Tag Archives: ordinary girls

Mother, Mercy


In this chapter of the book, Jaquira Diaz talks about the loss of her grandmother, Mercy from her mother’s side and the events that led up to it and events that happened after. I found this part of the section “Familia” significant because it really highlights her family and the relationships she has with her many family members. What really stood out to me was when family members from her mother’s side all came together, mourning the loss of Mercy and trying to arrange her funeral and for Jaqui to end up not showing up to her funeral. It must have been very overwhelming for her as she was conflicted with her own thoughts and feelings about Mercy and everyone else’s. In page 258, she talks about her car ride to Miami City with Cheito. “I’m glad he’s not the type of man who says shit like, “She’s in a better place,” or, “You have to remember the good times.” But in the car, I find myself doing exactly that–trying to remember something good about Mercy.” As you can see, she was so confused with how to feel since she hasn’t had many good experiences with Mercy (since Mercy has always thought less of her because of her blackness) but, she still lost her and wanted to remember her in a positive light. 

What also intrigued me was how Jaquira mentions Mercy again in the next section, “Regresando.” Years later, she’s still thinking about Mercy and even “seeing” her. “She’s been dead at least 4 years, but it’s her. I’m sure of it…My grandmother, like a ghost, haunting. And I wonder if Mami sees her too” (pg. 285). This made me wonder if Jaquira had some kind of connection none of us knew, not even her, and how much the loss of a family member can really affect you. 

Vintage filtered on silhouette of depressed girl sitting on the window

The Ghosts Return

Throughout the novel, Diaz, and many people in her life struggle with suicidal thoughts and many including herself have attempted suicide. After Mercy committed suicide Diaz began to reflect on how many people in her family have committed suicide or have tried to, “and then there is this: suicide was our family legacy” (Diaz 259). The last section was highlighted with happy and relieving moments from the later part of Diaz’s life. She talks about her graduation, “I can’t stop smiling. I am overwhelmed with happiness, with love, with hope” (Diaz 278). But even with these moments of immense pride and happiness Diaz still found herself struggling with depression and suicidal thoughts. “One night after not sleeping for days, I find myself sitting on the kitchen floor with a knife, not remembering how I got there, but trying to build up enough courage to slit my own wrists” (Diaz 286). This brings to light the question of whether Diaz will ever be able to fully move past the things that happened in her childhood.

Throughout the chapter “Returning,” Diaz returns to Puerto Rico and Miami several times. She thinks about her childhood and her teenage years. She loses friends from childhood during this time, reconnects with childhood friends, watches them raise kids and get married, and watches the health of her mother decline. Although Diaz is older, she is still trapped in the cycle of caring for her mother, self-destructing, and trying to find ways to cope. Except, as an adult, she finds a passion for writing, puts herself through school, and then graduates. Diaz will always have her past and therefore she will always have to deal with the ghosts of her past, but she has found purpose and she has friends that she cares for deeply.

A picture of a ghost representing the feelings of Diaz when returning to the places of her childhood.

Citations

Díaz Jaquira. (2020). Ordinary girls: A memoir. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.

McGrath, Patrick. “‘Ghosts: A Natural History,’ by Roger Clarke.” The New York Times, 24 Oct. 2014, www.nytimes.com/2014/10/26/books/review/ghosts-a-natural-history-by-roger-clarke.html.

Reflections and Legacies

“How do we keep living in the world when everything we built is gone? How do we even go on?” (Diaz, 310)

The last section of the book Ordinary Girls speaks a lot on legacies. The things that change based on what you lived through, who you were and how that formed who you are. This section was a lot of reflection while also narrating new aspects of Diaz’s life. For example, during the Halloween party, she reflects on her friendships with China and Flaca while also touching on them aging and gaining new friends. When she was in Puerto Rico she reflected on her life when she lived there, and on the rich history that has been erased by centuries of colonialism. She mentioned that La Princesa, a prison in San Juan that held many Nationalists, including Pedro Albizu Campos, is now a tourist attraction. After Hurricane Maria, she goes back to where she grew up, and sees everything her family built gone. The house her grandmother lived in, the store her father built and kept running, swept away and damaged by the storm.

