Wondering What My Mother Would Be Like at Age 76

 

Earlier this month. I attended Gunpowder Press’s release of their new anthology: Women in a Golden State: California Poets at 60 and Beyond. Since 2025 commemorates the 175^th anniversary of California’s statehood, the anthology features 175 California writers. My mother, Blanca Estela Palacio, would have been the same age as many of the women represented in the collection. December 5, she would be 76. For the world, she is forever immortalized at age 44. I am older than she was the last time I saw her alive, but not old enough to contribute to this anthology. The collection gives me an insight into what her life concerns would be as an aging Baby Boomer. Many favorite people and poets are included in this impressive poetry collection, a few micro essays are also tucked in.

As a child, I remember thinking that my mom was an exceptional women who had grown up with the best music. I was the oddball teenager who preferred her parents’ music and dances to her own generation’s. My mother was proud of the fact that she was a Baby Boomer, the generation of children born to parents who lived through World War Two, who protested the Vietnam War, who marched for peace, women’s rights, civil rights, and affirmative action.

Blanca Estela and Melinda Palacio

While my mother was born in Texas, she is very much a California girl. California is where she grew up, became a teacher, an activist, and a single mother who also took care of her parents and siblings during her short life. Because I keep aging and my mother does not, I often wonder what her life would be like now. I become wistful around women who have the opportunity for mother-daughter dates. There’s so much about my life in Santa Barbara that I wish I could have shared with my mother. We often took summer road trips from Los Angeles to San Francisco and on several occasions visited my uncle who was stationed at Vandenberg Airforce Base in Lompoc, but we never stopped in Santa Barbara. I don’t think my mom knew the town existed. Solvang was our usual stopping point. To this day, I have no explanation as to why we never stopped in Santa Barbara. I know she would have loved Santa Barbara, given that she enjoyed Solvang’s small town charm.

Ten years after my mother passed, I met a mother traveling with her adult daughter. I was so happy for the two of them. I told them how lucky they were. Mother and daughter Lucy agreed. They had the same round face and blue eyes. It still puts a smile on my face to think of the two women sharing an aisle on the airplane with twenty-year old younger me. While I can no longer travel with my mother, we sure shared some fun travels together to Hawaii, Mexico, and Europe. In reading Women In a Golden State, I see my mother in so many of the poems. Sharon Langley’s poem, I Saw My Mom Today, reminds me that I only need to look in the mirror see my mother: “Purse. Pucker, now pose./That’s her smile for sure./I saw my mom today.”

Thanks to Gunpowder Press editors Diana Raab and Chryss Yost, there’s a collection of 175 poems that share the concerns of Women in a Golden State and the anthology my mother would be included in if she were a living poet. 

 

 

 

*This article also appears in the Santa Barbara Independent