Post 1: Don't Call Me Jotín: Synopsis and Prologue

As mentioned in my about page, I’m searching for a publisher for my first memoir Don’t Call Me Jotín: A Mother and Son Journey. In the meantime, I’m eager to share here a few chapters from the work along with particular pieces that didn’t fit in its final iteration. Current excerpts can be found on my homepage: abelolivas.substack.com .

Synopsis of the Memoir:

Abel’s tumultuous and impoverished ten-member Mexican-American family in West Texas both envelops him and pushes him away. Their dilapidated three-room shack is so small he sleeps at the foot of his parents’ bed, creating a twisted dynamic with his mother who he fears will abandon him. When he witnesses his alcoholic father repeatedly attack his mother, he paralyzes, and when his mother calls him a “jotín,” or “cowardly sissy,” he internalizes it to the point of debilitating shame. Nowhere to escape the turbulent household except books, he becomes a successful scholar, but his enmeshment with his mother persists. Garnering a first-rate university education far away from family, he gradually tries to spread his wings but must first learn to accept himself, come out to his mother, and eventually build his own life as a gay man in a supportive relationship. With in-depth observations of his life and family members, Abel traverses the rough sea of poverty, alcoholism, suicide, homophobia, and entangled family bonds, aboard the strong sense of survivorship he gained from his mother.

Memoir’s Prologue:

This was supposed to be a book about my mother. It is about her, but not in the way I had imagined. I envisioned a more traditional biography about her rough childhood and youth, her tumultuous marriage to my father, her strife as a single mother, the tragedies she endured and survived. Her indomitable spirit. I’d narrate the story in an objective voice. No, in a sympathetic one. Even better—in her own voice mining her past.

I tried to write it that way. At twenty-six, in my first year of teaching Spanish at Milton Academy, I purchased my first Mac desktop with the intention of spending summer vacations in my cramped, on-campus apartment at the keyboard. I’d finally string together all the stories Mom had told me about her life before I was born, along with the episodes I had witnessed first-hand. It didn’t matter that she and I weren’t close anymore. We remained only loosely connected after our blow-up years earlier over her homophobia, but that didn’t destroy the desire I’d had since childhood to write about our family, with her as the central focus.

I progressed very slowly at first. Writing about the past triggered me constantly. Even when detailing violent conflicts I hadn’t witnessed, I’d seize up, as if I had experienced them myself. My recollections of my mother and alcoholic father’s fights—in the dilapidated shanty we lived in for the first five years of my life, then in the housing projects—also slowed me down, stirring up a powerlessness I could barely stand. I could only continue in short spurts after long breaks.

I always gravitated back to the writing, though. For a period, I did such a good job of telling my mother’s stories sympathetically that my sister Princess, a confidante and witness to my tension with Mom, was taken aback when she read several pages: “It sounds like you actually like her!” I agreed. As I wrote, I reverted to my previous role as Mom’s fiercest apologist and deepest admirer. I also got in touch with how much my writer’s temperament treasured the stories she had told me, even the dark, scarring ones.

After a couple of summers, I stopped writing, in part because of my limited mental bandwidth, even during vacations. I wasn’t at all suited for the school’s requirement that new teachers live on campus for five years, the regular dorm responsibilities, the lack of distance in the evenings from colleagues, students, and the facilities themselves, and the proverbial fishbowl experience. Until I was able to carve out more time and space for myself in a consistent way, I’d be unable to make any progress on the writing.

After four years at Milton, I left the Boston area for an independent day school in San Jose, California, The Harker School, where I’ve taught, managed the Modern and Classical Languages department, and engaged in LGBTQ+ advocacy for twenty-six years. It made for a much better match for me, both career-wise and in terms of this project.

As I continued with the memoir after relocating, on and off, in Bay Area coffeehouses now, a shift occurred, one that paralleled my personal evolution. I kept appearing on the page. At first, simply to describe how I, myself, took in my environment and the misfortunes that befell us. Next, as a person increasingly separate from the tribe. Then, as an individual with behavior to call out and an identity to defend. I even dared to flesh out scenes of Mom’s harsh treatment of me at certain points, identifying its damage and sharing my anger about it honestly.

I risked having a voice.

It hasn’t been without pangs of betrayal, guilt, and loss, even self-outrage at times. Somewhere along the way, I began to view the opportunity to tell Mom’s story as a way to compensate for abandoning her and my siblings when I left my hometown of Alpine, Texas for college. Doubting I had done anything of significance for them after leaving, I’d make up for it by honoring them in a family memoir. That was my mission in life, I came to believe. My very reason for being.

I can’t help thinking sometimes that I squandered that opportunity by choosing to focus on me. More than that, by critiquing publicly our indisputable matriarch, so worthy of my deepest respect. While select stories of the ones Mom shared with me did make it into this final iteration of the memoir, I removed her from the center of this narrative and the center of my universe and traced this journey instead.

It’s undeniable, though, that the process of writing this book has facilitated my personal development. It has given me insight, for example, into particular past experiences and family dynamics, or at the very least unlocked my truest feelings about them. It has challenged my harsh judgment of my coping mechanisms for highly chaotic circumstances. It has even helped me relish the many blessings in my life.

It turns out that this is the story I was always meant to tell—or at least the first one—as it’s the most natural extension of my true lived experience. In the end, authentic stories about relationships, like authentic relationships themselves, are the only ones worth the trouble.

I own my story, hoping to contribute something of value, however small or fleeting, to members of my tribe of origin, to the tribes I’ve joined throughout my life, and to every reader who accompanies me on this self-actualization sojourn. I hope, too, that, in opting for a complex and nuanced portrayal of my relationship with Mom, I’ve celebrated the long stretch of life she and I traveled together. Maybe in striving for a richer portrait of her, I’ve even accomplished an homage. As she rises off these pages in her full humanity, may she radiate strength and fearlessness in the face of extraordinary challenges, an inspiring faith and resilience, and a greatly expansive capacity to grow and love.

February, 2018. My mamacita and I in her South Double Diamond Ranch home outside of Alpine, Texas