My Nanny and the Origins of my Quirkyness
Around midnight last night, on our way home from work, my sister and I were discussing my inherent weirdness/quirkyness and its origins. Since both my parents/family are kind of conservative and nerdy (allbeit with excellent senses of humor), we agreed that it would have been really hard for me to acquire most of my quirky habits from them, since they lack quirky habits/don’t encourage “otherness.” Then, randomly, I told her that one of my favorite childhood memories was that of my Nanny, Reyna, sending up all of my meals on the wheelchair escalator machine that went from upstairs to downstairs that belonged to the handicapped woman who lived in our house before us/that we never bothered to have taken out because my Dad knew how much I enjoyed it. I would send all my meals, laundry, things up and down the stairs on that wheelchair escalator, or I would just ride it, and Reyna would use it for tons of stuff too. BAM! My sister was like, “There it is. You were raised by Reyna (who’s like the biggest, most hilarious, quirky weirdo lady in the game), and that’s why you are the way you are.” My Nanny raised me since I was 3 months old, and she lived in my house til I was 10 years old, and she pretty much let me do whatever weird thing I wanted to do. Other memories started to pop up that in retrospect could be considered quirky: a memory of me being like 5 in my backyard having to go pee, and Reyna just saying, “Oh, you have to pee? Go in the rose bushes over there.Thats ok. (my mother would have died).” Or, like, all the times when I was 4-5-6, and Reyna and I would ride the bus to immigration to talk to them, and I would do all her translating for her, then she would take me to the Panaderia to treat me to a pandulce and brag about me to ALL of her friends about what a bilingual genius I was at the young age of 5. Or, how she always indulged every QUIRKY whim of mine, like, my obsession with hour’derves (I would have her cut all of my food into tiny squares so I could pretend I was eating hour’derves, etc). At the core, Reyna is sorta strange; she has always made me and my brother/sister/mother laugh because she says the weirdest/funniest things i.e. she once cried about how ugly her daughter’s boyfriend was and how bad she felt for her daughter to look have to look at such an ugly man, you know, since he was so ugly. Since Reyna was a quirky/odd person herself, she let me indulge in what would have probably been considered as odd by the mainstream, but she loved me no matter how strange/quirky I was, and for that I’m eternally grateful.
I Love you, Reyna.You fucking weirdo.
my mom was like this! the hors d’oeuvres part made me remember how she would make little menus for me because i could never decide what i wanted to eat.
