“Hey, mija, how’s it going with your new classroom and the third graders?” I ask Gina one night as we snuggle in my bed. “O…K”, she says. “Just OK?” “Well, they keep asking me,” her body turns away from mine and her voice becomes high and mocking, “‘Why do you have two mamas?’” “And you say…” “I say I don’t know. I don’t want to answer them.” Ouch. This unexpected jab goes from her heart into mine, and I reach out to gently stroke her silky brown hair. She recoils. Her guard is up, although the bridge across the moat to her corazón is not completely pulled shut. My mind races to protect myself with the sword of logic. This is their fifth year in a school district hailed for its diversity and open-mindedness. What haven’t I done to prepare her and her twin brother to answer this “two mama” question? “Lo siento, mi amor. I didn’t realize you would have to start from ground zero when I put you in George’s combined third and …

“I imagined two people without words, unable to speak to each other. I imagined the need: The color of the sky that meant ‘storm.’ The smell of fire that meant ‘Flee.’ The sound of a tiger about to pounce. Who would worry about these things? For a long time, that was the only word the baby needed. Ma, ma, ma. Then the mother decided that was her name and she began to speak, too. She taught the baby to be careful: sky, fire, tiger. A mother is always the beginning. She is how things begin.” The Bonesetter’s Daughter  Amy Tan On my home altar sits a prayer card for a friend of my twins from Middle School. He died in a car crash a few months ago. I have no doubt his mother can tell you exactly how long it has been since fire took her first born from her five months before his 21st birthday. As mothers, part of our legacy is the task of teaching our children how to spread their wings and …

Raising twins was like driving a Harley Davidson motorcycle painted a bright red with all the extras. “You have twins? Two girls?” “No, a boy and a girl.” At that point there were two responses that each drove me down a different kind of loca.

As a mother for 20+ years, I did not start out with the end in mind, but I know now that mothering is rooted in legacy. I define it as something handed down from an ancestor or preceding generations; an inheritance. It is a birthright of every child to be raised with gifts that endure beyond our lifetime as mothers. The very first gift I intentionally saw as a legacy for my children was Spanish. With the birth of my twins in 1995, I had a taste of how deep sacrifice and love can go. My father’s death and my mother’s ensuing depression meant I was even more responsible for what my children would inherit. Like little children fascinated by their parents’ shoes, I was clomping around, feeling big and awkward at the same time. This was particularly true in regards to my wish to raise mis chiquillos to value and speak Spanish, a legacy from my parents I resisted for many years. In researching pre-schools, the one with Latino cultura and Spanish had a long …