In the last two pages of the book, she says who she writes for. She writes for those who didn’t make it—her friends that had passed away and couldn’t tell their own stories. She writes for the girls who grew up in circumstances like hers, for those who grew up feeling like they weren’t represented in the media. She writes this book as a legacy, her mark on the world saying that she is here, she matters, and she sees you.

La Princesa as a prison (Prior to 1993 when it was renamed)
Present Day– Puerto Rico Tourism Company (AKA El Paseo de la Princesa)

Live Life So You Don’t Regret

“For the ordinary girls. For all the girls who broke my heart. And their mothers. And their daughters. And if I could reach back through time and space to that girl I was, to all my girls, I would tell you to take care, to love each other, fight less, dance dance dance until you’re breathless. And goddamn, girl. Live.”

Throughout the ending part of “Ordinary Girls”, it was relieving to read that even though she had such a childhood, she was still able to make it past all that and look back at it as fun times. When she went back home, she couldn’t help but feel regret and sadness because she had left. Even though she was only gone for a year and a half, so much had changed. Her mom’s health was getting worse, her best friend was getting married, her abuela’s house was destroyed, her dad’s store destroyed, etc. She then writes, “How do we keep living in the world when everything we built is gone? How do we even go on?” This made me think really hard because we live for others and for the stuff we built, but when they’re all gone, what do we live for now? What I thought was that even though everything is gone, we should still live for those who are gone and experience things for them, anything that was built can be rebuilt. 

At the end where Jaquira states who she writes for, it made me realize that this book wasn’t made just for herself and the people in her life but also every girl that felt lost and labeled as weird, ugly, all the above. The ending sentences made me feel nostalgic because it reminded me of that time I was having a deep talk with my friends about the past and the future. We brought up so many memories we had together and talked about advice we would give to our younger selves. I regretted not taking more care of myself and people that I cared about and just living life. Jaquira’s last sentence brought back memories from my childhood. “And if I could reach back through time and space to that girl I was, to all my girls, I would tell you to take care, to love each other, fight less, dance dance dance until you’re breathless. And goddamn, girl. Live.” This sentence kind of made me rethink my life choices and also questions such as, “is this what I want to do in life, should I give up on this idea and go back with my original idea? Overall I really enjoyed the ending because it was mostly about Jaquira reflecting on her life and remembering everything she had to go through and using that to keep herself moving.

Dark Moments

‘and I am going to keep telling this if it kills me’ – Audre Lorde, “For the Record”

In this section we go along with Jaquira Diaz through several dark moments. It first begins with her suicidal thoughts and the first attempts she made on her life. This part of the section is hard to read because she starts off when she was eleven years old and attempted to kill herself. Her mother was abusing her and Diaz truly did not feel her life had any importance. She wanted to test how her mother truly felt so she swallowed all her pills and waited in the living room for her. The second time was after her mother threatened Diaz with a steak knife, claiming that Diaz was not her daughter. She finally stopped the attack after telling her own daughter to her face “You are so small I could squash you. You are nobody. You are nothing.” (Diaz, pg 158) After that Diaz swallowed all of her mother’s pills and locked herself in her room. 

The chapter ‘Secrets’ which is located at the end of the section, was the hardest for me to read. She thinks back to after she left the navy and came back to Miami beach, when she got sexually assaulted, presumably raped in an alley. This brings back a secret she had kept all these years for one of her friends in the fourth grade. A girl named ‘Yvonne’ (Diaz swore never to tell her secret so she changed her name) explained to Diaz and their other friend Beba how her stepfather would sneak into her room and sexually assault her, also forcing her to touch him back. Throughout Diaz’s life story she has told us about the multiple times someone had groped, harassed, assaulted, or raped her but how she never told anyone. What Diaz is doing here is explaining through her real-life story how normalized it is for women to get sexually assaulted and for them to also have sexual trauma because they bottled it up, and kept it a secret. Due to how our society is, women who have experienced something horrible are more compelled to keep it to themselves because justice usually is never served in their favor. Before Diaz could even tell the detective what happened, the detective gave her this whole talk about how her “words could put an innocent person behind bars, how [she] could ruin someone’s life.” (Diaz, pg 243) 

Citations

Díaz Jaquira. (2019). Ordinary girls: A memoir. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. 

