COMADRE USA

Rubio’s Mother did it Right

By Juana Bimba

I'm a progressive and not a fan of former GOP presidential contender Marco Rubio-- but I admire his mother, Oriales Rubio, and I dedicate this Mother's Day Post to her. I think she's one Cuban mom who got it right.

My generation of middle class exiles was brought up by servants in Cuba. If early memories serve, my mother was the wraith who swept nightly into my room, draped in cocktail dresses and perfume, to kiss me goodnight and disappear until the next evening.

Then the revolution came and changed all that.

Whole families fled to Miami and, sans servants as a buffer, thousands of us began the process of getting to know the strangers who called themselves our parents. It wasn't easy.

Our fathers worked long hours. Our mothers, unfamiliar with parenting, left us to raise ourselves while they mastered the intricacies of housekeeping without the help.  

This being 60's America, we turned to Beaver Cleaver and his TV family for default role models. 

We wanted to be good kids. We did household chores and never talked back. We earned our own money (our parents had none to spare). We babysat, mowed lawns, flipped burgers, pumped gas. We bought jalopies with our meager savings. We went to public school. We attended college on loans and scholarships. 

And we turned out all right. Or so we thought.

Because when it was our turn to have kids, we screwed up, big-time. We tried to give them everything we hadn't enjoyed as young exiles and it backfired.  We made them into monumental wastes of space: arrogant, sullen, entitled and disrespectful brats.

True, the world has changed, and it's no longer possible to grow up as we did. Public schools are now dangerous places, and the after-school jobs that we did for pin money have been taken over by hordes of the unwashed. So our children attended private schools and didn't work for pocket money, college tuition, brand new cars, or anything else they wanted.

Still, it seems we could've done SOMETHING so they wouldn't have turned out as nasty. We’ve done them no favor by spoiling them. When they step out into the world and discover that their shit DOES stink after all, they have a hard time handling reality. They crash and burn. I’ve seen some tragic examples of it.

(My own son has turned out okay; maybe it's because there were few opportunities to pamper him, since I had to struggle to raise him by myself.)

I'm not saying absolute poverty is a virtue; it can drive people to crime. But living in merely modest circumstances can be a different story, a catalyst to teach kids to overcome and excel. 

This, I think, is what Oriales Rubio did with her son Marco, who went from a paycheck-to-paycheck childhood in Miami all the way to a senator's seat in Washington DC. Would he have turned out any differently if raised in a Spanish-style mansion in Coral Gables? 

Probably. But then, we'll never know. 

Happy Mother's Day to all.