Anna Castenada Rojas

“Ma,” I’m screaming into the phone with the wind still blowing, Brooklyn never wants to loosen its grip on winter. But the wind wants to go. After all, there’s a bunny here! A sure sign of spring. 

“What’s wrong?” My mother is on the other side of the country, chomping a bagel out on her balcony. She’s in curlers and a nightgown. I know this because even though I’m in Park Slope and she’s in Palo Alto where it’s three hours earlier, my mother has eaten a bagel in her nightgown and curlers every morning for the past forty-three years. 

“Ma, you’re not gonna believe this! I’m chasing a bunny through Prospect Park!”

“You’re chasing a what?” I can hear the crumbs spray off my mother’s lips as she reaches for her mug of milky coffee.

“A bunny, ma, a bunny.”

“What the hell are you talking about? There are no bunnies in Brooklyn.” 

I don’t know why my mother isn’t sitting on the boardwalk in Brighton Beach right now. She’s not the California type. She’s the Mumu on the boardwalk judging people as they walk by type. I mean, she’s yelling, YELLING AT ME, about this bunny. Arguing, really. And you can tell my family is from Brooklyn because I’m arguing right back. 

“Ma, how the hell do you know that there are no bunnies in Brooklyn? Are you here right now? Also, did you know that Coney Island was full of bunnies before it became Coney Island? It was called Rabbit Island before it was called Coney Island!”

My mother takes a deep sip of coffee before she says, “Are you in Coney Island right now or Prospect Park?”

“Prospect Park, by Ninth Street,” the bunny crosses the bike path, but I follow.

“Well, you should be at freaking Bellevue in Manhattan because you’re crazy. That’s not a bunny.”

The argument with my mother has not slowed me down. In fact, the angrier she makes me – insisting that this is not a bunny when she is in California, and I am following a bunny – gives me speed. I stay on the phone to argue and simultaneously chase the bunny. I’m not sure what I’ll do if I reach the bunny. It’s not like I’ll pick it up. I think I’m wondering that if I follow it into its home there is a possibility there will be more bunnies. Then I can snap a picture, post it on Instagram and caption it “First signs of Spring in Brooklyn!” Maybe the photo will go viral. Maybe I’ll be on the news. Maybe I’ll make a YouTube channel called “Brooklyn Bunnies” where I discover a new part of this bunny world every day. Then I’ll have tons of followers and be able to pay my bills, and I won’t have to worry so much about the cost of food, if I should sell my soul for a celery juice, or if I can find a brand-new pair of sneakers at a discounted price for my smallest child who’s growing at the speed of light. All of this goes through my head as I yell at my mother who’s eating a bagel on her balcony, and I chase this little animal into the forest.

“Ma, when I finally snap a picture of this thing, you’re going to be in shock. I mean, real shock. Ugh, hang on, I have to climb this fence.”

“Have you seen the news? Terrible, just terrible.” My mother has always had a real knack for changing the subject right at the point when I might win the argument. I put the phone on speaker and hook it into one of my bra straps under my sweater as I climb a fence by the far end of the lawn. 

“I haven’t seen or heard the news and I’d like to keep it that way,” I scream this into my chest as I jump down into what looks like an ivy forest just off the path. “I’m done watching the news, it’s making me really crazy and anxious.”

“Well dear, yes, you’re chasing an imaginary bunny into the woods. Aren’t you supposed to be working today?”

I snatch the phone from my bra strap, scratching my neck as I violently pull it out of my sweater. “Ma,” I grit my teeth, “the bunny is NOT imaginary. It’s right here, I just can’t get a picture of it because it keeps moving, oh but when I do…” Before I can finish my sentence, the bunny stops. “Ma, shhhh, hold on, it stopped.” As it freezes, I edge closer. It ruffles the ivy and turns to face me.

“Well, what is it?” My mother has a piece of bagel in her cheek that she hasn’t chewed yet. I can hear it there collecting saliva. She, too, is quiet and unmoving on the phone waiting to see who’s right. Who won the argument this time?