Teenage Years Gone Weird

“Ms. Gold was known in most cliques as the counselor for the losers, druggies, troublemakers, kids who got suspended, kids who fought or brought knives to school, kids who flunked so much they were already too old for Nautilus, kids whose parents were drunks or junkies, or whose parents beat them, homeless kids, bullied kids, kids with eating disorders, or brain disorders, or anger problems. So naturally, when I showed up at her door, she knew exactly who I was.”

During this part of “Ordinary Girls”, Jaquira discusses her teenage life, how she always got in trouble and became a child delinquent. She was going through a hard time because her parents didn’t pay attention to her and what she did. Jaquira while growing up never really got the attention she needed or wanted, she had turned to someone else that she didn’t know to talk about her problems. 

Like Jaquira, while growing up I didn’t get the attention that I needed or wanted. Most of the attention was to my brother and this caused me to act out in school. Even though I did all my work and finished everything on time, I wouldn’t listen to the teachers and would talk back. But once my teachers threatened to tell my mother about my behavior, that’s when I would stop acting out for a bit because I was terrified of my mother. If she had found out about me acting out in school, I would get screamed at and slapped. In my school, there was a counselor like Ms. Gold. I hated her because I knew she was the counselor for people that got in trouble or did bad things. It was a constant reminder that I had to go to her because my parents didn’t pay attention to me or at that time I thought they didn’t care about me. As Jaquira talks more into her teenage years, I couldn’t help but feel bad because she had to go through all this by herself, and even though she did have a few friends with her, she still had to go through these things personally.

The Feeling of Home is like a Boomerang

Diaz did a lot of going back and forth in her life, and it’s reflected in her memoir. The way she goes between anecdotes parallels the way she went between homes and lives growing up. She went from living with her mom to living with her dad, and even between them they moved houses a lot. The people she hung out with differed depending on her age and where she was in her life; in school she had Flaca, Boogie and China, her marriage with Cheito, in the Navy she had Jones and G-mo (Diaz, 213, 222). After Mercy died, her feelings about her grandmother flip-flopped. When she first heard the news, she was reminded of the last conversation they had, in which they spoke to each other like they never had before. For her it was almost as if she was speaking with Abuela, someone she did have a good relationship with. When speaking with her little cousin before the funeral, Diaz learned that Mercy had a good relationship with her other granddaughter, one that was also Afro-Latina, described as having dark skin, eyes and hair. This made Diaz question why she never had a relationship like that with Mercy, and made her realize the similarities between her, her mom, and her grandmother. Her multiple suicide attempts were with her mother’s pills, whereas Mercy was found with five empty bottles of sleeping pills (254). In this particular section, Diaz does a lot of self-reflection on who she is, and what home is to her.

Boomerang

“We Must Save Ourselves”

“There comes a time when we realize that our parents cannot protect us, as much as we want them to, or need them to. There comes a time when we realize that we must save ourselves” p. 83

Díaz Jaquira. (2020). Ordinary girls: A memoir. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.

This section really shows Jaquira Diaz’s mother’s unraveling and progression of her mental illness. It is abundantly clear that the adults in Diaz’s life are not really capable of caring for her properly. In this section, she tells the readers about a relationship she entered before she was even in high school with a 21 year old. Though she describes the relationship through a mostly positive lens, the seven year age difference is illegal for a reason. A thirteen year old can not consent. She was a child, and Chris was an adult taking advantage of Diaz’s unstable home life and lack of positive adult figures.

On Page 75, Diaz describes her admiration for her mother before her addiction and mental illness took over. She worked hard, but cared for her children and was “exhausted but happy.” At one point, she wished to be like her mother when she got older. This wish later becomes her greatest fear as her mother’s condition worsened. Mami kidnaps Diaz and Alaina, forcing them to stay with her while failing to provide basic necessities. Even when they tried to escape, she “always caught us. Always (p 89).” When this happens, Diaz feels utterly abandoned by her father, who stands by and does not interfere with her mother’s antics. He is completely checked out, and disappoints Diaz again when he fails to protect her from Mami.

