be grown

    We try until love
    turns into logistics

    Until the marriage
    becomes another room
    we have to clean

    Until the person
    who was supposed to help us
    carry the life
    becomes one more thing
    we have to carry

    And then one day
    the math becomes
    so clean
    it almost feels cruel

    If I am already doing everything alone
    why am I doing it
    with someone beside me
    making it harder?

    That is not bitterness

    That is a woman
    finally telling the truth
    without decorating it first

    The best thing I ever did
    was leave

    I know how that sounds

    A woman is supposed
    to whisper divorce
    like an illness
    like a failure
    like a stain
    she could not get out
    of the good sheets

    But no

    The best thing I ever did
    was get divorced

    I gave myself
    the largest blessing

    I signed my name
    and called it mercy

    I walked out
    of the life
    that kept asking me
    to disappear politely
    and I became
    someone I could finally
    come home to

    Sometimes divorce
    is not the end
    of a family

    Sometimes it is the removal
    of the thing
    that kept the family
    from breathing

    Sometimes a woman leaves
    not because she wants
    to be alone

    but because
    she already is

    And then sixteen years pass

    Sixteen years
    since the paper
    the silence
    the door
    the strange new air

    Sixteen years
    of learning how to sleep
    without listening
    for disappointment
    in another room

    Sixteen years
    of carrying children
    bills
    birthdays
    school forms
    fevers
    holidays
    grief
    and my own name
    back into my own mouth

    The sixteenth year opens
    like a window
    I did not know
    I had survived long enough
    to unlock

    Some days it feels longer

    Some days it feels
    like I just left yesterday
    with my heart in my hands
    and no instructions

    But look

    I made a life

    Not a perfect one

    Mine

    And no
    it was not graceful
    in the beginning

    At first
    he hated my guts

    Let us tell the truth
    without making it prettier
    than it was

    There was bitterness
    There was anger
    There were years
    when the air between us
    had teeth

    That is what happens
    when a life breaks open

    People bleed
    People blame
    People become strangers
    holding the same children
    by opposite hands

    But time
    if it is kind
    or if we are lucky
    or if everyone finally gets tired
    of carrying the old knife
    does something strange

    It does not erase

    It rearranges

    The man who once
    could barely look at me
    now stands beside me
    in photographs
    at graduations
    birthdays
    holidays
    the ceremonies
    our sons keep making
    out of their lives

    We are not friends
    in the small-talk way

    We do not sit around
    chattering
    over coffee
    about the weather
    or what any of it meant

    But we are connected

    We will always be connected

    There are children
    walking around this world
    with both of us
    written into their bones

    That is a cord
    no court can cut

    And sometimes
    there is light
    at the end of the tunnel

    Not for everyone

    But sometimes

    Sometimes the bitterness
    gets old

    Sometimes the anger
    loses its posture

    Sometimes maturity arrives
    late
    limping
    but still arrives

    Sometimes two people
    who could not stay married
    learn how to stand
    in the same room
    for the people
    they made together

    And sometimes
    I look at him now

    happy in another life
    married again
    for almost as long
    as I have been free

    and I think

    God—

    I did the right thing

    Not with hatred

    Not with longing

    Just a clean knowing
    inside my chest

    Because some people
    cannot be alone

    They run from one marriage
    into another
    as if marriage itself
    was the missing piece

    as if the institution
    was the love

    as if a new ring
    could explain
    why the old house
    was burning

    But I did not run

    I stayed with myself

    I did not remarry
    just to prove
    I was still wanted

    I learned the shape
    of my own silence

    I raised my children
    I built my days
    I became the woman
    waiting for me
    on the other side
    of that door

    And now
    when he looks at me
    when his eyes pause
    a little too long
    on the woman I became

    I do not need to know
    what he is thinking

    Mine is this:

    I left

    I lived

    I was right

    I have walked into rooms
    star-studded
    and half-dead

    I have said
    I’m okay
    with such good lighting
    even God almost believed me

    There should be awards
    for this

    Not trophies
    Nothing ugly

    Something small
    Gold
    Sharp

    Something a woman could wear
    near her collarbone
    and not explain

    For the mornings
    we get up anyway

    For the years
    we hold everything together
    with one hand
    and still use the other
    to put on mascara

