Create your own story with WhatIf!
Create your own story with WhatIf!
Adult Narrator: When I was a little girl, I believed every family was like mine.
Adult Narrator: I believed every grandmother arrived carrying sadness she couldn’t explain.
Adult Narrator: I thought that was normal. It wasn’t.
Adult Narrator: As I grew older, I understood that something had happened long before I was born.
Adult Narrator: It was powerful enough to ripple through our family years later.
Adult Narrator: The adults carried those wounds everywhere they went.
Adult Narrator: Under the ordinary routines of fields, animals, and meals, another reality lived.
Adult Narrator: They talked about things they hoped the children would not hear.
Adult Narrator: Delfina arrived carrying a sorrow that seemed to enter the house before she did.
Adult Narrator: Nobody asked her to explain it.
Adult Narrator: They already knew how to make room for pain without naming it.
Adult Narrator: I was especially observant.
Adult Narrator: I began listening carefully, watching carefully, trying to make sense of things.
Adult Narrator: A conversation could disappear when I entered a room.
Adult Narrator: A pause could carry more meaning than a sentence.
Adult Narrator: Many grown-ups make the mistake of thinking children don’t understand.
Adult Narrator: Children hear more than anyone suspects.
Adult Narrator: They may not understand everything at the time, but they remember.
Adult Narrator: Eventually, the pieces begin fitting together.
Adult Narrator: My grandmother Delfina carried a great deal of pain.
Adult Narrator: Sorrow seemed to follow her.
Adult Narrator: I loved her immensely, and seeing her suffer hurt me, even when I didn’t understand why.
Adult Narrator: My mother carried that same burden in a different way.
Adult Narrator: She rarely allowed herself to stop.
Adult Narrator: In many ways, I think work became her way of surviving.
Adult Narrator: If her hands were busy, maybe the past could not catch up with her.
Adult Narrator: When I came back to the ranch as an adult, I recognized the silence in myself.
Adult Narrator: The pause before a question. The instinct to protect everyone else.
Adult Narrator: I had carried it farther than I knew.
Adult Narrator: I went back through the fragments without forcing them into a neat explanation.
Adult Narrator: Delfina’s sorrow and my mother’s labor looked like different answers to the same wound.
Adult Narrator: One turned inward. The other kept moving.
Adult Narrator: Eventually, I asked my mother one careful question. She did not tell me the whole story.
Mother: We didn’t know how to talk about it. We knew how to keep going.
Adult Narrator: The answer was incomplete, but it changed the shape of the past.
Adult Narrator: Remembering was not betrayal.
Adult Narrator: The children who listened had been carrying more than anyone knew.
Adult Narrator: I still don’t know every detail.
Adult Narrator: I know this much: silence can be inherited, but it does not have to speak for everyone.
Adult Narrator: Now, when a child asks, we let the question stay in the room.
Young Narrator: Can I ask you something?
