Mothers & Daughters - Rilegato

Ada Balmaseda and her daughters, Elaine Alatriste and Liz Balmaseda

Ada, mamacita, rest a minute.  Bastante with the rice and beans, the cooking, the cleaning and the cha-cha-cha.  Put away that ticket for your favorite gambling-day cruise to the Bahamas.  Listen while your daughters tell of a hardworking, joyous woman who, in her simple way, is the gravitational force that holds the family together.

Can you do that, Ada?  Or would it be impossible for you to take instead of give?

Ada Balmaseda comes from a family which, in typical Cuban fashion, is dominated by women.  "My mother has five sisters and one brother," her eldest daughter, Liz, explains, "and the women are almost Amazonian in their strength.  If you are a Cuban mother, you want to have daughters, because the perception is that girls will take care of you when they grow up.  Boys won't."

"Oh, for sure," Ada agrees.  While she also has a son, she's quite open about her preference.  "For myself, I love the two girls."

In Ada's vocabulary, the synonyms for "love" are "protect" and "provide."

"It was hard when they were growing up," she remembers.  "Very hard."

But there was nothing deprived about their life.  Their house pulsated with bright colors and boisterous fun instigated by Ada, as she bustled around the kitchen, laughing, singing and swinging her hips as she stirred the pots.  "Mom is a real party animal," says Elaine, the younger daughter.  "She'd always be egging on the cousins to dress up like drag queens."

"She was a nightmare," Liz giggles.

And although Ada couldn't help her girls with their homework because she never mastered English, she made sure they did it.  And did it right!  She scrupulously attended every open house at school and even volunteered as a teacher's assistant.  Later, to scrape up money for their tuition at a private Catholic school, Ada bought a minibus and started a business driving other girls to school, along with her own.  "I didn't like them to walk," she says, ever practical.

"My mother was always persistent with us," Elaine says, "making sure we were the best we could be.  She never let us slack off.  Whatever we wanted to do, she would find a way to open that door.  She even made all our clothes.  It was a ritual to go to the fabric store with her, pick the pattern, pick the material.  We always had to be chaperoned at dances and she would volunteer. Nobody ever minded, because she was the most fun mom to take."

She still is--only now she gets to go as a guest because Liz, a popular columnist for the Miami Herald, is on the A list for all kinds of celebrity bashes.  "I love to take Mom to parties," Liz says, "because she has such a blast.  She brings her camera and takes pictures of everybody.

"More than anything else," Liz rolls on, "my mother has taught me to be honest and genuine.  To be myself.  The first time I went back to my hometown in Cuba and I saw this place with unpaved roads where bathing meant dipping in a fruit can filled with water, I understood this is who I am.  This is where I come from.

"My mother embodies the Cuban heritage of that little town and the essence of being down-to-earth.  She never pretends to be who she isn't.  She once slapped Gloria Estefan's butt in my kitchen.  'Ay! Ay! Gloria, you eat,' she hollered, and, bang, she smacked her butt like Gloria was one of the chicks she drove to school.  Mom is my everyday reminder of how simple life is."

Liz and Ada and Elaine talk to each other several times a day.  Ada has never been much on discussing her feelings, and while growing up, the girls confided more in each other than in her.  "I was too busy in the kitchen to be their friend," Ada says.  "That's the one thing I would do different.  Be more their friend."

In her fifty-fourth year, Ada was diagnosed with breast cancer.  "It was the darkest day ever in my life," Liz says starkly.  "I thought cancer meant death. After the surgery she came to live with me for a while.  The wound got infected.  I would bathe her and everything.  I was just numb."

Yet Ada never lost her optimism.  She put her faith in her doctors and simply believed she'd be cured.  "I had no education what cancer was," she says.  "I felt when they took off the bad breast, that was the end of it.  The cancer was gone.  I never thought it would continue."

She drove herself to her radiation treatments and then went on to her job in a printing factory.  "I felt better doing that.  I didn't want to go home to think," she says.  By the time the treatments ended, she had returned to cruising to the Bahama casinos again and living like nothing had ever happened to her.

