My siblings and I have countless stories of funny, sad, ugly, and beautiful situations that we have lived through together. I wrote about our unbreakable bond in my first post on this blog (see “Belonging Somewhere”). We are intentional about getting together every year, as we live in different places across North America and Spain. Another chapter of those visits has recently wrapped and I’m writing this post fresh after my return from an 18-day trip to visit my family in Spain. Each and every time I get together with my siblings, we laugh about the silliest things, and sometimes I’ve wondered why we aren’t more “mature” since we keep revisiting old chapters of our lives. We have certainly grown up. At the same time, I remind myself that I’ve never laughed so hard in the company of others; when we’re together, a special magic happens for us. That bond. Those memories. Those feelings. That sense of belonging. Feeling safe. They have my back and I have theirs, full stop.
Among the many stories we have about growing up together, a few stand out and there is a particular one where I felt truly humiliated for years. The story involves a day at the beach in Margarita, a small island off the East coast of Venezuela. My father, brothers, and I used to vacation there every summer, and this particular episode took place during my awkward teenage years. What started as a promising day at the beach turned ominous when dark clouds approached and rain started pouring. Frantic beachgoers gathered their belongings and quickly ran to their cars to leave the premises. My older brother had been caught swimming and by the time he ran to our little perch on the beach, the situation around us was chaotic. People were running, vendors were hastily packing up their wares, and cars were leaving quickly. The sandy parking lot turned into a muddy mess, and I ran alongside my dad and three brothers trying to seek cover in our car and leave the premises. Worried about everyone else I cautioned: “Don’t slip” and before I had finished the sentence, I was the one who slipped on the muddy parking lot and fell flat on my back. A car was backing up as I fell and I ended up about halfway underneath it. People were horrified and warned the driver, who quickly hit the brakes and I was, almost miraculously, unharmed. Everyone around me was staring in shock that I was okay and that all this happened in the blink of an eye.
Unaware that I almost lost my life in that moment – or at least that I could have been seriously harmed – the teenage girl in me just felt the humiliation of falling down in a muddy pit in front of a crowd. I remember getting up in disbelief, disgusted by the slippery, gritty substance that covered my body from head to toe. My hair, clothes, and beloved white shoes were caked in mud. I was simply irate and ashamed, with the urgency and potency that only a teenager can feel in a moment like that. From my family’s perspective, after realizing that I was fine and completely unharmed, what they describe is truly hilarious. They saw an angry, amorphous figure emerge from the mud, almost delirious with rage. They describe my undistinguishable cries and muttering of unintelligible words as if I was possessed and speaking in tongues. Witnessing my reaction to my momentary misfortune, they went from horror to cringe to schadenfreude in seconds. My father, the usually witty and calming figure he was to us was rendered speechless in front of my contorting body and primal reaction. We walked out of that place, they silently, I still spewing venom and trying to figure out how to sit in the rental car while covered in filth. With a last remnant of decorum left, I draped a towel on the back seat and my two younger brothers sat quietly on the other side of me, avoiding eye contact and afraid that I was losing my mind. As we drove off, my frustration got bigger and in a bout of rage, I rolled down the window and threw my newly-destroyed white shoes out in the middle of the highway. That was the height of my momentary despair, which then subsided into muffled cries and sobs. When we got to our dumpy hotel, I ran from the parking lot to our room, once again fully ashamed by the public perception of what I looked like to the unsuspecting hotel guests. We refer to this episode as the “Creature from the Black Lagoon” (a reference to the classic 1954 film).
It took quite a bit of time for me to process this “coming of age” episode and view it with a sense of humor. The wounded and insecure teenager certainly grew up and now sees this story for what it is: a vignette of those happy yet challenging days from our adolescence. To this day, there’s an ongoing debate between my brothers and I about the brand of the shoes I threw out the window. They say they were white leather Keds, and I maintain that it was a pair of white leather oxfords with thin soles, which I’m sure accelerated my fall (Who wears that to the beach anyway?) I have conceded to the Keds because I realized that this is not the most important part of the story. What’s more important is the way my siblings and I have woven together a beautiful, strong tapestry of shared moments, a connection that has many rich undertones and still keeps us close. Like this story, we have hundreds more and we keep making new ones each time we get together. Our little sister had not yet been born when this chapter of our lives happened, and now laughs with us each time we get together and remember that episode. She keeps asking curious questions about it as if wanting to play a movie of the story in her own mind. Unexplainably, it almost feels as if she was there because she has made it part of her own memories. I remember retelling the story to her and her husband a few years ago as we rode in the back of a bus in a small town in Ecuador. We were laughing so hard that when we looked around, the passengers next to us were drawn in and laughing with us in a shared instant of connection. I still don’t know why these stories are so funny to us that have become evergreen moments of hilarity; but if I could bottle the feeling we get each time we talk about them, it would be a precious thing to have and spread around like confetti.
Another important part of this story is how I learned to laugh with myself with newly-found feelings of kindness and acceptance, as I have put the situation into perspective through all these years. This taught me not to take myself too seriously in those moments that feel sticky sometimes. From painful and humiliating, the story has become comical, and has given us lots of entertainment as we retell, dissect, and share it with other family members and our children, still uncovering new details previously untold. For example, this time around we realized that I had never truly grasped the fact that if I had been run over by a car that day our lives could be drastically different today. It was certainly a very close call and we rarely focus on that point. Instead, the story still gives us belly laughs, the kind that makes me appreciate being alive and surrounded by those I love most, who know me well and accept me as I am, whether clean and neat, or in disarray and covered in mud. And this is worth celebrating each and every time.
