Mi Familia

Her back is often sore from so many years as a nurse and mother. Gloria Vargas, 46, her hair the color of winter, positions herself carefully on the couch, gathers her thoughts in search of an appropriate commencement to her story.

She could begin with her 15th year, when she became a mother and wife, or with her journey from Mexico at age 8, but she chooses to go back further, to a small house on the side of a Sonora mountain, to a dirt floor and big metal buckets for burning firewood.

“We were very poor,” she says.

That she should begin her story with the beginning of her struggles is an indelible detail of her life. It explains hardship and sacrifice but also joy and faith, the love of children, who this Mother’s Day will honor her commitment to them.

The older ones know that, to understand their own lives, they must feel the ache in their mother’s back, the stiffness in their grandmother’s hands, swollen from years of working in a nursery and cleaning houses.

They must also understand a woman they don’t remember, Gloria’s grandmother, Mercedes Gallardo, who taught her about hope and faith and family, values Gloria has tried to pass on to them. They must know these three hearts to understand their own.

As a child, there was more love than food, says Gloria, both served up by her grandmother, a woman with deep creases on her face, hair as white as Gloria’s is now. She served her love so that it might be well received--with kindness and wisdom.

Early one morning, while the others were still asleep, her grandmother awakened Gloria and led her outside.

“Look,” she said, her eyes turned up to the deep, jeweled sky. The moon was bright and huge, and next to it was brilliant Venus.

“That’s the morning star,” her grandmother said in Spanish, and the two of them sat in timeless, pensive silence, gazing at the heavens. That a day could have such glorious beginnings gave Gloria the sense that each morning brought new beauty, new hope. Throughout her life and even now, she depends on such inspiration.

She came to Brea from Mexico shortly after her only sibling, a 3-month-old brother, died of pneumonia. Her mother married here, and Gloria never adjusted to her new life, to sharing her mother with a new family.

When Gloria became pregnant at 15, she told herself she was in love and got married. At 16, she was pregnant again. Children did not keep her from her dreams, she says, because she had none.

She was both mother and child, vulnerable to pervasive currents of the streets and the late 1960s. Yes, she says, there was drinking in her youth, and, yes, there were drugs. The heart of the La Habra neighborhood where they lived with her husband’s grandmother seemed punctured by heroin, alcohol and despair.

She saw people die--some of them slowly to addiction--and decided she needed change. She thought about her grandmother, about how hard she had worked caring for her and her four cousins as they romped upon the knuckles and knobs of a barren mountain.

While Gloria’s mother worked making tortillas, washing other people’s laundry, Mercedes watched the children and the sky, which held both hope and danger. When storms approached, she would gather them quickly into the house, fearful of lightning’s sudden and forceful strikes near the copper mines.

In La Habra, Gloria sensed a dangerous storm approaching her life. She gathered her two sons and left her husband, Seferino Vargas.

“I needed to get better, or be better. Something. I didn’t want to get caught up in that,” she says. “I didn’t want my kids growing up there.”

It was the moment of that decision, more than the moment of her sons’ births, that made her feel like a mother. It still isn’t clear whether her children saved her life or she saved theirs. Families, she says, save each other.

*

Gloria’s grandmother died more than 20 years ago. She could have lived longer but opted against heart surgery. She said that she was tired and that it was time for her to go. She died peacefully.

But she will be in Gloria’s heart this Mother’s Day and in the heart of Gloria’s mother, Eligia Estrada, 66, who lives a few blocks away from Gloria.

The three women, three mothers, share much in common. They worked hard, never losing hope. They kept family at the center of their lives and despite great odds have overcome generations of adversity, so that their children could have better lives, happier lives.

Gloria’s first son, Sef, went to West Point to play football but discovered he wasn’t suited for military life. He returned home and graduated from Cal State Long Beach with a degree in engineering technology. Now 30, he works full time as a sales representative for a hardware distributor and part time at Circuit City.

Ed, 29, the second son, went to medical school and is a first-year pediatric resident at Loma Linda University Medical Center.

Gloria has also taken in the children of relatives to raise and has become a mother to them. The two young ones are now 4 and 7. There is also Maritza Vargas, 22, who attended neither West Point nor medical school. Her life took a different turn, and she has just completed a six-month drug and alcohol treatment program.

When she checked herself into the program, she went with the love and support of her entire family, but only one person expressed belief.

“You can do it,” Gloria had said.

It’s what Gloria has told all her children from the time they were young. “You can do anything.” And no matter how they might fail, how discouraged they might become, she would tell them, “Tomorrow is a new day.”

With new hope, brilliance and glorious beginnings.

*

Dr. Ed Vargas sees them all too often, teenage mothers, unable or unwilling to care for the lives they created. For him, it serves as further proof of his mother’s conviction.

“Young girls come in with their babies and their moms, and their moms always answer the questions. Sometimes I get upset. I tell them, ‘Listen, this is your kid. You need to know how much you feed him, how many times he poops a day. He’s not a toy. He’s not your mom’s responsibility, he’s your responsibility.’ It always makes me think about my mom.”