“Oh, wow, well, ok, eeewwww,” I am turning around as fast as I can, running in the other direction, hands shaking, shoving my phone back into my bra, leaping over the fence, taking the phone out again, and bounding across the big lawn at ninth street.

“What, what? What was it?” My mother shouts through the phone.

“I’m not telling you,” I’m still running.

“Now you have to tell me. I told you it wasn’t a G-ddamn bunny! What are you, nuts? What was it a squirrel? A bird? Chipmunk?”

“No, Ma, no.” I really don’t want to tell my mother what I have been maniacally chasing for the past fifteen minutes, but I know that in a real Brooklyn argument, you can’t hide the facts. 

“Come on, out with it! What have you been chasing?”

“A rat, ma, a freaking, disgusting, dirty rat, ok?!?” I wait for the cackle of laughter to come, and when it does, I laugh a little too.

“Do me a favor,” my mother is howling now, “if you’re off from work today go get your freaking eyes checked so that you stop seeing Easter Bunnies running around Park Slope.”

“Yeah, ok, Ma.”

“Now have a great day, dear. I love you! I’ve got to finish reading the Times before my ZOOM dance class.”

“Alright, Ma.”

“I can’t believe you just chased a rat through the park. I can’t wait to tell my friends at lunch today!” My mother is still giggling when she hangs up. 

If I really examine this experience, it’s that my heart has been chasing spring before spring has been ready to bloom. The winter was hard this year, and I can’t wait for the daffodils to begin making their entrances around the neighborhood. When will the front stoops of brownstones start showing their pink and blue perennials, their yellow tulips, their purple and white hyacinths? And because I can’t wait for the first bursts of color, those initial signs of hope and life, and the natural progression of things, I force it. Spring in Brooklyn, spring in Park Slope, cannot be forced. Instead, it must unfold, and we must allow it to. The cafes and restaurants up and down Fifth Avenue must set up their outdoor dining when the weather tells them it’s time. Little children exchange their heavy coats for sweatshirts and lighter activewear as the robins begin to appear. The green markets replaces apples and squash for strawberries, rhubarb, and asparagus. Then, and only then, is it spring. Anything else would be like screaming on the phone with your mother while chasing a rat through Prospect Park because you thought it was a bunny. And that would be crazy, right? I mean, who does that? 

Everyone dreams of living in Brooklyn at some point in their lives. If someone says this isn’t true, they’re lying. The brownstone brick, the tree lines streets, and the tin roofs of coffee shops evoke a sense of wonder.

“Hey Lady, move a little slower why don’t ya, it’s not like I have anywhere to be!”

The man in the Fresh Direct delivery truck turning from 5^th Avenue onto Union Street is most likely my exact age. He’s a dark-haired beauty with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, five o’clock shadow, white t-shirt, and a blue and white trucker hat with red letters across the front that spell out “I PEE IN POOLS”. If I wasn’t holding my three-year-old son’s hand, balancing a tote bag on one shoulder, and trudging along a heavy sack of groceries; if my tits didn’t look like sandbags, if this were twenty-five years ago, I might have smiled. Maybe. We might have exchanged numbers, and I would have absolutely bought a matching hat in pink. But because I’m tired, and middle-aged, and a mother, and mostly because I’m from Brooklyn, I shift the shopping bag from my hand to my wrist so that I can flag my middle finger in this guy’s face. 

“Sit on it and rotate, asshole,” I yell, to which he responds by blowing me a kiss, to which I respond with the typical, smirking, “in your dreams, buddy.” 

It doesn’t matter that some of my hair is gray. Who cares that the brown stain on my sweatshirt from a greasy falafel ball looks like a dirty heart. It doesn’t even really make a difference that my son, trailing alongside me, has his finger all the way inside of his nose almost down to the ashy knuckle. In Brooklyn, I am beautiful, aging backwards like my borough. The man in the Fresh Direct truck is a bonus. He’s my daily reminder that no matter what happens, “I still got it,” even if the “it” that I “got” is a shitty attitude and a lot of confidence. 

