Dreams Betrayed

In the very Catholic world of So Far From God, the highest thing that women can aspire to be is wife and mother. The idea that is presented to them by the culture is if the women made the right choices and did everything that was expected of them, they could achieve their goals. It was evident that Sofia messed up from the get-go.

"That marriage had a black ribbon on its door from the beginning. Sofi's grandfather had refused to give the young lovers his blessing, the father had forbidden Sofi's querido to step foot in their house during their three-year courtship, and the local parish priest joined the opposition when he refused to marry the couple in the church" (21).

Sofi's querido had a well-known gambling addiction and therefore, no one was surprised when he abandoned her and their four daughters to pursue his vice. It was the natural consequence of a very bad choice by a young woman who gambled that her love could change him.

Her daughter, Fe, on the other hand, had made all the right choices. She was twenty-four, "with a steady job at the bank, and a hard-working boyfriend whom she had known forever; she had just announced their engagement" (27). "Fe was beyond reproach ... She and Thomas, 'Tom' Torres were the ideal couple in their social circle ... He did not drink or even smoke cigarettes. They were putting their money away for their wedding, a small wedding, ... because they were going to use their savings for their first house. As it was, while Fe had a little something to talk to Esperanza about, she kept away from her other sisters ..., because she just didn't understand how they could all be so self-defeating, so unambitious." (28) Yet Tom ambushes Fe by mailing her a Dear Jane letter on the heels of her paying for the fitting of her own bridal gown.

Fe's case reminds me of my mother and her generation so acutely it makes me uncomfortable. Like Fe, my mother came from a poor, working-class family. Unlike her neighborhood counterparts, she graduated from high school, worked in an office, and deliberately did not marry any of the factory workers who were attracted to her. She had noticed that factory families were always in upheavals due to constant strikes by the workers who would simply impregnate their wives during the down times. She wanted better for herself.

My mother married an air force officer and was reasonably happy for about twenty-five years. Not long after he retired, he filed for divorce, leaving her with a Dear Jane note that he had never loved her. She had further found that in this age of No Fault Divorce that she would have to use all her resources to fight off his divorce action until the laws changed regarding military pensions. At the time, she was entitled to none of it and it was not unusual to find a general's wife having to work in a shop. This was particularly unfair because military wives were not allowed to work if they wanted their husbands' careers to advance.

My mother's lament was, "we were told that if we behaved ourselves, we would be taken care of." Well, twenty-five years later, society and my father had flipped the script on her. Just as Tom had flipped the script on Fe practically the eve of her wedding. Both the literary and real-life outcomes of hanging one's dreams on another person shows how foolish it is to do so.

Works Cited

Castillo, Anna. So Far From God. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1993.