Mi querida Sanaë

The summer I graduated from college my mother, Akiko, gave me a journal that she had started writing when I was born. It looks like a child’s notebook, a faded blue cover with yellow, green, and red designs, worn at the corners from use. The front is misleading with the word recipes printed in English and French, so when I first opened the book, I thought I’d find a record of her cooking. The entries are mostly in Spanish, the language she grew up speaking in Uruguay and Colombia. Each one begins: “Mi querida Sanaë.” Her tone is descriptive and confessional, and the emotions she kept hidden for so long flow openly in writing. Reading through the journal I discovered that she had stopped writing when I was six but didn’t start again until the spring before I finished college, more than fifteen years later. To make sense of the gap she wrote: “The diary ends here. What happened is that I could no longer write about my life. I was not well. It is very short but through reading it, you can have a little glimpse of me.”

I read the journal quickly and tucked it away as though it were a hot coal. That summer, when she gave me the journal, my mother and I did not get along. We were angry at each other and our family was splitting in half. How to take in the intimacy of her pain when I felt consumed by my own?

Throughout my adolescence I longed for her to notice me, to ask me questions. I would hear other mothers say to their children, and I always felt a pang of hurt, the sense that she didn’t care or perhaps didn’t love me. That my existence bothered her. When I requested her spoiled beyond repair and it was selfish to ask for more.