This week, I had an admirable array of possible choices. There are tutors, masters in many disciplines in my family tree. One of my paternal great-grandfathers was a teacher, school principal, journalist, a published poet and up until the last week of his life he wrote for an art column in a local newspaper in my hometown. There are schools named for him, and for his sister, another great teacher. There are numerous music instructors, college professors in various fields ranging from law to medicine, cited to this day in scholarly papers. All of them are formidable, and deserving of their own blog post. But when I think about this theme, there is one name that always comes to the top.
I hope no one finds it strange or inappropriate that I am writing about a living ancestor, someone who is very close to me: my mother. She embodies the dedication, the passion and the true sense of what it is to be an educator. I apologize in advance if this will be too personal. I do not want this to read like a eulogy. Right now, I want to pay tribute to my mother for her achievements and the lives she touched during her years in teaching, or magistério, in Portuguese, from the Latin magisterium, meaning “a principle of nature having transmuting or curative powers”. That is indeed the power an educator wields.
My mother is 75, and was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia when she was only 61. News of her retirement in 2009 caught us by surprise; up until then, she had been talking about leaving her job in 2012. She had big plans, one was writing a book. She wanted to travel to spend time with me, in the United States, and my brother, who was living in Europe at the time. My mother became a grandmother twice in 2007. She took some time off to be with my family when I gave birth in March that year, and in October when my sister delivered her first child. When mom retired in mid-2009 there was another baby on the way, my sister’s second daughter. Two grandsons arrived when her cognition was already somewhat impaired, in 2012 and 2014, but we have beautiful pictures of her holding each of them with all the love of the world in her eyes.
Before her diagnosis, she wanted to cross off other items from her travel bucket list, specially Budapest. She has traveled extensively, but an opportunity to go to Eastern Europe never came. I am glad that, on her last international trip before her illness made such things impossible, she came to visit while I was living in Georgia. My mother always dreamed of seeing Savannah and Charleston, having grown up reading romance novels set in the Antebellum Era. We took the grand tour! During those weeks, I was able to observe what my sister had been telling me, about Mom’s spotty memory and executive function difficulties. For us, the long process of grieving the slow loss of our mother had started, and is still unfolding. Dementia is indeed the long goodbye, and it has given me the opportunity to reflect on life, death, spirituality, the things that matter and the ones that don’t. It gave me a new perspective on my mother and on my changing relationship with her. It certainly shapes me as a mother to my own children. I traveled from one side of the spectrum to the other, from being the one she cared for, to being a caregiver, although my sister, an extraordinary powerhouse of a woman and an apple who did not fall far from the tree, is the one that fulfills that role primarily.
I have seen my mother from her strongest to her most vulnerable, I came up with boundless more admiration for the absolute rockstar Maria Luiza is, and I want to write that while she is still here. When I see her, sometimes I catch a brief glint of recognition, she sees me and something inside her lights up. I do not know what she remembers, she cannot use her words anymore. Everything that makes a person who they are, the collection of personal traits, knowledge acquired, life experiences and whatever it is that constitutes one’s soul my mother still has them, but these things are locked away inside her brain, forever irretrievable. My children, nieces and nephew are growing up without the privilege I had of having both grandmothers around. I am leaving these words, which are patently my own impressions of her, so they can know a little more about Vovó Biziza.
She was born in Vila Velha, Espírito Santo, on July 21st, 1947, the second-to-last in my grandparents’ brood of ten. Mom lived her whole life within 2 kilometers from where she was born. The city was not big, and the times were different, the prospects were not the most exciting. Most people would not leave town, it was a quiet life. But she was born with the gift of wanderlust, which she indulged in by reading every book she could get her hands on, watching movies, and later in life, traveling. She was a straight-A student and in high school she went for a teacher’s certification track. She was already employed tutoring adults at a public school’s nighttime elementary education program when she started college, pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Neo-Latin Languages. By then, she had been dating my father for a few years. They had known each other since infancy, as it happens in small towns. The rest of the story unfolds in a fairly predictable way: they got their degrees, got married, had a baby (me), bought a house, had my brother, had my sister.
Now, things go off script. Not many people got divorced at that time. You were married, no matter how unhappily, until life did you part. My parents did not stay together, which was of course not easy on any of us, but for their own sake, in retrospect, I am glad they did. They are both good people who simply did not belong together. My father moved away, she stayed and became a solo parent when this was still taboo. Mother kept a brave face as some of their old relations drifted away due to her “unconventional” marital status. She raised us through thick and thin, went back to work outside of home, something she had not done since my brother had arrived. I am old enough to remember her suffering, but she was also a very practical person, and she did everything she had to do to pick herself up, and kept our lives as steady as possible. We did not experience hardship. She cried when she had to cry, the first couple of years took some getting used to, but on the other side she emerged stronger, resilient, and she never lost one ounce of the grace, kindness, generosity and dedication she devoted to her children, and to her students.
Mom juggled working at a school in the morning, and tutoring in the afternoon at our house. We had a classroom on the second floor with a long table sitting up to ten people. I grew up with the constant opening and closing of the front gate, watching the groups arrive hourly. Most of those were high school seniors she was preparing to pass the competitive university admission tests we take in Brazil. She also taught French, her second-favorite language, in which she was beautifully fluent. Portuguese was number one, and that love she had nurtured since childhood, reading the works from the great masters. Brazil and Portugal have produced some of the richest literature in the world, still vastly underrated. You should really. Check. Them. Out. Each of these links.
My mother believed that an education was a right, not a privilege. I remember her teaching grown-ups who had not been able to complete their studies when younger. She was unflappable dealing with the throngs of sleepy-eyed teenagers during school’s first period at 7 in the morning, that oftentimes were not on their best behavior. She would spend long hours editing and proofreading post-graduate and PhD theses, and facing, unflinchingly, piles of tests to grade (it was all paper-based, dear young reader). Mom was tired, a lot, putting in a double, sometimes triple, journey every day. Also, she was an introvert, and being one myself I do not know how she mustered the energy to engage daily with so many people, but she did.
