Family issues

THIS I WROTE ABOUT A WEEK AGO BUT HAVEN´T POSTED IT YET. HERE IT IS:

So I’ve been meaning to write in my blog for the past week or so, but the internet here has been very spotty…argh, I took unlimited cell phone minutes and dependable, fast internet for granted in the US and now I miss it like crazy.

Life in my house has been getting interesting and slightly telenovela-like (telenovelas are Latin American soap operas). My host sister’s newborn baby has been making my host mom a nervous wreck. My host mom takes full charge of it, telling Jenny to get the baby ready for a bath because she’s going to bathe it, asking Jenny if she forgot about the fact that she has a baby because Jenny didn’t give it her daily vitamin pill, etc. All this has created a very tense environment. Perhaps it’s scaring away the father of the baby, who I very rarely see.

A few days ago, I heard my host sister Daní crying to her sister on the phone about something and I thought someone had died. It turns out that she was just worried because her mom was having heart problems – a rapid heartbeat despite that her pulse and pressure were normal. This was in addition to a slew of other problems she’s been having, mostly linked to her worrying about this person and that person, even resulting in her having thoughts about death. My friend suggested that she’s depressed, and I do believe he’s right. The woman NEEDS to calm down and stop worrying and making everyone else insane. In the same conversation we had with my host sister, Reina, about how her mom is depressed and should go to the gynecologist to perhaps take hormone pills since she’s menopausal, Reina confessed that she recently broke up with her boyfriend of 3 years. As this was strongly against her parents’ wishes, she received some physical punishment from her father and her mom is freaking out about what other people will say. Apparently if you’ve already had a boyfriend you can’t find another decent man. All of this wasn’t a surprise to me since I’ve known that Reina has wanted to break up with her boyfriend for a while but her parents didn’t let her. Furthermore, a few years ago, she had another love interest, but her parents didn’t let her continue seeing him since that boy was going to be a fisherman, which is a job without a future. What DID put me in shock was her confession that she wanted to escape the house before her father returned from Lima. My friend guessed that she had a new love interest, and I suggested that it was an old love interest. She blushed and looked down. I was intrigued at her bravery and determination in the face of a confining home environment, yet worried at who this bloke is and whether she’d become another abandoned mother. Overall, however, I was decidedly ambivalent, just rooting for her happy future. When I came home, she was absent. In the morning, she was missing. However, nobody looked worried so I asked where she was. Apparently “she’s traveling” and in the city of Talará, which I know from word-of-mouth, is not exactly a city anybody vacations to. My guess is that since she was asking her mother to visit her aunt in the big city of Chiclayo south of here, they settled on a compromise and Reina went to visit her Envangelical aunt. I don’t know where her new man fits into the picture, but I’m glad she got a bit of breathing space.

And THEN today Jenny started to have pains in her stomach while breathing. It was such a strange location and Jenny was breathing so oddly that I thought almost immediately that she’s feigning something. Her mom of course starts flitting about talking about how she was never sick as a girl. Jenny’s aunt came. I think she knows a little bit about traditional medicine (which is full of outdated and erroneous beliefs, such as how opening the window ajar because it’s about 90 degrees F in the room is very bad for Jenny – they think the same for newborns and basically raise babies in greenhouses! That’s why they can take the hot weather much better than I can). She asked Jenny if she wanted to cry. Jenny nodded her head. “Well you’re all tight inside, just cry, don’t worry!” Jenny started bawling, her face showing more anguish than pain. I had no idea what to do so I just stroked her head and her arms, looking on with pity. In my opinion at the moment, Jenny was suppressing the panic and helplessness she feels now that she realizes what being a wife with child will mean to her in life: a ball and chain that does not let her reach what everyone wants in life – to be happy. All of her life, she has always known that one day she will get married and have a baby. Maybe she thought that was her mission in life, and it would make her happy. Unfortunately, her husband is never with her (and I don’t know what he’s doing if he’s not with her), her mom is stressing her out, she never leaves the house unless she goes to the doctor, and she’s dealing with the normal paranoid issues of a new mother.

What a life.