Raising a Blue Moon

My dear girls, You are young, too young. I remember being your age, wanting to be older, to be able to do more, be more, go further. You are always testing your boundaries, which I understand, in theory. In reality it is frustrating as a mother, because I know what is waiting on the other side of the curtain, and it only gets harder and I wish you could slow down and be present, milk your childhood for all of its worth. But this is why they say "youth is waisted on the young". If I could go back I would realize how lucky and how happy I was when I was little, I would enjoy everything, even school. When I was your age, being forty seemed ancient, like almost a fossil. When I was in University, I remembered my mom stopping in a department store beauty counter and looking at herself in one of those augmented mirrors (which are never a woman's friend), and frustratingly saying "no, no,no", like she could will aging to stop, like she could scare the wrinkles away....

  My dearest girls,  We live in a world of appearances; we carefully curate which side of ourselves we want people to see on our social media accounts, edit the photos, and choose how to bend the truth to make it sound and look exactly as we want. As a result, many of us feel inadequate or unable to keep up with the all-smiles, always-winning people. But really, what do we know? And why should we care? We are afraid to fail or to portray anything other than success and control, even when things are never that easy, black-and-white, or just one thing. It is unreasonable and unnatural to think that thriving individuals have no self-doubt or face a few setbacks on their paths to success.  We all fail; every day we fail. We fail to meet our expectations, others' expectations, deadlines, presentations, tasks, jobs, etc. Failure is a constant and nothing to be ashamed of. Sometimes, we fail even when we put our hearts and souls into it; sometimes things don't work out the way w...

  My sweetest girls,   Yesterday was a hard and sad day. My great aunt Lolis passed away. It didn't hit me right away. I was having an out-of-body experience as my father was explaining over the phone that she had passed, and that she was tired and had wanted to die for a while now. I thought, "This is where you are supposed to cry, you should feel more upset, why aren't you more upset? What is wrong with you?" When I hung up the phone, you came to see me. You knew something was wrong, and when I tried to tell you, that is where my heart caught up with my body, and I started sobbing. I am sorry if I scared you. Amaia was curious. I don't think she remembers my aunt at all. She was too little; the interactions were so short —a couple of hours here and there. As the hours passed last night and I got talking to other family members, all the memories kept flooding into my mind; cherished moments of my aunt Lolis and my aunt Blanca, who passed away more than 20 years a...

My dear girls,  I grew up with strong, independent women and the men who loved them. I believed my opinion mattered and my voice was meant to be heard. Soon enough, I realized my family dynamics were rare. From the world, I was fed doubt and uncertainty. I started second-guessing myself as part of the routine; this never-enough feeling was planted deep inside me, this need to be small, to make myself useful, serving, willing, friendly and never challenging. I worked under the assumption that there was something wrong with all my feminine qualities, that compassion, empathy, and cooperation were weak attributes, that ambition has only one form, and that there is only one way to achieve professional growth. I was "too much," too articulated, too outspoken, too demanding, and too feminist.  My gender served as my own limit on what I could and should achieve. I created a dumbed-down, watered-down version of myself that was less threatening to the world I was living in, but ...