Rita Avalos

la estrella de Michoacán cantante profesional de música ranchera.

Estoy compartiendo con ustedes un delicioso (snack) bocadillo muy delicioso y nutritivo es una malteada de leche de soya de proteína con fruta Blueberries y fresas, un pan de trigo con mermelada de cacahuate y un plátano pequeño. Saludos con mucho cariño a todos los lectores de la revista LATINAS CON PODER.

Mothers or Madres.

One of the most treasured females on Earth, one that some people take for granted and one that many others wish they had had in their lives. Mothers come in many varieties. There are, of course, the natural mothers who give birth to their children and, with the help of a spouse, raise them to adulthood. Then there are the single mothers who raise their children alone without the help of a spouse or live-in partner. Also, these days grandparents step in and raise their grandkids when their own kids fail to step up to the task. And finally, there are the adoptive parents, or parent, who lovingly adopt someone else’s child and raise it as their own.

I’m going to reflect upon 3 mothers who have greatly influenced my life. First, there is my own mother. She had me in 1949, 5 years after she and my father married. I was her first child. 2 years later, my brother was born to her. She was a strict parent, herself being raised by strict Hungarian immigrant parents who came to the United States at the turn of the 20th century. But she was also a loving parent. I wanted to play the piano at a young age and she made sure I got the piano lessons I needed. She also would NOT let me quit until my teacher told her she had taken me as far as she could, and I needed to go to a music conservatory if I was to continue on that path. I nixed that idea, telling my mother I was no concert pianist. Instead, I wanted to play modern music. She relented and when I started making money playing in rock bands, I showed her she hadn’t wasted her money on the lessons. What really thrilled me is when I later started playing in the piano lounges, she and my father would come in to see me play.

As the years went by, my mother and I became closer, and we spent many days going to lunch and visiting each other after my father passed away. After a while she started developing dementia and it became more and more difficult to be with her. Finally, my brother and I had to put her in a rest home where she eventually passed away at the age of 92.

daughter, within the first year of our marriage. Instead of taking care of our baby at our own home, she went to her mother’s house every day. I wasn’t too upset about that at first because she was a new mother with her first child. But then it just continued for several months. Finally, she went back to work and her mother became the daily babysitter. Again, that wasn’t the problem, except we also wound up spending the weekends with them too! Weeks became months and months became years.

So, the years passed, and we added 2 more kids but things never really improved. We divorced after 22 years of marriage. To her credit, however, when we started having grandkids, she stepped up admirably to raise 3 of our grand daughters because their mother (our 2nd daughter) was into drugs and bad people. So, she did for our grandkids what she should’ve for our own kids. Sadly, she just passed away a few months ago after being ill for several years.

Finally, I would LOVE to talk about the third mother in my life, my wonderful, beautiful current WIFE!! Along with being the LOVE of my life, she is an incredible mother to her 2 adult sons. One of them actually lives in an apartment adjacent to our house and the other lives with his grandmother in Mexico. She communicates with them every day, calls each one “mijito lindo” constantly and is always there for them whenever they need her. The son who lives next to us is an architect and my wife made sure he went to the finest architecture school in the area. In fact, his boss hired him immediately when he found out he had attended that particular school. My wife is very independent from her family, even choosing to live in another country. So she is the opposite of my first wife. She also puts her immediate family first, which is the way it should be.

She is a very busy woman. She runs her business in Mexico daily from our office while also going to meetings with important people, taking pictures as a professional photographer and putting together this magazine every month. All that and she still finds the time to be great madre to her sons.

The next mother I want to talk about is my first wife. Unlike my own mother, my first wife was not a good wife or mother. She, instead, preferred to remain a daughter to her own mother. We had our first child, a

Joe Cromwell Professional Musician and Teacher.