By Theresa Quinones/Buccico
When conversations are taboo, wounds never heal. Pain is passed down from ancestors along with physical traits; I can hear the echoing of their souls’ cries. To find a home where I could feel at peace, I needed to uncover the past that had been buried with people, some who I’d never met. I needed to discover the family truths that had been tightly wrapped up in secrets and lies. Now my voice, the voice of an opiate orphan, will finally tell the story that heals.
1
I am Theresa, named after the grandmother who raised me from infancy. I will always refer to her as “Ma” and I am forever her “Mija” (“my daughter”), as she called me. Ma filled me up with great memories, like the smell of sofrito when I’m making it as she taught me, and the sound of the songs she played, from Luis Miguel to Bocelli. Although we lived in a basement apartment on Pleasant Street, her love made everything beautiful.
Growing up, I can’t forget the lit-up dumpsters in The Valley at night. The orange light created ghostly shapes that floated to the sky. To others, they were simply dumpster fires. To me, they were the project’s campfire. If you’d seen me playing in Elm Park or dancing on the stage at the Latin festival of Worcester’s Institute Park, you would have seen a happy kid. Until I was eleven, life still had innocence.
2
It only took a four-hour trip to Brooklyn to take away the life I thought was mine. Until that day, I didn’t know the feeling of being less than. Until that car ride, I never realized I was not Ma’s daughter but her granddaughter. This is the story of how I met my biological mother.
Ma is driving the car, and I’m in the back seat. Ma says, “This is my daughter,” when introducing the woman she calls “Gigi.” She has an angelic glow around her. Her white coat trimmed with white fur on the hood is beautiful. When I finally get the courage to engage her, I call out, “Gigi!” Why do I get reprimanded? She looks at me side-eyed, and with an attitude in her tone says, “I’m your mom.” How can this be? I have no memories of her, and yet the feeling in my gut doesn’t dispute the truth. I look at her and see dimples on her face that I know from my own.
By the end of that ride, I had grown closer to the painful truth, but it was a truth that brought no healing. She had abandoned me! And each new experience of my birth mother in my youth increased my anger.
I felt anger when I thought about my baby sister, Jasmine, who was born not long after that car ride. And when Jasmine died at ten months, I felt overwhelmed with pain. I had made my baby sister smile, held her little body, and played with her. I couldn’t understand why she was gone. Now I know she was infected with HIV by my mother at birth. I was in fifth grade. It was my first funeral.
By the time I was fourteen-years old, I was already used to helping Ma clean out apartments after Gigi would disappear again because of drugs. The pain on Ma’s face was unforgettable: that look reminded me it wasn’t only me Gigi was abandoning. When Ma would say with a shaky voice, “Mija, be careful of needles,” I knew she was warning me about something more than getting stabbed while cleaning. But I was never given an explanation. I felt dragged along, cautioned, silenced. But I would always reassure Ma somehow that I understood, making a silent pact that I would not make the same mistakes.
3
By the time I was 17, Ma was aging quickly, and as she declined she began to pass on long-hidden family stories. I was one of seven children born to Gigi, beginning when she was only sixteen. But because she put drugs and alcohol ahead of parenting, Gigi wasn’t there for any of us. Listening, I was able to imagine my infant self, left alone by Gigi to scar both physically and emotionally over hours and days. The scars I still have on my right thigh testify to those infant cries. But I could also picture the joy of Ma bringing me home to Massachusetts on a Greyhound bus in 1981 after a painful call from her daughter. Ma said that it was one of the smelliest rides she ever had, but as I lay still in her arms, we both smiled. “It was meant to be, Mija,” she’d say. Each time she retold that story, she smiled.
I could hear her pride.
But Gigi, too, had been abandoned by a parent struggling with drug use: her dad. And at the age of eleven Ma, too, had been abandoned along with three younger siblings by her mother, Emilia, back in Humacao, Puerto Rico. This multigenerational cycle shaped Ma’s life, Gigi’s life, and my own. Despite all the trauma passed down due to abandonment, alcohol, drugs, and mental illness, Teresa Curbelo was able to raise me with love. And that, too, shapes who I am today.
Gigi died in her early forties. Like her father, she was taken by the early ’80s inner-city tsunami: HIV infection caused by heroin use with needles. I was only twenty-four years old then, and despite my promises to Ma, I had started down my own path of numbing life’s experiences. But my mother’s death was the turning point of my life. I would never use drugs again. In a sense, that was Gigi’s gift to me.
4
Ma’s gift for me was the way she nurtured and loved Gigi, my brother, and me in spite of all that pain. She never gave up on any of her family members. She always prayed and stayed in faith. She taught me it was not my place to take on ancestral pain or behavior patterns. I had the right to rise from the brokenness of the past. She empowered me to live, dream, and love! So I no longer question whose child I am. From the time I was an opiate orphan to the day my flesh becomes one again with the earth, I am and always have been a child of God and Ma’s daughter.
Eventually time, like a thief in the night, carried Ma away. I was 35. Now, although Ma is in her eternal Home in heaven, she carries on with me. Her voice in my heart tells me “Mija, I always go before you, to prepare a place for you, so that you may always feel at home.”
And I carry on her legacy. With my husband I am raising our two daughters. My oldest daughter carries her grandma’s name as her middle name in English translation—Estrella means Star. And my youngest carries her nickname; we call her Gigi.
5
There was a time in my life when I believed my soul was broken. Looking in the mirror, I couldn’t unsee the reflections of Estrella, Teresa, and Emilia in myself. Would history repeat in me? Living past the experience of the women who had come before me would take strategy and strength. Could I do it?
Now, some wounds have healed: I have beautiful scars. Learning and telling the story of intergenerational trauma is the process I’m using to mend my heart and mind, body and soul. These are no longer the lonely cries of an opiate orphan, but instead the song of a woman who stands united in memory with her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, loving them all back to life as Ma did for me.
