Story – “The Storyteller”

“In the morning when the sunrises my mother, Mia, wakes up and does her morning meditation. She always does this before she goes to work. I always know for a fact that by 6:30 a.m. she will be facing East, towards the sun, her face covered by sunlight. She’ll be in lotus pose legs folded like a Buddha, hands open with her palms facing the ceiling, and both folded neatly the left on top of the right. She always faces East, and she takes in the rays of the sun because they are healing, she says.

Sometimes, in the evening when she does her meditation, I will sit with her for five minutes and then when my legs have had enough, and the fantasies in my head begin to feel real, like I’m getting married to Usher and he writes songs about me, it’s time to go and I slowly get up and leave. My mom says that a person becomes disciplined by taking baby step. You do a small thing every time that becomes a big thing. Later, I will feel a deep warm feeling in my heart that makes me feel that there is nothing to fear and that life is good, beautiful and it makes me want to tell stories.

I watch her now, I have her Maybeline eyeliner in my hands and I will ask her soon to do my eyes, I want them just like Jennifer Lopez, but I know she’ll put up a fight and say that I am too young, thirteen to be exact and she’ll remind me of some time in the past when she was thirteen and she’ll go on and on as the present is the past, as if she’s forgotten what it was to be thirteen. Often, I wonder if in those meditative moments she remembers the past, back then when I was not born yet and she was about my age and thinking of boys?”

From My Daughter’s Eyes and Other Stories -to  read More:

Báez, A. (2007). . Willimantic, CT: Curbstone.

Story behind the story:

In the beginning of the book, Mia’s daughter is wondering about her mother and all of the stories that follow are those secrets the mother does not tell her. The collection ends with Mia’s daughter having the courage to ask for what she needs, so the beginning its Mia’s daughter and at the end it is Mia’s daughter in My Daughter’s Eyes and Other Stories. Mia worries about what will become of her daughter, in what ways will men hurt her, will she disconnect from self, or others, or succeed and thrive in a world that can be harsh to all women, men, LGBTQ+ individuals.

The Sandwich Strategy

I found Curbstone Press in 2002, and submitted to the Marmol Prize for First Fiction by a Latina in 2003, 2004, I made finalist, but I did not win.  Then I read an article in Poets and Writer’s about making a collection of stories interrelated, and since some of the stories were already interrelated, I decided to this and the article spoke of a sandwich technique, so I took the last story, My Daughter’s Eyes and Other Stories, split it in two and the beginning is the beginning of the book, and the end is the end of the book. Here I have Mia’s daughter thinking of her mother and her mother’s past and the stories the mother doesn’t tell her.

This was my first book, as innocent as a child and as tender.

Photo credit: Annecy Baez – created in WordSwag