by kieryn graham

Created on: October 15, 2008   Last Updated: December 11, 2008

When I hear myself using one of my parents' pet expressions, I try to stop myself mid-sentence, sometimes choking on the words. When my mother or father channels through me, I terrified-tremble and get more than a little sick to my stomach. I feel like melting into a little puddle of myself and seeping into the ground, so much irrigation.

I will not be like my mother and father! I will not subject my daughter to the pain and shame my parents brought me. Praying, and swearing to all my angels and saints, I long-ago promised myself I would be all the parent my own parents were not. And when I hear my own mother's words issuing from my lips, I feel as though I have betrayed something more than sacred.

My father, Senor Patrick O'Neill, a hard-working, hard-fighting, hard-drinking Irishman as perfectly Irish as Saint Patrick himself, married Veronica del Carmen Gonzalez just after Veronica turned 17. I arrived precisely nine months after their wedding, right on time. My father kept my mother barefoot and pregnant for several years after I arrived. After three straight miscarriages, though, the doctors tied my mother's tubes, instructed my father to take it a little easy on the little woman, and left me an only child.

More than an only child, though, the dead babies and the doctors left me an orphan.

At 21, my mother had no education, no big brood of babies, and no hope. My mother slipped into a deep depression for which my father had no sympathy, for which the doctors had no cure. Not even la curandera had a proper herb. My mother suffered a depression so deep only Jack Daniels delivered solace. My mother began drinking on her twenty-first birthday, and she kept drinking steadily until she couldn't drink any more. Then, she died.

When my mother drank, she rode an emotional roller coaster, going from giddy, flirty and girlish to maudlin, and then graduating in perfectly predictable and progressively more dangerous stages from melancholy to full-on bitch and then to full-on crazy. When my mother got to the lunatic harpy stage, she took-out all of her coraje, the repressed rage of the oppressed, on Senor O'Neill. When my mother no longer could have babies and build the family for which she had planned her whole life, her husband became not just a stranger but the enemy, and she manifest her hatred, for starters, in calling him Senor O'Neill. She put a great snarl into it.

When my mother acted-out her coraje on Senor O'Neill, fueled by Jack Daniels and turbo-charged by a

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