    Do not ask me
    how I survived it

    I don’t know

    Some days I am all woman
    Some days I am a loose sequin
    hanging on for dear life
    to a dress
    that has seen too much

    Some days I am the dress

    Stretched
    Pulled
    Zipped up over grief

    Still flattering
    from certain angles

    Still dangerous
    in the right light

    I have been loved badly
    and still picked the right shoes

    I have cried
    and then checked my reflection
    because suffering is one thing
    but looking insane in public
    is another

    I have carried ache
    like a clutch purse
    into restaurants
    doctor’s offices
    parking lots
    and conversations
    where everyone pretended
    not to notice
    how much of me
    I was holding together
    with one hand

    And still—

    I shine

    Not because I am happy
    Not because I am healed
    Not because the night
    has been kind to me

    I shine
    because something in me
    is vulgar enough
    to insist

    Because even broken things
    catch light
    when they refuse
    to stay buried

    Because I have never known
    how to disappear quietly

    Because every time grief
    tries to make a home
    inside my mouth
    I put on lipstick
    and speak around it

    Because I am tired
    yes—

    but I am not finished

    There is a difference

    A woman can be exhausted
    and still be holy

    She can be heartbroken
    and still be hilarious

    She can be divorced
    undone
    unanswered
    overstimulated
    and still somehow
    look like the main event
    in a room
    that did not deserve her

    That is not vanity

    That is resurrection
    with better lighting

    That is survival
    with a little shimmer
    because why should pain
    get to be the only thing
    that leaves a mark?

    Look at us

    Still here

    Still dressed

    Still ridiculous

    Still making beauty
    out of whatever
    tried to flatten us

    Still walking in
    like the floor
    owes us applause

    Still star-studded
    with every place
    we almost didn’t survive

  • More Sky in Her

    Trying to grasp their maturity
    is thrilling
    in a way I still cannot understand

    No one tells you this

    They tell you about the leaving
    the empty rooms
    the quiet house
    the laundry becoming smaller
    the food lasting longer
    than it should

    But no one tells you
    what happens after

    How your world
    reconditions itself

    How one day
    you speak to your son
    and hear a man answer back

    How his voice
    carries the weight
    of his brother’s voice too
    and for a second
    you are standing
    inside both of them

    These men
    have surpassed my height

    They are broad now
    Deep-voiced now
    Private now
    Their lives moving
    with a force
    that no longer needs
    my hands

    And still
    they began in me

    That is the part
    that makes me almost dizzy

    They were once
    a flutter
    a hunger
    a foot beneath my ribs
    a name I had not yet learned
    how to call across a room

    Now they stand in the world
    as if gravity
    belongs to them

    And I stand here
    trying to understand
    how something can leave you
    and still make you larger

    How love can grow taller
    than the body
    that carried it

    How a mother
    can be emptied
    and expanded
    at the same time

    No one tells you
    that after they leave
    you do not become less
    of a mother

    You become a mother
    with more sky in her

  • My Mother

    My mother and I share the same blood.

    B Rh-negative.

    The same rare inheritance.

    The same river moving through us.

    The same red history traveling from one body into another.

    She carried me beneath her heart for nine months.

    An entire season of becoming.

    Blood teaching blood how to assemble itself.

    Bone finding bone.

    A spine.

    A mouth.

    Ten fingers opening toward a life neither of us had seen.

    She made my body.

    This is no small thing.

    The original shelter.

    The dark and sacred room where I began.

    But the older I become the more I understand that being born from someone does not guarantee being understood by them.

    The womb creates a body.

    It does not necessarily create recognition.

    My mother and I share the same blood.

    B Rh-negative.

    The same rare inheritance.

    And still, we spent years trying to find a language large enough to hold us both.

    My mother spoke.

    God, how she spoke.

    Stories.

    Worries.

    Grievances.

    Disappointments.

    The thousand daily abrasions of being alive.

    She sat me down and handed me pieces of adulthood long before I was large enough to carry them.

    And because I loved her

    I did.

    I listened.

    I absorbed.

    I learned the weather patterns of another person’s sorrow before I had learned my own.

    I became her witness.

    Her companion.

    Her sounding board.

    The child at the other end of conversations meant for grown women.

    Perhaps that is why language became my native country.

    Why I reach for words the way other people reach for prayer.

    Why I cannot leave a question unanswered.

    A feeling unnamed.

