How She Taught Me to Let Go

CouRaGeouS Cuentos: A Journal of Counternarratives Volume 5 CouRaGeouS Cuentos: A Journal of Counternarratives Article 55 2022 How She Taught Me to Let Go Natalie Raquel Acuña Cal Poly Humboldt Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.humboldt.edu/courageouscuentos Part of the Bilingual, Multilingual, and Multicultural Education Commons, Chicana/o Studies Commons, Civic and Community Engagement Commons, Community-Based Learning Commons, Creative Writing Commons, Curriculum and Instruction Commons, Domestic and Intimate Partner Violence Commons, Educational Sociology Commons, Ethnic Studies Commons, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Gender and Sexuality Commons, History Commons, Inequality and Stratification Commons, Latin American Languages and Societies Commons, Latina/o Studies Commons, Modern Literature Commons, Politics and Social Change Commons, Race and Ethnicity Commons, Reading and Language Commons, and the Theory, Knowledge and Science Commons Recommended Citation Acuña, Natalie Raquel (2022) "How She Taught Me to Let Go," CouRaGeouS Cuentos: A Journal of Counternarratives: Vol. 5, Article 55. Available at: https://digitalcommons.humboldt.edu/courageouscuentos/vol5/iss1/55 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License © 2016 Department of Critical Race, Gender & Sexuality Studies (CRGS) at Humboldt State University. This Counternarratives and Reflections is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at Digital Commons @ Cal Poly Humboldt. It has been accepted for inclusion in CouRaGeouS Cuentos: A Journal of Counternarratives by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ Cal Poly Humboldt. For more information, please contact . How She Taught Me to Let Go   By Natalie Raquel Acuña My mother feeds me The warmth of home cooked meals, to adviceshe makes sure I’m full of. My mom taught me to never go to sleep angry. She reminds me this as my tears stain every step I take, my shoulders slumping and my hands reaching out to my stubborn ways. She says, “You’re the only one carrying this weight. The only one fighting a war right now is you. It’s too much of a load to carry by yourself. Let it go.” I bite my tongue that’s filled with rebuttals but she smiles at me and says “you’re so angry” How can I not be? My brother and father can sit up on your pedestal, they can watch me drown but I’m at fault for never learning how to swim. No one ever taught me. She says control those emotions, I ask her how. She says she herself isn’t a master but she’s gotten the flow of building up, she builds and piles every angry stone, every concrete pillar that she refuses to carry. 138 She stacks them on top of each other and the moment of collapse is earth shattering Crates and shakes just so we can feel every chill within our bones. She causes earthquakes and I’m still just flipping stones. 139  (...truncated)