Brooklyn exists in a cloud of nostalgia. It is the borough of “before.” It is the county of sentimentality, wistfulness, and the memory of a yesterday we aren’t even sure existed in the first place. Everyone wants a piece. Everyone dreams of living in Brooklyn at some point in their lives. If someone says this isn’t true, they’re lying. The brownstone brick, the tree-lined streets, and the tin roofs of coffee shops evoke a sense of wonder. People who grew up here, or even long-time residents who have made it to Brooklynite status, shamelessly recount tales of “the old days.” The old days are visions of a time when things in Brooklyn were real, original, creative, authentic. In these tales told by Brooklyn elders, life always appear to be better or simpler. The stories often begin with a setting or an unlucky situation. 

“I grew up on President Street. But it was when President Street was really Brooklyn.” Another popular opener is, “One time my dad went to my school with a baseball bat to handle things with the class bully. That was old school. That’s how we dealt with things back then.” Back then. The story unfolds as if there is a lease on time and that part of history never moved past the father’s grip on the bat. In the myths and legends of Brooklyn, store owners know every child’s name on the block, bad guys get dealt with by tough guys, and parents are rarely around, entrusting their children to the peeping eyes of the neighborhood grandmothers who lean out of windows in floral nightgowns and see all. In this way Brooklyn and its people never grow old, even if they are old. In fact, they don’t grow old even if they’re dead. Brooklyn is fiction; the Never Neverland of New York. 

My own story of Brooklyn is broadcast in a similar fashion. When approached by a stranger with the question “where are you from?” my answer is always, “I’m from Brooklyn.” Most of the time, the question that follows is, “no, but originally.” I think the reason for this is that nowadays I look like a midwestern Mom of three who has no clue where I left the keys to my apartment even though they’re in the tie-dye fanny pack attached to my waist. This makes my nostalgic Brooklyn tale even more crucial. “What? What do you mean? I’m from Brooklyn, and my father’s from Brooklyn, and my grandparents came here when they were six! And everyone in my family watched the Brooklyn Dodger games from their roof! Oh, and Coney Island, we went to Coney all the time, and ate hot dogs, and we were happy!” As I scream and rant about the schools I attended, how my mother would take me to the Brooklyn Museum every weekend, how my Dad’s best friend lived on fifteenth off of Prospect Park and got stabbed ten times on his way home one day, I wonder if I am telling the stories to prove something to the listener, or more so to prove something to myself. 

As our own youth disappears, as the reality of the enormity of life shifts into clear view, the stories we tell ourselves, the narratives we save for others, becomes the history of a borough that never wanted to grow up. There are always two Brooklyns simultaneously existing for most of us. For example, when I flip off the Fresh Direct, Bruce Springsteen look-a-like driver, I also feel the past creep up my neck like a whisper from a stranger in a dark bar. “Hey,” the voice says, “tell me something about yourself.” The man in the truck, cigarette falling from full lips, tempts the me from another time. But the reality, the day-to-day is often bleak, and out of this daily bleakness is where the seed of beauty is planted. In a few hours I must pick my two daughters up from school. At five o’clock I have to make dinner. At eight o’clock everyone goes to bed after a bath, and then I get ready for the next day. School, lunch, walking to my Mom’s house to give her a shower because she’s just had hip surgery. More cooking, waiting for my husband’s day off so that I can do everyone’s laundry. Then the stories emerge, erupting out of me, the tales my children will tell to keep the heart of the neighborhood beating forward into tomorrow.

