Colossus by Diana Rojas (p 165)

Originally published in Grit & Gravity: Volume XI | May 2025

(Inspired by “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus)

Mom is tired. She sees the end, but she has so much to do before she gets there. She’ll never get it all done. She is our monument, emblem of the collective lives we’ve lived. Her heart is slowing, slowing, but it keeps beating. She doesn’t have time to relive her life, so she’s trying to fix history. She broke centuries-old links when she came to the U.S., Idlewild her Ellis Island. Poor, but not tired, when she became American—the first female in her family, then going on to birth five new American women. She’d do it differently: we’d go to school, we’d have careers, we’d be our husbands’ equals. She tells me her story, then she tells it again with a different interpretation. She worries that I may have gotten the wrong idea, so she changes the story to make it right, to make it fit into the reality she wishes had been. Like she’s writing fiction. But I hear her truths. Some stories shock her midsentence when she hears them with her elder ears. Others she’s been mulling over. She wants to revisit every injustice, every injury. She brings up the doll she didn’t get for Christmas when she was five, repeats that story often. I give her a notebook and tell her to write her memories. She fills up the pages. She asks me if I’ve read them. She asks me if I’m stealing her stories.

Mom picked up strays. Not animals. People. They were drawn to her light, nowhere else to go. She picked up these stray people and tried to fix them by loving them. So many called her mother. Now she dotes on her old house—a patch here, a spot of paint there—where she had piled up her strays. She is good. She is exhausting. She can’t fix everyone. In fact, she’s fixed no one. She can’t afford to fix her house. She’s beckoning less strays now and when she does, she has a hard time fitting them among the accumulation of decades. So she’s turned all her attention to us, trying to fix us before she goes. We still fit. But we’re becoming petrified with age. We don’t want to change; we don’t want her to tell us what needs changing. We still need her emotionally, though; she’s the symbol in the harbor of our lives. Our motherland. But tides turn. She needs us physically more and more. She holds her arm up and scoffs at her bingo wings.

Do you think I’m fragile? she asks me. No, lady, I lie. I need her to not be fragile.

I tell my kids to lean on me, that they’re not heavy, that I carried them for nine months, that my body knows the weight of them. But we children, we are heavy. My mother carried us collectively for forty-five months. For nearly four years she alone bore the weight of us. Her body remembers that. Like old floors, she creaks from the weight now.

She never lost her accent. It’s a thick one. Her ancient land with her every day, despite the lifelong journey. She’s truly dedicated to speaking Spanglish now. She forgets that most of her grandchildren don’t understand Spanish and will rattle off a sentence in her mother tongue to them more and more now. Mom, they don’t understand you, I remind her.

Sometimes she’s my cautionary tale. Don’t take shit like she did. Don’t bring in strays like she did. Meet people where they are, which she didn’t do. But the apple never falls far from the tree, and I can’t help myself from trying to fix people. I try to fix her house. There can be no problems without solutions, I think. I’m terrible at math.

She won’t abide complaints about our husbands. She chides us for being too hard on them. Men can’t handle weighty things like we can, she tells us. Don’t burden them, she insists. She knows how heavy we are. She needs to believe that someone tried to help her carry us through life. She wants them to carry us the rest of the way, to help her because she’s tired. They did repairs on her house when her husband would, so she turned them into heroes. When some of her girls were their equals, she honored the memory of when they were good, when she thought they were their equals. She imagines that they will fix a broken toilet again if she ever asks them to. But she will never ask them anymore. I can fix things too, she now says, gamely squaring her shoulders. The toilet is always clogged, and a plunger sits in useful wait next to it.

You’re going to be worse than Mom, my sister says to me. You’re going to insist that you’re fine, that you can live alone, that you don’t need help. But by doing so you’re going to make yourself a burden on your kids.

I can’t disagree. I hate asking for help. I hate asking for recognition. She, too, hates asking for help or recognition, but she’s done a lot and she needs help now. Maybe I should give Mom a shiny, new trophy that she can hold up high above her collected stuff in her old house, where visitors and strays can see it, can know her triumphs.

Do you think I should sell the house? she asks me. I don’t answer.

Like a beacon, her smartphone glows, dings, rings all day long. She welcomes all her callers. She’s addicted to WhatsApp. And Facebook. And Instagram. She interrupts conversations to show a posting from some long-lost third cousin twice removed whose name we may or may not remember, or whom we don’t care about. Her connections make her feel seen, important, remembered. We only show mild interest, but she doubles down. She gets lost in the thread; she goes deeper into history. Our disinterest confounds her. Let me tell the story, she insists when we try to change the subject, listen to me. Her life is getting replayed in her mind with every chime from the screen. She tells me she posted something. Go look, she says. I tell her she can just describe it to me. She gets annoyed. If I don’t see it, it might not be real.

I offer to sort her thousands of photos. I arrange them chronologically in albums even though doing so plunges me into a deep melancholic state; the weight of memory crushes me. I notice that she doesn’t rush to look at the albums I’ve arranged for her. It’s not real for me if she doesn’t look at them, appreciate them. She was the prettiest woman in the room in the pictures. The bombshell. She was unaware of that then. It made her prettier. Now her brow is furrowed in permanent worry. The characters in her story, in her pictures, are dying, one by one. She’s carrying the weight of their memory on her shrinking frame. Their weight makes her look old. Tarnished. Progressively insignificant.

We huddle with Mom on the group chat, then free ourselves from her in the sisters’ chat. Sometimes simultaneously. I’m not ready to be an orphan. I think that when I’m orphaned, I will be truly free. But I’m not sure I’m ready for so much freedom yet.

I don’t look like Mom. When she orphans me, will people forget I was hers? When she orphans us, will we forget we were all hers, that we all weighed heavily on her? When she orphans us, will we forget each other? Las chiquitas de Clara.

We’re all deep into middle age, but we’re still just Clara’s girls. Her trophies. We roll our eyes behind her back a lot now. We’re like teenagers again. We keep things from her, secrets. We don’t want her to lecture us, we try to spare her unpleasantness, we don’t want to burden her. We talk behind her back about her crumbling house. We think we need to take care of her. We think we need to sell her house. Sometimes she’s fragile.

I want her to be free. I want her to free herself from the plinth of her life, from keeping watch. I want her to know I’m unfixable. We’re all unfixable. Everyone was carried by a wind beneath her heavy robes, to feel weightless, to know what it is to be truly free, even if only for a moment or two. I’m a dreamer and I thought she’d feel free when she was widowed. But she just doubled down on us. I think I’ll sell the house, she sighs. I don’t want it to become your burden. I tell her she’s free. I tell her she can step down and walk away, that she can walk on water. I tell her she can make her own decisions. I tell her no one can tell her what to do.

But her progeny weigh too much. She’ll never get off the ground. The house won’t be sold yet. We need her to keep the light on.