You Decide
Okwuosa, “a lot,” which is the highest compliment available.
She calls me Tía.
She calls Hugo Papo, which nobody taught her and which she arrived at herself at about two and a half and which ruined him.
And she calls my sister Mamá.
That was decided in a room by four adults and a therapist in the January of 2023 and I want it on the record that I was not the one who argued for it hardest.
Marguerite Stiles was, in a family meeting, in about nine words: she has a mother, the mother’s alive, use the word.