“Mami yells at the drivers on the street,” my seven-year-old has been known to tell her teachers at school. “She gets so mad and then she yells and then they wait for us to cross the street. Also, one time, Mami chased a delivery guy on a bike because he didn’t say excuse me.” Her teachers nod and smile, and at a parent-teacher conference they show me a picture she drew of me running after the cyclist. I laugh because the legends of the Brooklyn mother have already started circulating throughout the grade and on the classroom’s group chat. In Brooklyn, to become a legend, even if only in a small child’s Crayola depiction, is to age backwards, to be frozen in the time of someone else’s memory. To be a part of Brooklyn, to become its concrete, its brownstones, its front stoop chalk games, is to have stories told about you by someone else.

After all, life can be mundane at best, cruel at worst. As the Fresh Direct truck disappears into the distance of Union Street, the grocery bag I am holding rips open halfway down the block. A box of gluten free cookies, a large can of coconut water, an organic dark chocolate bar, three apples, and two ripe bananas roll out onto the sidewalk. “Shit,” I say staring at the pretentious mess in front of me. The spill has me asking myself what version of Brooklyn I am living in now. When historians look back at Brooklyn today, will a sepia photo of me screaming on a street corner holding my son’s hand appear? Will the coffee shops and restaurants have a fuzzy look to them in the textbooks people study?

“Oh man, that sucks,” a teenage boy says as he passes my mess. 

“Yeah, don’t offer to help or anything,” I snap back while shoving the chocolate and coconut water in my tote bag, trying to untangle the ripped plastic shopping bag from the bananas.

“I’m in a rush, lady,” he puts his air pods in so that he doesn’t have to hear me when I answer. 

But it doesn’t matter. I’m already fiction. I’m already aging backwards, a frozen photo still of a woman bending down to pick up her fallen groceries, on the epic, unending streets of Brooklyn.

My middle child, Alma, came on the heels of a miscarriage. Two months after I lost a baby, my daughter appeared on a blurry sonogram screen in a run-down doctor’s office in the heart of Brooklyn. I knew that I would name her Alma, the word for soul in Spanish, the word we say in our home when there’s something deeper than “I love you.” Mi Alma, we say in Spanish, my soul. 

Alma will be five years old in December and she’s having a tough time. Today she is the middle child. She’s right in the middle, two years older than her brother, Mathias, and two years younger than her big sister, Helen. In her short five years she has lived through the death of one grandmother and the grief of a father. She has lived through a pandemic. She has lived through staying inside for a year or two. She has lived through masks, and hand sanitizer. She has lived through a traumatic seizure her little brother had when he was almost two. She has lived. 

On Sunday, Alma’s tantrum was the worst it has been since she was three, when we adopted the comical name “threenager” and were convinced that by five the meltdowns would cease. But this was the first time I feared my own child. It was also the first time I had to remove my other two children, take them into the bedroom, and close the door saying through a crack “when you can calm down, Mami can open the door.” I was afraid of my almost five-year-old, I was afraid of my soul. Mi Alma. 

A child’s behavior is often a two-way street. In a parenting webinar I take out of desperation, the host speaks to me through a screen and says, “the child’s behavior is usually in direct reaction to the adult’s behavior”. This is a complex idea for me, especially because Alma is the child who is most like me in personality and empathy. She’s also my most tactile child, always needing to be close, comforted, hugged, and snuggled. When inside my belly, she carved out a space in my spine and stayed there for much of the final trimester. She found such a cozy spot inside of my womb that I now have three engorged discs in my back that will never go back to normal. With Alma I had sciatica down my left leg, I had gurd, I had so much trouble sleeping, I would sit on the couch and just cry. But when she arrived, she was the sweetest baby in the nursery. My night nurse at the hospital said that every nurse fought to hold Alma because she was so sweet and quiet, a good eater, and a gem to hold. 

On Sunday I hold Alma in my arms on the floor as she wails. “Aaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh,” she screams so loud I fear the other neighbors in my apartment complex might knock on the door to ask what’s going on. And I would have to tell them, “This is a tantrum, my daughter is throwing a tantrum.” The baby starts to cry, Helen starts to cry, and finally, when Alma won’t stop, I start to cry. It’s all just too much sometimes. 

