Like Son by Felicia Luna Lemus Read Free Book Online Page B

Mexican-American woman ever to graduate from Yale Medical School. Class of ’75. And she didn’t just graduate, she graduated with honors and acceptance to one of the most prestigious surgery residencies in the country. My mother was an academic and medical genius. She even had impeccable bedside manner. Eventually, she found her true calling and became a sought-after plastic surgeon. And through it all, she was beautiful with big dark brown eyes, a thick mane of shining black hair, and a quick smile. She was the perfect poster girl for a model minority against-all-odds success story.
    Granted, it was truly remarkable that she made it to Yale in an era when civil rights and feminism were considered new-fangled nuisances by much of the country. And yes, it was equally impressive that patients traveled from places as far as Portugal to receive her care. But thing was, the poor-little-brown-girl-made-adoring-career-mother role she played in public was a complicated mess of half-truths and dysfunction.
    There’s no good way to begin explaining. So let’s just start with this:
    Even though I hadn’t stepped foot in her house for five years, I could assure you with absolute certainty that the kitchen cabinets and drawers of her multimillion-dollar home burst forth with a combination of the finest china, crystal, and silver … alongside precariously tall stacks of Taco Bell giveaway plastic cups, rubber-banded bundles of broken ballpoint pens, piles of junk-mail envelopes saved to be used as note paper, at least five American Society of Plastic Surgeons coffee mugs, a Botox Cosmetic wine opener, and a seemingly endless supply of Pfizer Post-it notes.
    And:
    Although my mother’s closets were filled with a couture wardrobe, designer jewelry and shoes, it’d been years since she could fully open the door to the master bedroom without knocking over the leaning piles of trash that literally filled the room wall-to-wall. Her queen-sized bed was covered ceilinghigh with unopened mail, old medical journals, and drab complimentary magazines sent for her office’s waiting room. She slept on a La-Z-Boy recliner in the living room. And she bathed with a washcloth in the front hall bathroom. Why? Because raw sewage seeped up through all the showers in my mother’s house.
    “It’s the septic system. I can’t do anything about it,” she’d said on countless occasions.
    I rather doubted that the other richies in the neighborhood put up with shit flooding their homes. To be fair, I also doubted they’d grown up in as damaged a family as had my mother. But trust me, that knowledge didn’t make it any easier to be her kid. Considering how much my mother’s screwed-up-ness had interfered with my life, it was really tough to empathize. So, while I wished I could have just loved my mother pure and simple, at least I understood that, even though she shone angelically in public, deep down and in the safety of her home, she was a sad mess in exactly all the ways she was raised to be.
    See, my mom came from a long line of sick twisted wealth and seriously perverse notions of love. She grew up in a tight extended family that lived very simply but provided total financial support for life to those who deferred their personal sanity and needs to unfair family rules and expectations. With multiple bank accounts in various names and a net worth reaching into seven digits, the family had more money than they would ever use. Where did all that immigrant barrio dough come from? Mexican Mafia? Drugs? Black market jumping beans?
    Official story held that my mother’s family had pinched hard-scraped pennies until the copper screamed. But please. You don’t get that much money from collecting pennies. Besides, my maternal great-grandparents were Mexicans who had come to the States during the Depression. There weren’t any pennies to pinch back then even if you’d wanted to, especially if you were Mexican, doubly if your marriage was the equivalent