Coincidentally I was reading We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver when the Florida school shooting took place killing 17. It was a riveting read about a 17 year old boy who kills 9 people in his school and more so as I longed to understand what goes on in the mind of any young person capable of committing these atrocious acts. In the book, Kevin’s mother (the narrator) also struggles to understand why her son meticulously planned and carried out the murder of 8 school companions and one teacher. I will not spoil the book for anyone who wishes to read it and, in spite of what I considered an unnecessarily gruesome end, it was well worth the read.

As with everyone I know, I was horrified not only by the Florida killings, but with the printed fact that by the 15th of February there had been 18 school shootings in the United States[1]. That’s one shooting every two and a half days, every 36 hours. No, mistake: there are 13 days (weekends and the 1st of January) where there was no school, so it was 18 shootings in 34 days, or a shooting every 1.8 days. As The Guardian states in the note below, there were a couple of accidents, some incidents with no deaths, and two suicides but none the less, there were 18 gun related incidents in schools in the first 34 working days of 2018.

As if this were not bad enough, I then heard President Trump (or The Donald as Obama called him) say that the problem was that schools were gun-free zones (not that kids could buy or get a hold of automatic and semi-automatic weapons) and that the solution was to arm the teachers[2], a proposal that shouldn’t even merit comment, much less consideration, an opinion I voiced to a group of friends during market day in Salies. I was surprised to find that one of the ladies, though claiming that semi and automatic weapons should be banned, considered that having a gun was a necessary defense. This made me think of my father and remember an incident that taught me a lot about guns when I was young.

1920 Sep 25, Laguna de Medina 2First some background. My father was a hunter (the picture on the left depicts him at 18, in Spain, 1920) and, as such, owned a good amount of shotguns which he kept under lock and key in a gun cabinet. Everything I know about guns I learned from him. Even as a child I was taught that you never, EVER, point a gun –even a toy gun, even a water pistol- directly at another person. When I asked my father why he didn’t buy himself a pistol, he said that he had shotguns because they were for hunting; pistols, and most other weapons were for shooting people and he had long ago decided that he never wanted to kill any other human being (he had done his military service during the Rif war in Africa and, from what I have read about it, there were atrocities committed on both sides); that –according to him- was the reason he had not gone back to Spain when the Civil War broke out for he would have been expected –as a member of the Spanish nobility- to lead troops into battle.

When I was around the age of 13, my father began to show me how and how not to handle a shotgun. I was taught that the moment the gun was handed to you, you break it open and check the barrels to see if it is loaded; that you never walk with a loaded gun even if you have it open (his best friend had lost an arm by tripping while walking with an open, loaded gun); that the safety should be on at all times until the moment you plan to shoot your prey. He showed me how to clean a gun after using it, how to aim ahead of a flying prey so that the shot and the bird would cross paths. He took me to shoot skeet at the gun club and let me practice until I was pretty good at it. Then he took me duck 1922 1 (2)hunting, in Acapulco, out at the Lagoon of ‘Tres Palos’ (Three Sticks) where we stood, at the break of dawn, up to the knees in swamp water, hidden by the marsh grasses, waiting for the ducks to fly over. I remember feeling very important to have been included in the hunting expedition (my mother had preferred to stay home in bed and was happy to have me as a stand-in) although I don’t know if I shot any duck on that first time. Neither do I remember how often I went with my father. Actually I only have two clear memories of these experiences: the first, feeling things crawling up my legs from the swampy water (and discovering later that it was nothing more than the air bubbles from my sneakers) and the time I shot and wounded a duck. The poor animal dropped to the water well within my reach and I could see it fluttering helplessly. From watching my father, I knew that it was my obligation to wring the creature’s neck in order to end the suffering I myself had caused it. So I waded out to where the bird lay and took it gently by the head with my right hand. Then, trying not to look into its eyes which were still open and alive and attempting to kill it without causing it harm, I gave it a couple of soft swirls. I can still feel today the warmth of its body, the life still present there. I was heartbroken, I hated myself and I just wanted the damn bird to die so I could stop suffering myself. It did not oblige under the gentleness of my feeble attempts. So after three half-hearted swings and seeing that the duck was still flapping around suffering, I could stand it no longer. I plunged the feathery body into the water and put my heavy cartridge box on top of it so that it finally drowned to death. I realized in that moment that I was not capable of killing an animal and I have never been hunting since.