If you talk to Ada today about cancer, she'll only tell you that she's too busy worrying about Elaine to think about herself.  That's because five years after Ada's mastectomy, breast cancer revisited the family and struck Elaine.  Ada feels it was her fault, that she somehow gave it to her.  Elaine was thirty-two, married with two little girls, aged one and three.  But when she became ill, it was obvious that she was still and forever her mother's child.

"We put our house up for rent and moved into an apartment in Mom's building. She took care of my kids and made all our meals.  She still does.  I was so sick from the chemo that I couldn't bring myself to open the refrigerator.  I never thought twice about who would help me.  I knew my mom would.  She's my mom.  And she was also my inspiration.  Seeing her so well five years after her treatment gave me hope.  If she could do it, I knew I could."

Elaine holds an activist attitude that as long as she does everything medically necessary, she'll lick the cancer and be fine.  She is pregnant again, awaiting the birth of a son.  Yet in an all too familiar refrain she says, "It's my mother I worry about.  Every day I'm still helping her get through my ordeal. She's always in a panic worrying about me.  In the last few years, we have developed so much in common.  Sharing breast cancer and becoming a mother myself has helped me understand my mother a lot better.  I'm living her life, caring for my children like she did for us.  And it's a good life.  I hope I can have as much fun at sixty as she does.

"It's funny.  When she went through her cancer, I never thought of her dying. I knew she'd pull through.  But when I got sick, I actually came to the realization that I wanted to go first.  It would be much harder for me if she wasn't here.  I don't know if I could survive without her."

Liz feels pretty much the same way.  "My mom helped me survive my divorce," she insists.  "I was so afraid to tell my family.  I was so sure I'd get the typical Cuban line, how the streets are hard; don't let him go.  But my mother shocked me.  She said, 'That s.o.b.  You deserve better.  You don't have to take his crap.'"

Both sisters admit that their mother still thinks they are her little girls.

"Sometimes that's completely comforting," Liz says.

"And sometimes it feels controlling," Elaine adds.  "When I was going through chemo and all my surgery I needed someone to control my life and I was glad Mom was there.  Now she has a problem backing off, so I just blow up and tell her, and usually she listens.  Still, of all the mothers I know, I wouldn't have traded this one for any of them."

Nor would Liz.

In 1993, when she won a Pulitzer Prize for her newspaper columns, the invitation to the awards luncheon in New York included one guest.  "There were only two people I could take: my mom or my then husband.  And I said this honor is for me; it's not part of my marriage, and I want the memory to always be mine.  In my heart the only honest thing was to take my mother because she'd be in my life forever.  She won't fly, so we went by train from Miami, and it took forever.  I wanted to make it a nice trip for her, so I got a suite at a lovely hotel and we stayed a week.  I kept wanting to take her to Fifth Avenue to shop, and she only wanted to go to Chinatown and buy designer knockoffs.

"The luncheon was one of the greatest days of my life.  There's my mom, a factory worker, sitting at this major table with all these glittery figures and she was so proud, even though she was embarrassed she didn't speak much English.  It was right to have her with me.  It wasn't just to say thank you. It was to acknowledge that I wouldn't have been there, I wouldn't have won a Pulitzer, if she hadn't put all that effort into me for all those years."

Some might say the Balmasedas' relationship needs more air.  They would argue that their closeness is the oxygen that sustains their lives.

When Carol Saline and Sharon J. Wohlmuth created Sisters in 1994, they took America by storm, captivating countless readers with their poignant exploration of sisterhood.  In this beautiful new volume, they turn their empathy and perception to a territory perhaps even more intimate--the intense connection shared by mothers and daughters.

The profoundly personal experiences of the women portrayed in these original essays and photographs illuminate a relationship that is awe-inspiring in its power and depth.  Some of these women are well known: Cindy Crawford, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Margaret Atwood, and Jamie Lee Curtis all speak of their own relationships in these pages.  There is also wisdom to be found in the words of a ninety-six-year-old great-grandmother with her nine daughters; a mother and daughter who have fled the war in Bosnia for an uncertain future in New York; and a woman who received a kidney transplant as a last gift from her dying mother.  Whether the speakers are famous or not, their stories and portraits express universal feelings of tenderness, pride, and a love so fierce that it is sometimes painful.  Mothers and Daughters is a stunning and evocative tribute to this unbreakable bond.