A Dream Called Home

by Reyna Grande

  “Give it your best effort,” I would tell my students during class. “Take pride in your work. Your future depends on your education! Education is everything!” I sounded like my father, and I wished he was here to help me convince these kids how important it was to think about their future.

  “We don’t need to work hard,” my students would say, shaking their head at my enthusiasm and overzealousness. “All we need is a D in your class to go to high school, don’t you know?”

  They looked away from me and went back to their apathy and mischief. Because of the district’s low expectations, the students, quick to take advantage of the situation, gave up on good grades the moment they entered eighth grade.

  My half brother, Leo, became a victim of these policies. Making his way through school getting the required Ds in math and English had set him up for failure. When he got to high school, he couldn’t handle the course work and dropped out. Unlike Betty, he never went back.

  My students’ apathy was one thing. Rudeness and disrespect were something else. There were some who completely crossed the line, and when I would call the parents, many wouldn’t return my calls. I remembered Ms. Hoang’s advice to pay home visits, unannounced. So I started showing up at the homes of my worst troublemakers to ask for parental support. “I can’t take it anymore,” one father said upon hearing my report that his son had taken scissors and cut up all the headphones in my listening center. “Can you help me? Do you know of a place that I could call so they can take him off my hands?”

  I sat there thinking, I came to ask you for help and now you’re the one asking me to help you get rid of your son? I felt helpless seeing this father so desperate. I didn’t know what to tell him. I didn’t know the details of their lives, of what had led to this, and I felt incapable of giving advice. I thought of my mother and the trouble she had had with Betty. Though it was true that Betty had behavior problems, I thought it had been a reaction to the lack of love and support she had at home. But what could explain her behavior when I took her to live with me, when all I did was to love and support her? She once said to me, It isn’t that easy to start somewhere new with the old you still inside you. Though habits are hard to break, and although it took some time, Betty did break free of her past, found her way, and managed to take control of her life.

  I wished I better understood the dynamics between parents and children. I was unable to offer comfort to this man. “Don’t give up on your son” was all I could say. “He needs you to be strong and to have faith in him. He’s trying to figure out who he is.”

  He nodded and said, “Sí, está bien, maestra. Gracias.”

  Another day, I asked a girl to throw away her gum.

  “That’s a stupid rule,” she said. She blew the huge wad of gum in her mouth into a pink bubble, then burst it with a loud pop. The students erupted in laughter.

  “I’m sorry you disagree with the class rules, but you need to follow them,” I said, pointing to the trash can by my desk.

  She walked up to the trash can, spat the gum out, and looked at me and said, “You’re such a bitch.”

  I sent her to the office, and when class was over, I called her father to schedule a meeting after school the following day to discuss his daughter’s behavior.

  Instead, he barged into my room the following morning during first period. He hadn’t checked in at the main office as visitors were required to do. He came directly to my classroom to yell at me in front of my students.

  “It’s your fault my daughter said what she said. She was just defending herself. She told me that you’re constantly punishing her for every little thing she does. She’s not the problem. You are. I’m going to go to the principal and request a better teacher for my daughter.”

  I was so shocked I couldn’t get any words out to defend myself. He stormed out of the room, and I stood in my classroom while my students looked at me, witnesses to my humiliation. I was about to burst into tears, right there in front of them. Thankfully, the bell rang and they jumped from their seats and rushed out of my classroom, leaving me alone with my shame.

  That night, I woke up soaked in sweat, my heart racing. I’d had a nightmare where I found myself running from a huge wave, but no matter how fast I ran, I was overtaken by a deep, watery darkness, a bottomless void from which I couldn’t escape. I felt an incredible despair wash over me, drowning me, squeezing the last of my breath, my hope.

  I sat in bed, the moonlight streaming through the window, the scent of jasmine drifting in from the patio outside. I understood that this dream was a sign. I was treading water, and I needed to do whatever it took to keep from drowning. The truth was, I was running out of strength.

  How did my life come to this? I wondered. Being a middle school teacher wasn’t my dream, and the longer I stayed, the more it became my nightmare. I opened my desk drawer where I had stored my unfinished novel. It had been almost three years since I had touched it. I took out the pages and leafed through them, thinking of that other me who had once loved to write. Since I was thirteen, writing had been my lifeline. It had been the thing I would cling to when I felt most helpless. It had once been my dream, but I had betrayed it. I had turned my back on it and lost my way.

  Now I was twenty-six years old, and I could already feel the years I had lived, the choices I had made or not made, weighing me down, suffocating me, making me feel old and tired. I closed my eyes, thinking of the dream that had carried me through college, the dream of being a writer. Had I let it die by failing to nurture it? I reached into myself, searching for my dream in the deepest recess of my soul, until I found its heartbeat, slow and faint.

  Sensing my distress, Nathan woke up whimpering. I picked him up from his crib and sat on the rocking chair to soothe him.

  “Once upon a time,” I told Nathan as he sucked his thumb and soothed himself back to sleep, “there was a little immigrant girl with a big dream, but then she lost her way . . .”