    A loose thread hanging from the hem of a perfectly good life.

    I learned early that everything must be examined.

    Everything discussed.

    Everything understood.

    And I am tired.

    Not of my mother.

    Never of my mother.

    I love her.

    Love has never been the problem.

    The problem is that love and understanding are often mistaken for twins when they are merely neighbors.

    So we spent years waving to one another across a distance neither of us knew how to cross.

    Then there was my father.

    A man who seemed perpetually occupied by some private cosmic adventure.

    A man of so few words that silence gathered around him like a second skin.

    Yet I could sit beside him for an entire afternoon and feel more understood than I did in conversations that lasted years.

    He never asked me to carry his grief.

    Never handed me the weight of his interior life.

    He simply made room for mine.

    And when he died everyone assumed I was grieving a father.

    What I was grieving was recognition.

    The rare miracle of being witnessed without explanation.

    Without performance.

    Without the exhausting labor of translating myself into a language someone else might finally understand.

    Perhaps that is why unfinished things haunt me.

    Why I pull every thread.

    Why I interrogate every silence.

    Why I stand before mysteries demanding they surrender their meaning.

    I spent my childhood holding one end of conversations that never seemed to end.

    Of course I grew into a woman who wants answers.

    Of course I became someone who believes every story deserves a conclusion.

    But lately

    I am beginning to suspect

    that not everything unfinished

    is broken.

    That not every silence is withholding something.

    That some people love us through language.

    And others through presence.

    That understanding sometimes arrives speaking.

    And sometimes arrives and simply sits beside you.

    The same blood does not guarantee recognition.

    The same house does not guarantee understanding.

    And yet—

    love persists.

    My mother and I

    still waving across the distance.

    My father gone and somehow still answering me.

    The child I was

    standing between them

    learning two different dialects of devotion.

    One made of words.

    One made of silence.

    And all these years later

    I am still trying to become fluent in both.

  • Return Address

    I sit here digitally composing words across a screen
    while somewhere far away
    my son’s handwriting still exists on paper

    creased softly at the folds
    forty-five days old already
    by the time it reached my hands

    And nothing about modern life can compete with that

    Not the blue glow of notifications
    Not the speed of a text arriving mid-thought
    Not the endless stream of people speaking
    without ever truly touching one another

    Because ink carries the body with it

    The pressure of his hand
    The pause between sentences
    The places where he pressed harder
    without realizing emotion had entered the page

    I opened the envelope slowly
    like people used to open news from war
    carefully—reverently
    already afraid of loving it too much

    And somehow this letter lifted my spirit
    in ways nothing else has been able to lately

    For one suspended second
    I forgot distance
    Forgot oceans
    Forgot time zones and deployments
    and the unbearable mathematics of missing someone

    I forgot the years moving forward

    I was no longer standing in my kitchen
    holding paper beneath morning light

    I was simply his mother again
    close enough to hear his voice in the next room
    close enough to believe
    love still travels faster than grief

    And I wanted to archive this feeling somehow

    Fold it carefully into a drawer
    Place it beside kindergarten photographs
    old report cards
    little league schedules
    the backpacks I could never throw away

    As if tenderness could be preserved
    like pressed flowers between heavy pages

    As if a mother could save a moment
    before life carried it off again

    Because the terrible thing about joy
    is how quickly it understands
    it cannot stay

    So I stood there quietly
    holding the letter against my chest
    like something alive

    trying to memorize
    the exact shape of being needed
    the exact sound of my spirit returning to me
    through his handwriting

    And for a moment
    this loud technological world disappeared

    No algorithms
    No scrolling
    No noise

    Only a mother standing silently
    holding proof
    that space and time are not always strong enough
    to keep the heart from returning home

  • 45 Days

    My youngest wrote me a letter

    Forty-five days ago
    and I cannot stop thinking about the fact
    that his love had already been traveling toward me
    while I was still living ordinary life unaware of it

    Forty-five days

    Forty-five mornings I woke up not knowing
    a piece of him already existed in the world
    trying to find its way back to me

    Do you understand how devastating that is?