I’m not always a great mother. My friends say that I am and that makes me think I’m like a night villain wearing a cape, pretending to be a normal citizen when really, I feel like a creep most of the time. I get very angry sometimes, annoyed, impatient. When Alma starts to cry because she can’t have what she wants, which is often these days, I get upset, I scold, I leave the room. Sometimes I lose my temper, and this makes me feel like the worst mother on the planet even though I’m human, even though I know mothers lose their tempers, even though I know, I know, I know. But the mother guilt, the mother wound is sometimes stronger than what’s real. Sometimes, as a mother, it’s hard to find the truth in the middle of a tsunami.

“Alma, mi Alma,” I coo in Spanish. “Alma, are you happy?” I ask one day holding my middle child in my arms on my yoga mat after she has stepped in front of my video to cry and scream that someone took her toy.

“Yes,” she nods.

“Alma, mi Alma,” I continue, “did you have a good day at school yesterday?”

“Yes,” she says again. My hands are interlaced with her tiny fingers. I wonder how a child so small can make such a huge fire in the belly.

“Are you angry at Mommy? Are you angry at Papi? Are you angry at Helen? Are you angry at Mathias?”

“No, no, no, no, no.”

“Do you know we love you?”

“Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.” 

A friend suggests I ask simple questions to find out what’s going on. “Ask her to find out, to figure it out,” she says, as if motherhood is that simple, as if there’s always an answer and when we have it everything will go back to normal, as if normal is a place or an award we can achieve. 

After the tears I pack a lunch and get everyone dressed. “Come on you guys,” I smile, my eyes puffy from exhaustion, “let’s go to our tree.”

One of my children’s favorite places is a tree deep in Prospect Park that has fallen over. It’s where Alma feels most free to climb and sit calmly with her siblings. We bring grapes, turkey sandwiches, and little cartons of organic chocolate milk. The air in Brooklyn is crisp. The leaves down Prospect Park West promise a colorful fall, a bright school year. The browns, yellows, blazing oranges lead the way toward a little salvation on the weekends. The children build forts, magical kingdoms where only they can save a village that has been under attack by an evil monster. We sit on the grass and get our jeans muddy from a fallen rain from the night before. A puppy nearby catches a tennis ball in his mouth and brings it back to his owner. Two lovers kiss and embrace under an old oak tree. 

I remember just two years ago when Prospect Park was the only salvation for a city suffering silently with the rest of the world. I remember how we felt: alone, afraid, and unsure of what the universe held in store for us. Perhaps this is how children feel a lot of the time, especially tactile children like Alma who need to be comforted more often, who need to be reassured that, “everything will be alright, shush now, everything will be fine.”

“Mami,” Alma says happier than she has looked all week, “Did you know that a big monster was living in our tree, but he was a friendly monster and now we can climb the tree with him and he gets us candy?”

“Wow, really?” I say, “what a nice monster!”

“Mami,” Alma looks at me the sun glinting off her brown eyes, a strand of hair caught on her cheek.

“Yes, my love?”

“I’m sorry I screamed.” She hugs me.

“Thank you for saying sorry. It’s ok to be angry, right?”

“Yes,” she answers, “but it’s not ok to have a tantrum and hurt people.”

I know we’re learning. I know that together we’re learning. I know this. Deep in my soul, in the depths of my alma, I know. The park’s beauty promises salvation, patience, wonder, and the magic of childhood. At almost five years old, Alma knows this too. 

“Mami, I love it here,” she laughs while running to her tree, because in this moment it’s hers, something all for herself, something that’s big enough for everyone so she doesn’t have to share it. She doesn’t have to squeeze herself in the middle for it. She doesn’t have to throw herself on the floor and beg to be seen. On the heels of winter, the Brooklyn leaves carry her, and by carrying her, they carry me too. They carry all of us forward as we approach the darkest months. And if we look closely enough, we can see that the dark and the cold is really just a hiding place full of brilliant light.