Zibby Mag

I still ask myself: Could I have been a better daughter?

By Paula Ramón

I was not an organized child, according to Mom, who scolded me when I didn’t make my bed or came home from school with my white socks stained and wrinkled. For my mom, everything had to be spotless, and maintaining order was a shared responsibility in our home.

Before I turned eight years old, she taught me tricks for washing white clothes and ironing. By the time I was ten years old, she had instructed me in darning, sewing on buttons, grabbing hems, washing the bathroom, cleaning the floor, picking fruits and vegetables, and making arepas. With her, I also learned to drive, basic concepts of electricity, construction, plumbing and even how to change a tire and the car’s oil. Mom was a walking primer in traditional and alternative medicine. Over the years, she imparted various tricks and life lessons that I first arrogantly dismissed but later proved crucial in my most difficult moments.

I was born in Venezuela in 1981, at the end of an oil boom cycle, the commodity that determined the ups and downs of our economy. My mother, a teacher who retired early due to poor health, raised me with a firm hand. With a strong, practical character, my mother struggled in dealing with me, the dreamy child I was, always with my head in the clouds. It was as if we spoke different languages and that mutual feeling of being misunderstood grew over the years and tainted our relationship.

More disciplined and austere with finances than my dad, a Spanish immigrant 25 years her senior, Mom managed to lift herself from humble beginnings in rural Venezuela into the middle class in Maracaibo — a city renowned internationally for its vast oil reserves.

We lacked nothing, but Mom religiously reminded me and my two older brothers that we were poor.

“You have to stretch yourself only as far as the blanket will reach,” she used to say. Yet, through my parents’ resourcefulness, that blanket—to extend the metaphor—covered us sufficiently even on the coldest nights.

Political and economic upheaval marked my early memories. The violence and insecurity disrupted our home and traumatized my childhood. I used to say that by age twelve, I had known as many coups d’état as presidential elections. Later, the societal polarization stemming from Hugo Chavez’s 1999 rise to power deepened divisions, infecting even family gatherings. And in recent years, the hunger, misery, and precariousness defining Chavista rule pitted Venezuelans against each other in a type of perverse social Darwinist experiment.

We both cried on the phone during those years when she needed her daughter and I urgently needed my mother.

I never bothered speculating how life may have unfolded with another birthplace or by remaining in my country, which I left at twenty-nine, when my then husband was relocated to China. But after Venezuela’s tensions and crisis further strained the complicated relationship I always had with my mother, five years after bidding her farewell in a crematorium, I still ask myself: Could I have been a better daughter?

The complex bond between mothers and daughters is a well-trod topic. I experienced this firsthand, and discovered that distance doesn’t ameliorate those strains, it only makes them worse.

During her final years, our exchanges were no longer just about the personal differences my mother and I had, the grudges I harbored into adulthood, or my constant desire to prove I was different from her. They were about her obsession to find food and medicine, the recurring fear someone would hurt her in one of the countless robberies the government did not bother documenting, and my despair at seeing her languish in a decaying city without reliable health and human services.

We both cried on the phone during those years when she needed her daughter and I urgently needed my mother.

Without realizing it, Mom embodied my home and my country. I wrote in my memoir, Motherland, that after her death, the umbilical cord binding me to my home in Venezuela was severed.

Her absence left me with an emotional void, but also an existential one. Not only did I have the constant reflex to pick up the phone to call her, but I had a lot of free time by not having to make daily bank transfers, search for medicines and food virtually, triangulate calls with my aunts or her caregiver, or look for solutions to any new problem that arose.

After years of feeling burdened by so much responsibility, and using most of my days off to go to Venezuela to help her, I found myself not knowing how to deal with those absences. And suddenly, I felt the urge to go one more time to my country, my city—my home.

In 2019, a few months after her wake, that’s what I did. I went back to the terracotta floor, to the plants that Mom tenderly cared for, to the shelf where she kept her food, to her room and her bed. There was electricity and water, and I almost could hear her saying, “That’s why I don’t want to leave this house: where am I going to be more comfortable than at home?”

In her closet was my inheritance—a hefty 1910 coin she treasured because her mom was born that year.

I organized some belongings yet left things largely untouched, taking only a few books and the coin, which Mom kept in a plastic chicken-shaped piggy bank. (I took the object with me when I left, only to discover that it just didn’t make sense without her.)

The house was a time capsule, a box that held our memories, our joy, and our acrimony—the only place that would ever truly feel like home to me. And yet, aside from that romantic notion, it was just another empty house in a country full of empty houses abandoned by the millions of Venezuelans who fled in the last decade, an exodus that divided families and reshaped the entire country.

I closed the door, then the two gates—there are never enough locks in my country—and said goodbye, not knowing if I would ever return. The idea that my siblings and I would someday expand the home to welcome our own families—my mother’s dream when we were kids—belonged to another time. That was unthinkable now.

It’s been nearly five years since that trip, and everything—Venezuela, the house, my mom—has taken on a spectral quality, as if it was all a dream of my own.

My only connection with the past is through one of my aunts, who calls me from time to time. Despite the jolt of excitement I get when I see her number pop up on my phone, a long tide of sadness always follows. It’s a recurring reminder that my early life was not a dream.

I once had a country, a home, and a mother.

Now they are gone.

Paula Ramón is a Venezuelan journalist who has lived and worked in China, the United States, Brazil, and Uruguay. She is currently a correspondent for Agence France-Presse, based in Los Angeles. She has written and reported for the New York Times, National Geographic, Columbia Journalism Review, and Piauí magazine, among other outlets.