1951-3 Mexico (4)However, the incident that taught me the truth about guns took place a year of two later. Our house in Mexico City –as most of the houses there- had a flat roof where we hung the laundry and had a storeroom. Late one night, after we had all gone to bed, my father heard footsteps on the roof and realized that someone had managed to climb up there and was walking around. As my mother told the story later, my father grabbed a broomstick and went up to the roof to face the invader. She was laughing and my father was right there eating breakfast so it was obvious the story had a good ending, but I was shocked.

“Why didn’t you take one of your shotguns?” I queried, thinking how ridiculous and helpless a broomstick must have looked to the invader. “Supposing he had had a gun?”

“Well,” my father explained, “if he had had a gun, he obviously would have been more than prepared to use it, something that for me would have been difficult if not impossible; so if I had appeared with a gun he might have shot me right off while I considered the possibility of doing the same. A person who breaks into a house with a gun is prepared to use it; I was not. It was safer to go up without a gun if you know you are probably going to think twice before pulling the trigger.”

I understood perfectly: I couldn’t even wring the neck of a dying duck to stop its suffering! So, I ask myself or anyone else who will listen, how many teachers are prepared to pull out a gun and shoot a student before he sprays everyone in the classroom with automatic fire power? It’s ridiculous! Even if the teacher is trained and manages to extract his/her gun from its concealment, aim at the student and pull the trigger, the possibility of landing a deterring shot before the other responds in kind is minimal. And then we have to think how many teachers would be able to do this and how can we be sure that the classroom to be shot up is one with a gun-toting teacher? My history class was taught by a Miss Hunter who –if I remember correctly- was a small, aged lady with white hair and glasses. I just can’t imagine her pulling out a Smith and Wesson from her girdle and shooting our aspiring high school killer before saying calmly to the class: “Please open your History books to page 347 where we left off last Friday and commence reading, and, Ralph, would you mind removing that trash from the doorway and depositing it in the Principal’s office.”

The basic argument against gun control runs to some version of the following: “With gun control, the good people will be forced to give up their guns while the baddies will continue to have them; we will be defenseless”. Nothing is farther from the truth, as my father well understood and showed me with his brave example. If someone armed enters to rob my house, he/she probably does not mean to kill me, just to take what he/she wants and depart. He/she will only shoot me if I threaten to shoot him/her. If, on the other hand, someone wants to kill me, they will undoubtedly do it while I am walking down the street unarmed, or driving by in a car unarmed and not while I am in my own home where I might have a weapon. Therefore, gun control might actually save my life, not put it in danger.

The mostly ‘kids’ who shoot up schools are not hardened criminals; they are usually ordinary –sometimes mentally or emotionally disturbed (not ‘sicko’ as Trump said)- kids. Gun control would make it more difficult for these unfortunates (yes, they are as unfortunate or perhaps more so than the ones they kill) to obtain weapons, especially automatic weapons. It is much more difficult to kill 17 people shooting them one by one, than it is spraying them with a hail of bullets without even having to aim.

As I am not a hunter, personally I have no use for a gun in the house; I know I would be absolutely incapable of using it. I have proof, for when I was kidnapped, many years ago in Mexico City, I found myself trying to figure out a way to escape. One day, the kidnappers left an empty bottle of wine in my room and I thought to myself that I could use it to hit my guard over the head the next time he came in and make a break for it. Immediately I realized I would try to do it gently so as not to hurt him (just like the poor duck) and that would have me ending up as the object of his wrath. Fortunately, the police did the job for me and I was rescued.[3]

So if you ask me –and nobody has- I’d say “not more guns, not less guns, but NO GUNS is the only solution.”


