I am your mother
On how your definition of family can be a construction of oneself (#PoseFX)
“I am your mother”. This phrase has always been such a common place in many films that sometimes it can sound a cliché, but some others new meanings can also be carried through these words that have been said for immemorial ages.
As a gay man they have brought pain, because some unforgettable moments when they were said as an excuse for misunderstanding, mistreatment and even punishing hurt, but also, these words are so powerful they also bring love and are the origin of our own identification as well, especially when you come from a matriarchal low middle class family where women have been the columns on which you stand, the support for everyone around you and the Cartesian origin of most of your values, strengths and weaknesses.
I am not that kind of person that consider that the LGBT+ cause is part of my daily basis life, not because I do not think that it is important but because I dream of a day when being gay will be so important as the colour of my hair or what kind of games I used to play when I was an infant. (My own ideas of this social movement are in themselves a troublesome topic to be visited in another blog feed.) Thus, I try to act as much as I can as if that dream were real although my own ideas of normality has been, and are, challenged by others and myself, with and without intention, countless opportunities. Despite my own efforts to live that dream where being gay does not affect my life so much, I know that it is part of my every move, every decision and word I say.
Other aspects of myself as well define my thoughts and actions but few compete in equal conditions against my sexual orientation, maybe the fact of having been raised in a family with no masculine positive references and the careless mind-heart engraving that brings with it.
This picture from the Boston Public Library represents something alien to me since I never had such old traditional example really around. I had a sister of my paternal grand-mother who used to lived like this. They were far away to my live, like an elevated image of what one could be. Now I know different.
I have always believed that “family” is a complex word for which “simplicity” is not a concept to associate with; even the most desolated loneliness is a family burden. For many people, this is about your own construction as a person more than a given fact attached to the circumstances around your cradle. If this were not true, many people would be even lonelier because we could never build a space of love around us. And sadly, for many it is still only about the environment where you are born and raised.
“I am your mother”, so alien and real sounded those words when Elektra Abundance declaimed them to Blanca Evangelista in the Pose series! They came to me as a new way of family which I had not realized could exist and could not see how deeply their roots reach. A way of family that I have never seen, even having some experience into formal arts where you always end up embracing new people as your chosen family. I realised that what I lived many years ago with Mila Rosa, my teacher of stage expression, and her sister Hebe, could have an even more profound meaning under some circumstances. When you are isolated by everyone that isolation can also be a source of love and art and joy; it can create a nest where to fall safely, a wing under which you can feel sheltered and above all a place where raise your real self.
Is it not true that we create our own families when the lack of blood leaves our heart in desperate need of someone with whom to commune?
Is it not true that we create our own families when the lack of blood leaves our heart in desperate need of someone with whom to commune? That lack of blood affects different streams that feed the same river but each one adds up a different landscape to mould the whole picture. It is also true that, as in nature, when those streams dry out new ones will appear instead. Mila Rosa was an artistic grand-mother and Eli was an emotional sister. None of them are here with me any longer but they are always here too. Their streams are not lost but turned into fresh ponds where I can always return for a time of happiness. The flows can also change their course, exactly as in a slope the water finds new ways and new destinies, especially after a storm or a long drought when the view reveal itself as a new terrain under a different sky. My relationships with Ale, Nati, Ana, Delia or Hebe are not the same now as they used to be but they are precious part of my life and for them there will always be fresh water from my well.
…changing times where people are facing their own suppressed liberties as well as the terrifying task of recognizing, accepting and embracing the liberties of others.
“I am your mother” brought to me many memories and realisations of other’s people lives and condense the fact that we fight or should fight to find our way to break free from our chains. Some people success, some others do not, and because of I see the shell where many are trapped I feel more grateful to those that have inspired me to reach that liberty. I have in my own family some brave examples of self-construction and their success is also an example of how my family have changed over the year by being part of these changing times where people are facing their own suppressed liberties as well as the terrifying task of recognizing, accepting and embracing the liberties of others. Such hard-to-achieve goals mean so much! I see that there is no major happiness that being honest to oneself. I suffer and wishes a better future for those many who their streams never reaches the river of self-authentication or even worse, their rivers have never been nourished from a start, since they are blocked by the dam of fear to oneself or to the distressing and also dangerous society where they have the unavoidable fate to be.
I can say that my stream of self-construction has reached the river, slowly, painfully and many times insecurely. I embrace the feeling of having been so lost that the stream has got blocked, dried or even walked back in many occasions, and it will probably go through those stages in the future all over again. That irregular path departed from my given family and have carved through those chaotic advancing years opening up space for my own constructed families thanks to the generosity of other souls that were, and are, building up their own families too.
At the end, I have forged my own real meaning of “I am your mother”, almost like a basic instinct reveals itself and empowers us at the most distressing times: we are own parents when we start to take conscious decisions about what we want to be and how we want to live, overcoming or at least putting up with many obstacles as best as our efforts make out.
Gratefully, I have a new core, a new center where I feel sheltered but above all and everything, complete.