When Gloria left her husband and La Habra, she knew she needed an education, so in 1971 she began work on her GED. She briefly went on public assistance until completing training and becoming a nurse’s aid. She later became a licensed vocational nurse and, finally, in 1987 achieved her goal of becoming a registered nurse.

*

As children, Ed and Sef would put on their pajamas and tumble onto her bed, where she sat studying, surrounded by books. She always took time to read them stories before sending them off to say their prayers and go to bed. It’s something both her grandmother and mother believed in, Gloria says.

“When my kids tell me they want to go to the park, we go to the park. I don’t say, ‘I have to clean the house’ or something. I remember when I was a kid and my mother and grandmother would do the same thing. It made me feel important, and I think that’s important.”

She was always working, studying, but her children knew they came first.

“She was my inspiration,” says Ed. “I think it was seeing her studying so hard to become an RN that made me want to become a doctor.”

From the time he was 7, he talked not only about being a doctor but also, more specifically, a pediatrician, so he could help children. But by the time he reached high school, he had doubts about himself.

His mother’s words pushed him forward: “You’ll go to medical school, you watch. God has a plan for you.”

He left home while he was in high school because of confrontations with his father, who had rejoined the family. Gloria and Seferino were divorced for three years when they decided to remarry.

While he always provided for the family, always spent time with the children, coaching their Little League team and taking them places, he also always drank. It led to verbal abuse, harsh words that Seferino now wishes he could take back.

“I know Eddie has a lot of resentment,” the father says. “There was a lot of verbal abuse I dished out. I hope to someday patch it up with him, but it will take time. I know I have to walk the walk instead of talk the talk.”

During Ed’s senior year in high school, a friend committed suicide, and one day he went to visit her grave.

“My dad had been drinking, and when I got home he asked me where I’d been, and I said I was visiting her at the cemetery. He said, ‘She’s not there. There’s just a pile of dirt there. She’s dead. She’s dirt.’ We had words, and he slapped me. I was ready to hit him, but my mom stopped me and said, ‘No, just leave.’ So I left.”

He told her that if he left he wasn’t coming back.

“I know,” she said, “Go to your grandmother’s.”

“As much as I didn’t want him to leave,” says Gloria, “I knew he had to. I could see Eddie’s hatred toward his dad. That’s a bad thing for people, so I knew he had to leave, because hate’s not good for you.”

He stayed with his grandmother throughout his years at Cal State Fullerton, where he majored in biology. He left when he was accepted into Albany Medical College in New York.

Just as his older brother found it difficult being away from home when he left for West Point, Ed struggled. Many of the students were from Ivy League schools or had been admitted into a six-year program right out of high school. They were children and grandchildren of doctors. It was a different world, sometimes frightening, and Ed searched for a place in it, simultaneously grasping onto what was familiar. He would often sit in hallways to talk and laugh with the Puerto Rican janitors.

It was a difficult adjustment, and he was told he would have to repeat his first year. He returned home unsure whether he wanted to continue, unsure whether he had it in him to become a doctor.

His mother encouraged him, friends he had made at school called and urged him to return, telling him that he would make a fine doctor. So he returned, and by the time he left Albany, he was voted class president. He gave a speech at his graduation, beaming with pride as he looked out at the audience. Among the generations of doctors sat his mother and grandmother in their best dresses.

“They were dressed nice, but they didn’t have expensive suits like the rest of the people there. They stood out, but they didn’t have to be the best-dressed people there. They didn’t have to be doctors. It was the biggest moment of my life, and when I saw them in the audience, it was overwhelming.”

Sef, the oldest son, says much of how he views life came from his mother. He works two jobs so that his girlfriend can stay home with their daughter, who will soon turn 3.

“She instilled in me a devotion to family,” he says. “Her life now is devoted to the two young kids. She didn’t have to take them in, she could have just taken some time off from raising kids to spend on herself, but it was important to her that they stay close to the family. She sacrificed her teenage years for us, and now she’s still sacrificing to raise two more kids, and if something happened to her, I would gladly take them in. That’s what she’s taught me about family.”

Maritza completed the treatment program two weeks before Mother’s Day. In a speech to the other graduates and their loved ones, she said, “I thank God that I have a mother like the one he gave me. She continued to have me in her prayers every night. She had faith and she believed in me, even after everything I’ve done.”

Following another binge, Gloria’s husband recently spent a week in treatment. While they now await finalization of their second divorce, Seferino says he still loves Gloria, and she says she would like him to remain close to their children, as long as he is sober.

He, too, is family.

“What my grandmother, mother and I have in common is our family,” she says. “Some people would say we’re stupid, but I don’t think so. Someone has to take responsibility for your family. My grandma always took care of her brother or whoever when they were on the streets. She fed them, took care of them. She took care of us. If a kid needed a home, she gave him one. My mother was the same way. We all take care of our family. No matter what.”