Día de La Madre

Although it’s a little bit late, FELIZ DÍA DE LA MADRE (especially to my wonderful mother, Debbie, and my wonderful future mother-in-law, Eleanor)! Although this post is fairly late for Mother’s Day in the states (which was last Sunday), it’s only un poquito tarde for Día de la madre as it is celebrated in Guatemala – always on May 10th. On Tuesday I went up to the head of Básico’s office to drop off some papers and in return was handed an invitation to a Mother’s Day luncheon. I turned to Profe Francisco and said, “Thank you Profe, but I’m not a mother.” “That’s ok,” he said, “it’s for all the mothers – current and future!” How do you respond to that?

I was convinced that this was one of those oh-so-common Guatemalan meetings that I should just bail on. Believe me – there are a lot of them (the excuses: 1. Oh sorry I missed that meeting, I didn’t really understand what you were saying – my Spanish isn’t so good! And 2. I didn’t know that meeting included me... and 3. We had a meeting? Oh, I’m sorry, I never got that message….) have become kind of common phrases since moving to Guatemala…). Regardless, after receiving the invitation I immediately went and told Molly exactly how lame/weird this meeting would be. Her response? “Dude. We’re totally going – it’s gunna be awesome.” Recently, basically since becoming beyond homesick, I’ve been realizing how negative I’ve been about everything, and I decided she was right. Not only were we going – we were going to ENJOY IT gosh darn it!

At 1 pm Molly and I walked to the library. Oddly enough, being 15 minutes late, we were STILL the first ones to the library. Shocking. We sat down at a table and were soon accompanied by Julissa and Francis, two sisters who are both doing their year of service and who are insanely awesome (and also non-moms). The library was soon filled with the women from the school who were all seated and then served by the men of the school (taquitos and homemade Danishes – yum!) Ok, so the lunch was worth it…kind of.

After receiving our hand delivered lunch we were all given interesting cards. I use “interesting” because I don’t really know how else to describe them…so just have a look…

The card that all the women were presented with…

Sometimes it baffles me how “alright” people are with breastfeeding in this country. Show your knees in a dress? HECK NO! Show a little bit of cleavage? I THINK NOT! Pop out your breast to feed your babies? WHY NOT?? Regardless, it was hard to believe that they actually PRINTED it and put it on a card. Wow. And I’m not even a mom…que suerte!

After receiving our tacos, Danish, and cards, there were then presentations on mothers which included: 2 youtube videos (one actually showing a mom birthing a baby with the caption “thank you for suffering through birth for me…”), one of the teacher’s singing 2 heartfelt songs (sounding like a bad ‘80’s karaoke singer complete with closed eyes, clenched fists and all!), and an “interpretive performance” by a new teacher at the school in which he acted as a child whose mother had just passed away….it was moving…it was…hard to keep a straight face… In fact, it was hard to keep a straight face throughout ANY of it – including when some of the mothers were asked to tell funny anecdotes about their children and started talking about inappropriate topics….awkward! SO awkward!

I don’t really think this blog post could EVER do our Mother’s Day here at NPH justice – I wish I could convey all the emotions we felt during that meeting to you...but I just don’t think it’s possible… Instead, I will just say, it makes me appreciate the *subtle* way that we celebrate in the states: with flowers and cards and dinners. So to all the wonderful mothers (past, present, and future!) I wish you a (belated) Happy Mother’s Day!