[2] Some gun rights advocates have pushed to expand gun-carrying in schools further. Andrew McDaniel, a state legislator in Missouri who introduced legislation last year to make it easier to carry guns in schools, told the Guardian that, in rural schools where it might take 20 or 30 minutes for law enforcement to respond to a school shooting in progress, it made sense to have other armed citizens ready to step in.

[3] The book I wrote about this incident is called Once días… y algo más and is available on Amazon; the translation into English, Eleven Days, is out of print and 2nd hand copies are quite expensive I believe.


Mom 80Funny how some moments stick in one’s mind forever. I was just making myself a salad for lunch and every time I make a salad I remember my mother. Not all of her, just one precise incident, one small moment in time. It must have been in the ‘60s, we were at my parent’s weekend house in Valle de Bravo –a small lakeside town in the wooded hills of the State of Mexico about three hours’ drive from Mexico City- and they had invited a Norwegian couple with whom they had been friends (and neighbors) for years: Ella and Ivar. My mother set about preparing dinner and Ella offered to help (I was in the living room talking to my father, I think). Suddenly my mother stomped out of the kitchen; she was livid, her thin face all screwed up into a grimace, her boney hands tightened into little fists.

“She sliced the lettuce! How can she be so dumb? Lettuce for salad should be torn not sliced!” She seemed beside herself with rage. I remember being shocked not that my mother was mad (a state she often found herself in), but that she could get so upset over such a small detail. What in earth did it matter if lettuce for salad was sliced with a knife into even pieces or torn by hand into uneven pieces? I don’t suppose anything came of my mother’s tantrum that night because I remember nothing more about the evening, but even today I can never prepare lettuce for salad (tearing it, of course) without thinking of my mother and her rather absurd anger that one evening, and when I slice the endive that I usually include in my salads, I wonder if she would have thought I should tear it also.

I must admit that my mother getting angry was something that happened more often than I like to remember. One of my early “traumas” stemmed from the yelling fights between my parents after they had had a couple of evening cocktails. I remember my mother saying once that she never slept so well as after a fight with my father (she would stomp off to the bedroom and lock the door leaving him to sleep in the living room or library).

Strangely enough, the fondest memory I have of my mother is precisely of her getting angry. It comes from when she was much older, in a nursing home in Madrid, Spain, and completely gaga. Senile dementia had stolen her capacity to speak and to understand all but the simplest of phrases, such as ‘Would you like some ice cream?’ The only thing she seemed to have not forgotten was how to get mad. Some days when I would go to visit her in the residence, she would see me come through the door and her face would screw up into a grimace of anger and her hands would tighten into those two little angular fists that seemed to say she was ready for a fight. She would glare down and off to the side as I stepped into the room.

“Are you angry, Mother?” I would query gently, smiling to myself and her whole body would tighten even more like a spring forced to twist against its natural coil. “Ok then, I’ll just sit here beside you for a moment and wait,” I’d say, taking the empty chair to her right. We’d sit there in silence for about three minutes and then she would stand up, take two steps, sit herself down on my waiting knees, lift her legs so I could pass my arm beneath them, and cuddle up to my neck like a child. She weighed no more than 47 kilos by then, so holding her thus was easy and delightful. All the love that many times I had failed to feel for my mother previously would flow through me at those moments and I would melt with tenderness for that head-strong, demanding, spoiled woman who had given me life. She… Life… gave me that most precious memory that even today –more than eleven years after her death- I cannot remember without feeling tears of joy filling my eyes and without my heart swelling with love. It is strange, perhaps, that this should have been her parting gift, seeing as she had seldom been physically demonstrative towards me before. As a matter of fact, I have very few –if any- memories of physical closeness with my mother except this incredible present of her final years.

