Write This Down...

Reasons why I drowned in Angie Cruz's upcoming book 'How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water'

I grew up hearing so many dichos in my Mexican household. Sayings I often get asked to translate because they make their way out of me in my broken Spanglish whenever I get excited trying to communicate a feeling; a state of being. And to me that explains why dichos exist, why they have been passed on from one generation to another - to help us try to explain the unexplainable because ultimately how do you even begin to explain and capture a feeling or a state of being?

Explaining the unexplainable, for me, felt like one of the core themes in How Not To Drown In a Glass of Water by Angie Cruz. Immediately from page one, we are introduced to Cara Romero, our narrator and the main protagonist of the novel.

A novel that feels like Cara Romero is begging the reader to witness her life and understand her actions even when those actions go beyond understanding. You see, Cara Romero is in her mid-50s trying to find a new job. She’s not just trying, she’s desperate - she’s on the verge of losing everything if she doesn’t find a job soon. Through twelve sessions with an assigned job counselor, we learn that she’s already lost so much but she’s still hoping to hold on to the community she’s part of. A community that held and supported her after she fled the Dominican Republic because her ex-husband wanted to kill her.

Life for Cara has not been easy and we learn that so much of that has impacted the way in which she views the world and navigates it. The way in which she parents her son. A son, we learn, she is estranged from. A son she’s put her whole being into raising when mere survival for her, at times, felt impossible.

To say that Cara reminds me of my mother would be an understatement. As she sits unveiling her story to this job counselor page after page, I’m hit with the reality of the things I don’t know about my own mother. All the things she might have endured. Those things that in turn contribute to the very fabric of her being. To the way, she has mothered and raised me.

My mother first found out I was a lesbian when she dug through my room while I was visiting Mexico with family because “something didn’t feel right” to her. She found letters written to me by a girl she thought was just my “friend”. When people ask me how it was coming out, I have no response or reaction because I didn’t “come out” I was “found out”. At that time my mother felt like the worst person in the world to me. Through email exchanges, she told me about all the ways in which I failed her, and how my lesbian lifestyle would lead me to addiction and ultimately death. According to my younger brother, she lay in bed sick afterward for days.

The thing is, I haven’t ever wondered why she assumed or thought the things she said to me. Why when she came to terms with the word “lesbian” it raised a red flag of danger. The only thing I knew then was that from that moment on we became unknown to each other. Whatever bond she had worked all her life to build with me split and I was no longer that baby whose life she thought she could control and mold. All her dreams for my future and life vanished. I didn’t understand her grief then and I still often struggle to understand it.

However, something shifted in me when I sat as a witness to Cara Romero’s life. As she opens up to readers with her struggles. Telling us about how things were when she was growing up and how she feels so utterly overwhelmed by how different things are now. Initially, she leads us to believe she is a reliable narrator, that she is a victim of these terrible things happening around her, like the way her son avoids total contact with her. But as she’s desahogando, relieving herself of the life she has lived we start to understand the ways in which she’s been the own cause of her suffering. The ways in which her inability to change and reflect on the cruelties of her own life, have deeply impacted the relationships around her. Particularly her relationship with her son - Fernando.

There was so much of my own Mother I saw within Cara. Her stubbornness, her toxic positivity, her inability to speak the difficult, and her fears of what others might think. But through the peaks and valleys, we witness in Cara Romero’s telling of her life, I was able to access and understand something I hadn’t before — love is deeply twisted when life is messy but it is always at the core of everything. The difficult reality is that unfortunately for me, love looked like my mother telling me that I was no longer her daughter or that she doesn’t understand what she did wrong in raising me. Love looked like her telling me I always manage to pick the most difficult paths and breaking my heart into a million pieces. I wasn’t able to understand then that she was struggling with her own life to twist love into what she did, instead of what it really should be - true acceptance. She still struggles with it. That is our shared reality but through Cara Romero - I felt able to understand her a little bit more. To sit with this deeply nuanced character in a book opened up a door that I needed to see my own mother and that immediately threw me into a puddle of tears. Tears I didn’t know I needed to shed for the split that lives between us.

We’ve never talked about the past or her initial reaction to me “coming out”. I don’t think that we ever well - maybe she’s told the story to a stranger willing to listen or maybe she hasn’t. What I do know is that the own Cara Romero in my life is still trying and in the same way, I rooted for her in the novel - I’m rooting for my Mama too.

All typos are my own….and there are plenty because I am human so please be kind and patient.