Día de la Madre

Mother’s Day in Guatemala was this past Monday, the tenth of May, and it was a HUGE deal. Lots of schools take the day off, and those that don’t invite all the moms to school and there are snacks and programs and the kids present some kind of craft or something that they’ve been working on for a week. In Mileni’s class, for example, they had been working for two weeks on embroidering dish towels for all the moms. At work, we only had to work until mid-day then we got the rest of the day off.
There are also activities at the church, special dinners, and tons of presents for the moms. The holiday is really about a week long, which is great for moms, but sometimes difficult for those young women who aren’t moms (for whatever reason) in a society that values motherhood as the reason for existence for women.

Monday evening, my mom and all her siblings and their children went over to her parents house to celebrate the holiday. Each family brought something to eat... we had enchiladas, cake, sandwiches, rellenitos (mushed up plantains with beans in the middle and fried), sweet bread, and café con leche. Then at the end of the meal, when everybody was already stuffed, they realized we hadn’t eaten tortillas, so Carmelina (my grandmother) got up to make tortillas so it would actually count as a meal.

It is also the custom on Mother’s Day or on any other special day like birthday, for people to get up and give little speeches to the person of honor. So all the adult children said thank you to Carmelina for being a great mom and for having patience and the kids and grandkids recited poems about mothers that they had been memorizing in school. Then Pedro, the grandfather, got up and said thank you to Carmelina for being a mother to his children, and said something as well to each of his daughters. Then he said to me, “we’re glad you’re with us to share in this holiday, and we hope you feel like you have even more moms and grandmothers now, and ‘nos adelentemos´” which is basically like “and lets’s keep moving forward,” which was a suggestion to keep moving on so I can become a mom soon, too. I just laughed and said I am still a baby and they all laughed too. But many people in the past few days have asked me if I have kids and how old I am. I think people here realize that it’s not so strange in my culture that I’m still unmarried and without kids, but for here, if a woman is 23 and still unmarried she’s probably starting to panick that she’ll never get married. Basically, I’m pretty close to old maid-dom already.