However, throughout our lives, our priorities, emotional needs, and even our philosophy of life change.

I was the youngest child of my parents. My mother was 40 and my father was 48 when I was born. As I grew up, especially in school, I noticed that my parents were much older than the other parents who attended the meetings. Most of the other parents were always willing to attend sporting events, festivals, and field trips; and since my parents showed no interest in that, but rather in working to help their older siblings and grandchildren, I took refuge in my sister Agustina, who became my foster mother.

There are only 10 years and 10 days between my sister and me. She was born on January 2, 1963, and I on January 12, 1973. We are both Capricorns, and we are very similar in our approach to life, which makes sense, because she passed on her worldview to me, and I drank from that wellspring of wisdom.

My mother's name was Hilaria Rivas, and she had 10 children, not all of whom had the same father. So we were a "mixed" family. My older siblings could have been my parents. In fact, I have nephews and nieces who are older than me.

According to my selective memory of affections, I got along better with some siblings than others. Sometimes, I would go up to five years without seeing my siblings, and then I felt like they were strangers, people with whom I had no connection. Perhaps that's why I found my true brothers and sisters in my school and neighborhood friends.

When my mother, Hilaria, turned 70, my sister Agustina and I wanted to celebrate her birthday by getting all the siblings together. At first, the gathering was nice, but then childhood memories and traumas resurfaced, and each of us remembered family events in different ways. So, my "poor" mother ended up being the "referee in the arguments." Are mothers condemned to deal with their children's childhood traumas forever? "Poor mother," I thought at that moment. She should have had a happy birthday, and the closeness with her adult children brought back a dose of resentments from their own childhood and adolescence.

That's why, when I read the book The Wind of the Hours by Ángeles Mastretta, I felt a strong connection to it, because in the novel, the narrator reminisces about her childhood, adolescence, and adult life. Obviously, her memory is selective, like everyone's, and focuses on the family, romantic, and friendly relationships she had throughout her life. The writer says about her mother:

I have no reason to be sad. Music comes and comforts me. Life is good to me, but I still feel my mother's absence close. I now have the desolation of another Christmas without her presence. My mother loved Christmas. And the love for these holidays is something learned in childhood, and one no longer despises it if one is ungrateful. I love Christmas. I've been singing about it forever, but never in a way that would convince everyone around me that any excuse to love is good, and that this end-of-year excuse is even better than many others.

Since turning 50—I'll be 53 soon—I've begun to feel like I'm living the way I always wanted to: doing what I feel like doing, without stressful schedules that make me frown, and loving only what I want to love.

Sometimes I spend entire days without leaving the house, and then I talk to my dead: to my mother, to my father, to my sister Yolanda, and especially to my nephew Anthony, a young man who died in another country, a victim of the pandemic; and whose ashes we only have in a small wooden box that rests in my sister's house, always adorned with wildflowers. I've constantly imagined his last look, his last gesture of pain; but I didn't see it; and only crying soothes my soul:

Ángeles Mastretta puts it this way:

It's barely ten in the morning. We cry at night, we cry for heartbreak, for youth, for loneliness, for loss. Or just because.

As I write this, I'm crying, and I do so because I know that peace awaits me after the tears.

I don't know if I've said it before, but I'm still anchored to childhood. I still have my doll Carolina, who will soon be 43 years old; and now I have a dog named Susy, who has awakened in me a perfect connection of love and protection.

I live life to the fullest, and as Ángeles Mastretta says:

I'm more afraid of other people's deaths than my own... Just as if something doesn't hurt, I don't get it checked out...

This year, two childhood friends died: Maricarmen and Alejandra, who was my godmother. Almost all of us from the neighborhood gathered there, and we said goodbye, talking about our shared memories. Then, I thought, as Ángeles Mastretta says:

Now that death appears so frequently and always, in any case, astonishes and overshadows us. Is it that the more it happens, the more unheard of it seems?

I wonder if it's the frequency of death that makes us more distracted with age. We lose our loved ones, and with them, we lose track of our forgetfulness.

When I first read this book, which is a diary about the narrator's life, I felt that a part of me was in it. That's why I chose it for this challenge proposed by @weisser-rabe, to whom I express my affection and admiration.

Me gustaría invitar a @genomil, @blessedlife y @marcybetancourt