When I was 50 (my mother would have been 77) and recently divorced from alcohol, cigarettes and my husband, I went into a prolonged period of psycho-therapy and discovered that I, much like my mother, was filled with rage and that 99% of this fury was directed against what I saw as the spoiled, selfish, egocentric adolescent of a mother I had. I remember entire sessions with the therapist, me insisting that I hated my mother and she gently suggesting that, actually, I loved her. Little by little, I worked through the anger, learning to place limits, to not allow her manipulation and to see her as the aging, frightened, lonely woman she was. Then something happened that changed our relationship forever.

She had dropped by my house and was about to leave when suddenly into my head and out of my mouth came the following words: “I want a Mommy-hug”. She looked at me obviously bewildered. I stood there in front of her waiting. By that time, she had shrunken quite a bit and I was around 6-8 cms taller than she was; I could have easily taken her in my arms forcibly and done the hugging, but that wasn’t what I wanted. “Give me a real Mommy-hug” I insisted opening my arms but not moving towards her. She cautiously and stiffly lifted her arms and placed her wrists at the height of my waist, giving a little squeeze.

“No,” I stated firmly, “I want a Mommy-hug, a really real Mommy-hug.” She moved a little bit closer so that her forearms could sort of bend behind my waist but she still was centimeters away from the bulk of my body. I felt a slight increase in the pressure, but whatever it was, it was so far from a hearty hug that I repeated with even more emphasis: “No! A Real Mommy-Hug!”

With that, she suddenly moved in close, entwined her whole arms around my waist as I put mine around her shoulders and we hugged a real hug. I have no explanation for what happened in that instant. I can only describe it like a lightning-bolt of energy passing between us through the whole length of our bodies. I don’t even know if she felt it too, but I was left speechless. She quickly let go and stepped back, mumbled something and headed for the door. I couldn’t even move, fixed in place by the memory running through my body of what had just happened. I heard her car drive away, but still I stood there, glowing with the absolute realization that I loved my mother, and that what had passed between us could only be the intense discharge of the energy of that love so strongly denied.

A few minutes later, I was still standing there or close by, when I heard her car pull up again. Then I heard the car door open, and her feet rapidly mounting the steps to my door. Suddenly a small morsel of paper was slipped under the door, and her steps descended again, the car door closed and she drove off. I moved to pick up the paper. Written on it, in pencil and in her neat, measured script I read:

        That hug was the most important that has ever happened to me in my life.

That was all, nothing more: no gushing, no overstatement, just sixteen simple words expressing –perhaps- her painful, lifelong incapacity of physical closeness with her daughter. From that day on, every time I saw my mother, I would adopt a mischievous expression on my face, tilt my head and laughingly say: “Oh boy, oh boy: time for a Mommy-hug”, and we would move easily into each other’s arms laughing.

A short time later, my mother began to lose her cognizance and over a period of eleven years she slowly left. In the beginning, it was not easy for either of us because she was terrified and I was intensely and selfishly working on rebuilding my life, but we did the best we could as we all always do. Those eleven years, during which I was responsible for making my mother’s life as easy as possible given the circumstances, were a gift. I never brought her to live with me (as my brother had suggested the moment he knew her mind was going, to which I countered that he might consider having her move in with him, thus ending the conversation) because I had decided that I had a right to love my mother and I knew that if I burdened my new life with her ever increasing care, I would end up closer to murder than affection. While in Mexico, I hired the best help I could so that she was always seen to, accompanied and cared for while living in her own abode. When I moved to Madrid and brought her with me, she was placed in the best nursing home available, only six blocks from my home so that I could visit as often as possible. I know I did the best I could and, therefore, I have no regrets. And I asked the Universe, God, the Cosmos or whatever you wish to call that which governs our existence on this plane, that if it was possible I wanted to be with her when she passed. That wish was miraculously granted as I have written about in another place and will not repeat here.

Now I am near the age my mother was when we had our first hug, progressing through my own 70’s and I begin to contemplate (still, I hope, at some distance) the wrapping up of my personal story. I cannot say that I have done a better job than my mother at mothering because I doubt very much that I have. But fortunately now I know –just as I hope that she did- that I have done the best I could, always and that I love my children just as much as my mother loved me which –in the end- turned out to be more than enough.