Learn Your Role And Know Your Place

For many years, Sofia had been pitied as "la Abandonada," roughly translated as deserted, neglected, or abandoned (Larousse 2), but all these years, it had been a role she had been forced to play. A role which she had played so well that she ultimately had convinced herself that Domingo had deserted her. Until he had gambled away what was left of her land to a corrupt judge. (215)

"As her memory came back to her," she realized "how, back in those early days Domingo was little by little betting away the land she had inherited from her father, and finally she couldn't take no more and gave him his walking papers. Just like that, she said, 'Go hombre, before you leave us al out on the street!' Yes! It had been Sofia who had made Domingo leave" (214). "So, without exchanging two words about her decision with Domingo who surely must have seen it coming anyway, Sofia had her peacock-raising lawyer serve the papers she figured were twenty years overdue, and told him to leave" (216-217).

"But back then, to be excommunicated was more fearful to Sofia than the thought of destitution; not to mention that her mother was still alive then, and her mother had been like the Church's conscience incarnated to her daughter. If anything ever brought the fear of God to Sofi even more than the thought of being excommunicated it was her mother's disapproval, so divorce had been out of the question" (218).

So it had been better for everyone, including her daughters to think Sofi had been abandoned, leading to devastatingly codependent behavior in practically all of them.

Sofi reminds me a lot of my maternal grandmother who also married a slick, charming man. But my maternal grandfather was a womanizing ne'er-do-well who saddled her with the eight children who survived her fourteen pregnancies. My grandmother was pitied by the community because she had to work hard herself to support her community. Except at the height of the Great Depression when Franklin Deleanore Roosevelt's work programs prohibited giving work to any married woman who had a husband to support her.

My mother remembers this as the happiest time the family had where her father, a normally peevish and abusive man, was concerned. He would come home exhausted from work, his food would be waiting on the table and he seemed more mellow and affectionate back then. But shortly after the war in Europe started the factories up again, my grandmother voluntarily went back to work and my grandfather went back to being an itinerant painter.

Through the ensuing years, my grandmother labored in the factory pulling double shifts while the whole community, indeed her own children, pitied "Poor little Helen" for having to be practically the sole support of her large family and her lazy husband. What is interesting is that, after my grandmother divorced my grandfather because he was abusive to the children, he married his mistress, got a real job and supported her for the rest of her life. Even then my grandmother always publicly lamented over the disgrace of being divorced, refusing to even consider another man though she was still just in her fifties.

The truth is, like Sofia la Abandonada, Poor little Helen was a proactive woman who had made her own choices. My grandmother didn't care much for the life of a housewife, she loved making her own money, and she practically had to be forced out at retirement. And the reason why she never remarried after divorcing my grandfather was that she loved her independence too much. The problem is that, like Sofia, the last people she clued in were her own daughters who grew up with severe codependent issues of their own.

Works Cited

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

Larousse Concise Dictionary. Spanish-English/English-SpanishThird Edition, Paris France. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006.