Category: Moments

My little girls can really be the sweetest things in the world. Tonight, while I was talking with a friend on the phone, they prepared me a tray with lemonade, carrot sticks and blackberries. They squeezed the lemon juice themselves. Only problem is that they squeezed all the lemons and forgot (or didn’t know) about the water. As the lemonade tasted too sour to them, they kept putting more and more sugar, so much that couldn’t really dissolve. Just too cute not to mention.
I love them so much!

I just saw a picture. One of many pictures that have defined this “war” between Israel and the Palestinian people living in Gaza. Just one more picture, but one picture too many. I won’t post it here because I can’t bare to see it again, though I can’t get the image out of my mind (but here is the link if you just have to see it: http://www.elpeaton.org.ve/view/galeriaFotoShow.php?idG=57). Yes, it’s by no means the worst of all.
But I’m a mom, and I can see in that little face, in those eyes closed forevermore, the face and eyes of my child. How fragile life is, how quickly gone, and how immense, impossible immense, the pain of losing a child would be.
How many Palestinian moms have had to go through that pain in the last month or so? How many didn’t because they died as well?
I’d be angry, I’m sure I am angry, but too sad right now to notice. Because, but for the grace of that un-existent God, that child could have been mine.

Someone in craigslist (I’m a regular at the food forum) mentioned family recipes, and I couldn’t but think of my grandmother’s – and then my aunt’s – recipes for cakes. I grew up with their sponge cake with lemon frosting (though I preferred it with whipped cream), chocolate with mint sauce and yellow cake with chocolate-dulce-de-leche frosting. And of course, apple pies, chocolate pies, lemon pies. My grandmother was known for her cakes and pies, and she was the best.
Now I have their old cookbook. But I have it because my aunt passed away. It’s been almost 2 months and I’m still crying almost every day. Sometimes I cry because I’ve already gotten used to the idea that she’s dead. I loved her so much.
Mike came home and interrupted me from the thoughts, so this will be it.

I’m breastfeeding Camila, lying next to her on the sofa in my mother’s house. Mika comes behind me and starts cutting my arm with a plastic knife. She wants to get to my blood, she says. What are you going to do with the blood?, I ask. Put it in a plastic bag and then throw it away she says. Seems like a waste, I say.
A couple of minutes later she comes and starts brushing my hair with the brush from the vacuum cleaner. She’s trying to get the knots out, she says.