When she was not working, she was in her bedroom at the end of the hallway, the space where she could enjoy the brief gift of quiet and solitude, although she always knew what us kids were up to. She was not an absentee mother, and she was firm in disciplining the wayward child (I think I deserve the Number 1 prize on that). She grew up with strict values of politeness, respect for everyone regardless of their background, strong work ethic and personal responsibility, and she expected nothing less from us. We were also brought up still in the old times when there was the proverbial village that helped raise the children. Both my grandmothers, some of my uncles and aunts were always present, she could count on them and so did we, but during the hardest times, during the long sleepless nights with one or more sick kids, when she had to manage the myriad little crises that come with parenting, when one of us was struggling in the difficult process of growing up, she was there, always by our side, always steady, our biggest encourager, enthusiastic about our prospects and exploits. My brother left to live abroad in 2000, I moved here the following year, and she cheered for our success while missing us dearly.
During school vacation, we would travel to be with our father, and mom would purchase a travel package and go somewhere. She went to Europe and the US several times, she traveled a lot within South America and domestically in Brazil, too. She would always send postcards from whichever new destination she was visiting. Those are now stored in boxes along with many pictures and other mementos from her adventures. That lady climbed several hundred of steps and experienced the rarefied air and the visual marvel of Macchu Picchu, she was in Los Angeles in 1994 during an earthquake, and she had this one story where she was behind a man at an airport in London, then in a few days in Toronto, and finally in Brazil, same guy, wearing the same jacket, a couple of weeks later. For him, it was probably boring work travel, but she did all of that plane hopping while seven months pregnant, which is no small feat.
I am very happy to inform that she found love again, more than once. Some relationships were brief, and the last one lasted a couple of decades. They never got married, didn’t even move in together, which was by common agreement and worked out great. He was a good friend, a companion, and for a period of time a caregiver, until we had to move her to be closer to my sister.
My deep dive into family history, and the fact that it has become so big I am now even keeping a blog, started with her. She liked telling stories, specially of her travels to her mother’s hometown of Campos, when she was younger. There were so many uncles and aunts, cousins galore, I could not keep track of them. Now I have plentiful names and dates, but sometimes cannot match them to the stories, a big source of dismay because I should have written those things down somewhere.
My mother had a prodigious memory, and she would remember people’s names, birthdays, even phone numbers (again something really novel for you, young reader). She called every sibling, niece, nephew, and a long list of dear friends to wish them all the happiness and health on their big day and through the year ahead. Many of those friends were former students. She threw beautiful birthday parties for the three of us, creating treats and decorations by hand in a pre-Pinterest era when you had to come up with the ideas on your own. She made picture albums chronicling our childhood, all labeled and decorated, also before the digital age. Those, I am rushing to scan because time is not kind to photo paper.
For each of our births, she created a Baby Book where you can see her perfect calligraphy on the family tree going up to the great-grandparents, all the immunizations, major milestones, and some of her impressions of her babies in all the important categories of “first smile”, “first tooth”, “first steps” and “first word”. Mine was “ua”, which she translated to the readership as “rua” (street), but it could also mean “lua” (moon). Or, pretty much anything that sounded vaguely like that. My vocabulary grew exponentially and very fast, undoubtedly because I was surrounded by said village, my mom at the center of it, making the time to play with dolls, sing lullabies (in French too!), and read books. We had a lot of them, and they were not just for show. She taught me to read when I was three, which earned me a fast pass in academics: the sisters at the Vicentian school she had attended and where she also taught at times let me enroll in kindergarten ahead of schedule.
Every memory of my mom is profoundly intertwined with her craft, her mission, her passion of being a teacher. Even when the times were not the greatest, again, we are talking dealing with teenagers, she was always ready with a lesson plan, a smile on her face, a clear explanation for each of the incomprehensibly complex verb tenses and the labyrinthine rules of Portuguese grammar, and more than enough time to help a student before or after class. I do not think she had real off hours. Teaching was her every day, not just a job. She believed in education as the key to form a professional, a citizen, a well-rounded person, and she wanted to see each of her students realize their potential.
She also liked being the student. She went back to further her own education, taking courses in theology, a subject she was really interested in even though she was not particularly religious. Furthermore, she went for her post-graduate studies when I was already in college, and she wrote her final monograph on the language and symbolism in the music and lyrics of her favorite composer, Chico Buarque de Hollanda, who was targeted during the military dictatorship my mother grew up under, starting in 1964 when she was still in her teens, and ending when she was the mother of a teenager. One of the dearest memories I have is taking her to see him live when I was living in São Paulo, sometime in ’98 or ’99. She was able to deliver a copy of her study to one of his assistants. I hope he received it. Chico, by the way, is still fighting the good fight. She was also a huge Elvis Presley fan, and after the onset of her illness, on those days when she was more absent, in those increasingly longer gaps of connection with the world and the people around her, one of his movies would always bring her back, and we would sing with Elvis whether he was in Las Vegas, Acapulco or Hawaii.
So, this is a little bit about Maria Luiza, one of three ancestors I still have along with my dad and his mother. Some people who will read this blog also know my mother, and may want to add their own impressions, or would like to highlight a different set of memories of her. The comments section is open. If you are someone doing family history, do not wait until after they are gone. Seek them out, listen to their stories, write them down. And if I may suggest one question to ask them, this is it: ask about their teachers. Behind a great person, there is typically a dedicated group of educators who helped them along the way. I know because every single time I visit my hometown, I run into someone who has something amazing to say about my mom.