Throughout this section, Diaz interweaves the story of Baby Lollipops, the gutwrenching murder of a toddler, Lazaro Figueroa, that gained national media attention during key points in Diaz’s own life. She marks important memories by what was going on in the Baby Lollipops case, and tells the story simultaneously with her own. The side by side comparison and fixation on the fact that the baby’s own mother did such horrible things to him are intentional. Sometimes parents can do horrible things. Prolonged abuse is evident between Mami and Diaz and the correlation to the Lazaro Figueroa case is clear. Parents are supposed to love and protect their children, but when they are incapable of doing so, the responsibility to try to save themselves falls on the children. This was particularly threatening to Diaz because it served as a reminder that parents can be loving one day and monsters another.

Díaz at the 2019 Texas Book Festival, Larry D. Moore

Díaz Jaquira. (2020). Ordinary girls: A memoir. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.

Wikimedia Foundation. (2021, April 28). Jaquira Díaz. Wikipedia. Retrieved November 2, 2021, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaquira_D%C3%ADaz#/media/File:Jaquira_Diaz_2019_Texas_Book_Festival.jpg.

Happy Sad Mother

“These are the memories I want to keep: my mother, exhausted but happy, how carefree she was, how beautiful. How for those moments, before we knew that she was sick, the whole world seemed possible. How when I looked at her, I hoped that one day,  I would be exactly like her. (pg 90)”

While reading about Diaz’s relationship with her mother and father, I came to a realization that everyone’s life is completely different, even if we are similar in some ways, we will always be different because we don’t go through the same experiences. Not only that but also, it was shocking to me how messed up it was that no matter what Diaz’s mother did, her father never really cared. He was in his own world and when Diaz’s mother threatened to take away his children, he never said anything about it. The way Diaz explained how different her mother was before she was sick felt very real. She described how happy her mother was before she was sick, running around chasing each other laughing, and how she felt like she could accomplish anything. She looked up to her mother and hoped to be like her one day. But after her addiction to drugs, Diaz’s greatest fear was becoming her mother. She didn’t want to grow up like her mother even though she had admired her for so long.

The Illusion of Control

Growing up as a woman of color Diaz was faced with varying forms of oppression from society and her own family, as was seen in the first section of the reading. The second reading began to explore her experiences with violence as a woman and how these experiences made her feel powerless. As Diaz was growing up in an unstable, violent environment she began to take back control with her fists, “just itching for a fight, begging for it…all those years of beat-downs barreling against me” (Diaz 116). Through the years of fighting with her brother and being slapped around by her mother, the anger began to build up and during late middle school, early high school, Diaz began fighting as a way to express her power. This can be seen when J.R. was antagonizing her in the hallway, “I was not and would never be, the kind of person who got bullied or made fun of…” (page 127). Diaz knew that she could not control her mother’s actions, but in that moment of powerlessness, she showed J.R. her power through violence.  

Diaz’s therapist tried to help by explaining that control could not be conquered in all parts of her life, but certain actions, smoking, and skipping, for example, could be controlled on her part. The lack of control that was felt in Diaz’s life was due to the instability of her mother. She describes her and her sister sleeping fully dressed in case an incident occurred. Diaz also feared her mother, “my greatest fear, the thing that scared me the most in the world, was my mother” (Diaz 89). She feared her mother’s sudden outbursts, her violence, the embarrassment of her asking her friends for money, but more than anything else, she feared being like her mother. Going from her father’s house where she was constantly in fistfights with her brother to her mother’s house where she was constantly on edge ultimately left Diaz looking for a way to exert power and gain control and she found this through fighting.

America Is in Crisis. That's Not New for Many of Us | Time
Jaquira Diaz at 14 years old.

Díaz, J. (2020, June 25). America is in crisis. that’s not new for many of Us. Time. Retrieved November 2, 2021, from https://time.com/5859204/america-in-crisis/.

Díaz, J. (2020). Ordinary Girls: A Memoir. Algonquin Books.

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