    That while I was awake or asleep
    his handwriting was somewhere moving through darkness

    sealed inside trucks
    resting in forgotten bins
    crossing highways at night

    all because my son sat down one day
    and missed me enough
    to let his hand speak

    And suddenly modern life feels so empty to me

    These instant little messages we fire at each other all day
    without breath in them
    without weight
    without silence

    But a letter

    a letter suffers distance

    It earns arrival

    For forty-five days
    the page carried his touch without mine

    The same hand I once held crossing parking lots
    The same hand that learned how to write its own name
    while I stood nearby believing time moved slowly

    God
    I did not just read his words

    I felt time itself collapse

    And there he was again somehow
    inside the pressure of certain letters

    Forty-five days old already

    By the time I touched the page
    he had already changed a little

    Laughed at things I did not hear
    Walked through evenings I did not see
    Carried worries silently without me beside him

    That is motherhood perhaps . .

    the lifelong ache
    of realizing your children continue becoming people
    in rooms you cannot enter

    Still

    when I saw the word “Mom” written there
    in the same familiar slant he has carried since boyhood

    something inside me broke open so quietly
    I almost mistook it for peace

    Because after all the years
    all the growing
    all the distance
    all the necessary separations life demands from us

    some part of him
    still writes home
    like I am the safest thing he has ever known

  • Archived Love

    I still have the backpacks

    Every one of them

    Kindergarten dinosaurs
    faded superheroes
    broken zippers
    ink stains
    the straps worn thin
    from years of carrying
    small important things

    They sit inside plastic totes now
    stacked quietly in the house
    like sealed chapters
    of a life that happened too fast

    Sometimes I open them

    And suddenly
    the years come rushing back

    little lunch boxes
    crumbs at the bottom
    folded spelling tests
    a forgotten pencil
    the smell of childhood
    still hiding faintly in the fabric
    like time never fully left

    People say:
    why keep all of that?

    But mothers understand

    Because those backpacks
    once moved through this house
    attached to small boys
    with untied shoes
    sticky hands
    and entire universes
    still tucked inside their laughter

    I carried them through
    field trips
    divorce
    growing pains
    late-night homework
    broken hearts
    and all the ordinary holy moments
    that disappear before you realize
    they are becoming memory

    Now the house is quieter

    The backpacks do not move anymore
    But when I see them
    I remember this truth

    for a little while
    I was the center
    of somebody’s whole world

    And maybe that is why
    I cannot throw them away

    Because inside those faded bags
    lives proof
    that love once ran wildly
    through these rooms
    calling me Mom

  • Wooden Box

    If I could
    I would place every fear I have for my sons
    inside a small wooden box
    and leave it out in the yard

    I think about that box often

    I imagine it sitting there alone beneath the weather
    the grass growing slowly around it
    rainwater darkening the wood
    August heat opening tiny cracks along the lid

    A plain little box
    holding all the unbearable parts of motherhood

    At first
    the box would have held small things

    Fevers in the middle of the night
    Tiny shoes by the door
    The sound of them crying from another room
    The terrible helplessness of hearing your child cough
    while the whole dark house waits with you

    Back then
    I thought motherhood was about protecting

    I did not yet understand
    that motherhood is mostly about enduring

    ‘Motherhood’

    So the years passed
    and the box grew heavier

    Into it went first heartbreaks
    Late-night drives
    Silences
    The fear that arrives when your children begin
    walking further and further away from your arms

    And now my sons are men

    Men in uniform
    Men standing inside realities
    I cannot soften for them

    ‘Motherhood’

    So now the box holds oceans

    It holds unanswered messages
    It holds the terrible imagination of mothers
    It holds the sound of a phone not ringing
    It holds every silent prayer
    I have whispered into the light

    If I could
    I would leave the box outside forever

    ‘Motherhood’

    I would let rain kneel over it through the night
    Let thunder shake it open
    Let wind carry pieces of my fear away
    through the trees

    I would let winter freeze it stiff
    Let summer split the wood apart slowly
    until the earth itself
    began carrying some of the weight for me

    Because I am tired
    of carrying the box inside my body

    Tired of setting it beside my coffee each morning
    Tired of carrying it room to room invisibly
    while the world continues normally around me

    And still
    when I close my eyes
    the box becomes lighter again

    Inside it

    I find warm little hands clenched in mine
    Their laughter moving through the hallway

    Maybe that is the true shape of motherhood

    a small wooden box
    filled first with tenderness
    then with fear
    then with all the love in the world
    a human being can no longer survive carrying alone