  Nathan started screaming, as if in protest. “You don’t like that story?” I asked him. “Well, neither do I.”

  I looked at my son’s face, his eyes half-closed, his little mouth in an “O” as he lost his grip on his thumb. I wished I knew what the future held for him. What kind of human being would he grow up to be? What kind of dreams would he have? Then I realized that I could never encourage my son to pursue his dreams if I hadn’t done so myself. When Nathan was older, how could I dare look him in the face and tell him to believe in his dreams, to work hard for them and never let them go, if I had let mine die simply because adulthood had turned out to be too hard? No, my dream was still alive. Barely, but it was alive. It wasn’t too late for me. For us.

  “I don’t like this story, Nathan,” I said. “Let’s write a new one.”

  I called Diana the next day and told her about the humiliating experience in my classroom, my disillusionment at knowing that even though I had tried so hard to do my best, I felt like a failure. She said, “Reynita, you need to transfer to adult school. The difference is like night and day. Middle school is not for you. Plus, all the responsibilities and stress have really impacted your writing. You can’t let that happen. Listen to me, you’ll love adult education.”

  Diana and Reyna

  Before she began teaching at PCC, Diana had spent several years at an adult school teaching immigrants. “I loved that job,” she said. “My students were the most committed students I’ve ever had. The difference is that they’re responsible adults and want to be there. And there are no papers to grade, so you’ll have time to write. Reynita, you need to think about yourself and your baby. If you don’t take the steps to change the situation you’re in, you’ll always be stuck there. Don’t lose sight of your writing.”

  Following Diana’s advice, I looked into an accelerated teacher credentialing program. It was urgent that I swap my emergency credential for a real one. In a year, once I had a clear credential, I could transfer to the local adult school.

  I also looke
d up writing classes and stumbled upon the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program. They offered ten-week courses and weekend classes. Since I hadn’t written anything in three years, I decided to start slowly. I registered for a weekend class called Finding Your Unique Voice, taught by María Amparo Escandón, author of Esperanza’s Box of Saints. I had never taken a class with a Mexican writer, and that added to my enthusiasm.

  “Why are you doing this?” Mago asked me when I told her of going back to school. “You have a child. You can’t be taking classes. You’re a mother now. You need to take care of him. Be with him.”

  “I’m doing this for both of us.”

  “How much time are you going to have left for Nathan between work and school?” she asked. And though we were on the phone, I could feel her judging eyes shooting daggers at me.

  “Not much,” I admitted. Her question made my guilt return. Since I worked full-time, I left Nathan with a babysitter from 6:45 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., while I was at work. And now with me taking credentialing classes, I wouldn’t be home until ten three nights a week, and my weekends would be spent at my writing classes. But if I didn’t do this while he was a baby, it would be much harder when he was older. When is the right time for me to reclaim my dreams? I wanted to ask Mago. When he’s all grown up and gone? I didn’t think I could survive those long years of waiting, yearning to piece together my broken dreams. What kind of archer’s bow would I be for Nathan if I was hollow and rotten on the inside?

  When Mago and I hung up, I thought about how being a mother had turned out to be the hardest thing I had ever done. When I became a teacher, at least I had one week of training. When I was discharged from the hospital, Mago had rolled me out in a wheelchair with my bundle of joy in my arms and a diaper bag full of fear and self-doubt on my lap. She returned to her life and her kids, and left me to figure things out on my own.

  I couldn’t turn to my mother for support or guidance. My sister-in-law was the woman I admired most when it came to child rearing. I found it ironic that a teenage mom would be my role model, but Norma had an uncanny understanding of the complexities of motherhood. She also had something that I was struggling with—unlike me, she had no doubt that her children should always come first, and she accepted and embraced motherhood as her first and only duty. To Norma, her children were her dreams. Every time I encouraged her to return to school, get her GED, and pursue a career, she would say, “Not right now, my children need me.”

  When I taught Beginning ESL, I had ordered picture books for my students because even though they were middle schoolers, they couldn’t read English well enough to handle chapter books. One of the books that came highly recommended to me from other teachers was called The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein.

  As I was putting my new books on the shelves, I sat down to read the book, and it left me with an awful taste in my mouth. The story was about an apple tree that plays with a little boy, and he loves her and she loves him and life is perfect. Then the boy becomes a young man and he doesn’t want to play anymore. First, he wants money, then a house for his family, then he wants to run away from his problems. The tree gives him her apples, her branches, even her trunk, but it never makes him happy. Years later he returns as an old man—just as miserable as always—and the tree is nothing but a stump with nothing left to give of herself. He says, “I don’t need anything. Just a place to sit.” So, she offers him her stump to sit on.

  When I finished reading the story, I wanted to hurl it out the window and never let my students read it—especially my girls. I refused to believe that to be a good mother I would have to give and sacrifice all until what remained of me was only a dead stump.

  So I made my decision. I would go back to school because loving my child didn’t mean I had to destroy myself.

