Maritza, the mother

Immobile, Maritza heard the slam of the door when angered Cassandra left the kitchen in the middle of one of their cyclical, unresolved arguments. Cassandra was not her daughter anymore. Although they loved each other, she could not recognize that person who left so enraged leaving her in the middle of a sentence, just like that.

Martiza, now at 40, believed she understood life better than her daughter did. She had learned that each year adding to your life resume changes the "how to deal" with the crazy world, and changes people too. She remembers that when she was twenty years old, she felt as if life was a Grand Central Station with many trains going to fascinating places full of fascinating people, and that she had the energy and all her life ahead to ride them all.

Along the years and carrying the scars of her rough bumpy ride of her twenties and thirties, the version of the Grand Central Station metaphor she tells her daughter changed with time. Now that her daughter was in her 20's, in that lecturing tone, as distilling some secret wisdom out of her own life, she repeated to her daughter her altered version of her original metaphor: “Cassandra; life is like a Grand Central Station with many trains going in and out. Once you choose a train, what you are really choosing is a ride, not a destination.” Then, as if she was doing her a favor by making her anxious about the other shoe dropping, she would add with a "utmost-serious-matter” tone, “Even when you do not get to were you intended, it will take you somewhere. In any case, and no matter what train you choose, listen well: there is no return. You will be somewhere else, and will become someone else.”

She felt totally validated when one day in her job she received a Power Point Presentation called the Train of Life, with beautiful colored pictures y mellow music, saying practically the same thing. She was into something; "connected to the universe's wisdom", so she thought. Her search for happiness had included a failed marriage, many broken relationships, not finishing any of the different majors at college she tried, moves to three or four towns, and many jobs --bad and terrible. Her daughter did not have to go through what she went. She would make sure of it.