tortilla

I sit at home. I take care of my house, husband and children. I love metaphors. I am a born-again, Bible-believing Christian. I'm sarcastic. I love peanut butter cookies. I love being in love with my husband and being loved back. 

My two-year-old daughter is taking a nap on a cozy couch as I sit at the desk mumbling here. 28 years old with a useless-to-the-world degree in theology from an unaccredited college. I bring in no money. A paycheck isn't my proof of worthiness to the world. I'm not the best at what I do. Most of my friends are better cooks, and managers of their homes. I'm a mediocre housewife.

My mother was not. She was a single mom who worked a full time job. She drank and partied on the weekends. I'd like to say that she tried her best with the lot she had. I'd like to say that although life was rough, everything turned out fine. I can't. It was painful. It was very painful. Grandma was my after school care. I have wonderful memories of those afternoons. Whether the weather was warm or chilly my brother, cousins and I sat in front of the TV and soaked in our after school cartoons. Grandma would make us lunch. Sometimes it would be chicken noodle soup and bologna sandwiches, sometimes homemade nachos. There in the living room on the crimson carpet we sat inches from the TV hardly blinking while Darkwing Duck fought bad guys, or Lamb Chop and Charlie Horse told knock-knock jokes. Grandma would start making tortillas about that time of day. No matter how loud we set the volume, the sound of her metal rolling pin thudding the counter flattening perfect circles of masa could be heard. Thud. Roll. Thud. Roll. And as we were hypnotized by Raphael's Teenage awesomeness a small wad of masa smacking a face would snap us out of it. Then another. Grandma had started a masa fight. We'd accuse her and she'd deny anything. Her smiling face couldn't hide her guilt. We'd scramble on our knees to find little balls of masa to throw back at her, but as fast as we'd fire, she'd fire right back. I don't think she ever missed a target. Some Friday nights Mom wouldn't come home. She'd go out to bars with who knows who. I'd sit in Grandma's kitchen until the early morning sobbing into her green plastic rotary phone calling every friend in her floral phone book asking if Mom was there. Grandma would come by in her night gown and rub my knee or shoulder and tell me to go to bed. Sometimes I would. She stopped making tortillas years ago. 

I can't make a good tortilla. Not like hers. I graduated 10 years ago. Most of my classmates have smug careers. Some are bloated with beer and aged by long nights in the dark doing things that they're ashamed of. I don't drink on the weekends, or party. I don't have a smug career and neither does my husband. We make just enough to get by. I love my kids the way I wasn't loved. Trump.