  27

  Reyna and María Amparo

  “WHAT IS VOICE?” my new writing teacher asked as we reviewed the course goals for her weekend workshop. “Your voice is the unique way in which you communicate with yourself and with the outside world. It is your spoken and written fingerprint. Hundreds of variables determine your voice from the moment you are conceived. No one in the world communicates the way you do, and what makes your voice unique is that your life’s experience is unique.”

  This was the first time I’d considered that my experiences might be things to celebrate, rather than be ashamed of. Was it possible that everything I had gone through had shaped me into a unique individual with a unique voice?

  María Amparo turned out to be a generous teacher, and our shared country, culture, and heritage made me feel connected to her. Though we had been born into two different social classes—she into upper-class Mexican society, and me, well, let’s just say that had my father never brought me to the U.S., I could have been María Amparo’s maid—we were both here in a city far away from our homeland, Mexican transplants united through our love of books and words.

  In her class we explored the goal of honing our writer’s voice. “So, if all writers have a distinct, identifiable voice, why is it so complicated to find our own?” she asked. “Our voice as writers is our own truth. It is the well we all have inside filled with all the moments of our lives. Oftentimes it is a scary place. We are afraid to dip our bucket into the dark waters of that well because painful memories will come out. It is our own fears that don’t allow our true voice to emerge.”

  During breaks, María Amparo sought me out and we talked about Mexico. She was from Veracruz, the eastern state that borders the Gulf of Mexico. It has one of the most beautiful dance and music traditions, one that reflects its European, indigenous, and African roots. My favorite Mexican actress, Salma Hayek, is also from there.

  “Have you ever been to Veracruz?” María Amparo asked.

  I was embarrassed to admit to her that I didn’t know Mexico well.

  “Well, I’ve only passed through your hometown on my way to Acapulco, so I don’t know that part of Mexico, either,” she said. “But maybe one day you’ll have the opportunity to visit my state.”

  “I do love the dances,” I said. “And the sones jarochos!” One of my dance fantasies had been to perform the dances of Veracruz and get to wear the exquisite costume made of yards of white organza and lace, which, when held in a dancer’s hands, looked like sea foam.

  To my delight, the excerpts María Amparo shared with us were from Latino authors whose work I knew well, and celebrating those authors’ unique voices made this class even more meaningful to me: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez; the little gem of a story, “Salvador Late or Early,” by Sandra Cisneros; and Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo, the Mexican author whose work Marta, my Spanish teacher, had compared my writing to. His novel was about a man who travels to his dead mother’s hometown to find his father, whom he has never met. He discovers that his father passed away years ago, and the town turns out to be a literal ghost town populated by the spirits of its dead inhabitants. The themes of the book—hope and despair—were themes I knew well from my own life.

  María Amparo assigned us a writing exercise which was straightforward and yet difficult to execute. She wrote on the board: Write as if your parents were dead.

  One of my greatest fears as a child was that my parents would die while they were in the U.S. Through the years I had often asked myself: What would my life have been like if my father had died and never come back for me? Death is the border we can only cross once.

  I knew this was a question I needed to explore in the writing exercise. Yet, after almost three years of not writing, I approached the exercise with insecurity. What if I had forgotten how to write? My fear then led me away from the task at hand and I started to think of other things. Was Nathan okay? Did he miss me? Was the sitter paying enough attention to him? Was Mago right? Was I a bad mother for being in class instead of with my child? Should I call the sitter and check on Nathan?

  María Amparo looked my way, and I was embarrassed that while everyone had quickly p
ut pen to paper or was typing away on a laptop, I was staring blankly into space, on the verge of a mini nervous breakdown. She smiled at me encouragingly, and with a deep breath, I opened my laptop. Focus and write, I told myself. Just do it. As soon as I touched my fingers to my keyboard, it all came back.

  Class was over too quickly. María Amparo had helped me reclaim and celebrate my voice. When she dismissed us, I felt a renewed sense of excitement for my unfinished novel. Now I knew I had made the right choice.

  I thanked María Amparo for the class, and just as I was leaving she said, “Reyna, have you ever heard of Emerging Voices?” I shook my head, and she continued. “It’s a mentorship program offered through PEN Center USA for writers of color. You should apply. I’m one of the mentors.”

  She explained that Emerging Voices was a seven-month program that would open the doors to the literary community, not only in Los Angeles but also nationally. The chosen participants, or fellows as they were called, met to discuss their work with each other and with a master teacher. They each got their own mentor, received free classes at UCLA Extension, and met with published authors, editors, and agents to discuss craft and publishing tips.

  It sounded exactly like what I was looking for—a writing community. María Amparo was the only writer I had met in Los Angeles. If I got accepted into Emerging Voices, that meant I would no longer feel alone and isolated in my writing journey.

  “The only problem is,” María Amparo said with a worried look, “the deadline is this Friday, which means you have five days to put together your application packet.”

  “That’s going to be hard,” I said. “But I have nothing to lose, right?”

  She smiled at my enthusiasm and wished me luck. “I hope you get in,” she said, giving me a hug, and we said “Hasta luego,” not “Adiós,” because we both hoped that our paths would cross again soon.