Care as the Currency That Cleared. La Hermana Mami

Hotline Intro

Thank you for calling the Tóxica Tarot Hotline. Listen up because the options can always change.

Press one if you signed your sibling consent forms growing up in order to help out.

Press two if you're the self-assigned family fire warden when things get out of hand.

Press three if your out of office reply has never stopped anyone from calling you.

If you've ever solved a problem that wasn't yours before the person describing it, amiga, stay on the line.

Tóxica Tarot is for entertainment purposes only. The host is not a therapist, does not offer readings, and is legally speaking just a rando on the internet. Twenty-two archetypes, one card an episode. Side effects may include cringe, compassion, and cunty self-care. Tóxica Tarot is Latina made for the girls, gays, and theys.

Audience discretion is advised.

The Welcome

Hola, hola, hola. I'm so glad you're here. Come on in, relax your shoulders, settle in, maybe make yourself some tea. I suggest hibiscus for the heart or tulsi for permission to pause.

Let's get comfortable so that we can get a little uncomfortable.

I'm your host, Carla Corazón, and this is Tóxica Tarot.

Meet the Empress

We come across The Empress sitting in a wheat field. Her setup, ooh, it's good. She's got a waterfall, a crown made of 12 stars, the symbol of Venus at her feet. Our girl has a pomegranate print dress, and it's giving fertility, baby.

This card is often associated with abundance, motherhood, and nature.

Everything comes through The Empress.

Meet La Hermana Mami

In Tóxica Tarot, the Empress goes by La Hermana Mami, patron Tóxica of Smothering. If the Empress is about nurturing, the shadow is about smothering.

This one is often found with the eldest daughter promoted before she was old enough to refuse the offer. You see her and you see someone capable, reliable, the one who handles it.

The thing we often don't notice is that a lot of these responsibilities came before the age of ten.

A lot of immigrant households have needs that nobody else can meet. And La Hermana Mami is the one who remembers to bring the sunscreen when Mami forgets.

They're also the ones who feel an immense guilt if they forget and their siblings get burned, never really paying attention to their own hard-to-reach places.

The household reorganizes itself around her competence. She carries it even though no one ever asked her if she wanted to, and the carrying became her identity. So much so that putting it down felt like a betrayal to the people that love her.

The Yolanda Clause

In this space, we listen and we don't judge, but we do have a Yolanda Clause that we need to cover. We cover pattern recognition but not absolution, and this is not a hall pass to cause or endure harm.

Some of us grew up in homes where "I volunteer as tribute" came as default without us really understanding why.

For the eldest daughter, the gender expectations are big and early. Some kids are handed dolls, and others are handed the emotional weight of a household.

I think about this like a false forklift certification. She was handling the heavy machinery without the training or pay. What's the worst that could happen?

Our brains organize for the tasks that are directly in front of us. You learn to monitor adults' moods more than cartoons.

They became excellent at learning to anticipate the needs of the room so efficiently that they had the answer before anybody could finish. Capacity attracts demand.

The house stayed standing, but the cost was that they forgot that they were also somebody who needed foundational support.

The Shadow

The shadow. She can't let anybody help, not because she doesn't want to, but because help arrived kinda late for her. It arrived in adulthood from partners and friends long after the muscles for asking for help had atrophied.

So when someone offers to take the weight, her nervous system simply decides it's faster and cheaper and safer just to do it herself. She becomes the friend who hosts, the sibling who plans, but is secretly surprised when the room never holds her back.

The golden shadow is that she can hold a lot. She can hold a schedule, the feelings, the bill, the family system without dropping a single plate. This is a real and rare capacity. The gift is her ability to be a place to land, creating safety for the people around her.

But the only thing that makes a gift a gift instead of a sentence is that safety finally has to include her too.

Tóxica Cinema

Tóxica Cinema. Once an episode, we pull characters from film and television, not to roast them, but for pattern recognition and always with love.

For La Hermana Mami, we have two characters who would have absolutely called the Hotline.

Luisa Madrigal from Disney's Encanto. This one carries donkeys and never asks who's carrying her.

Nikki Freeman from Obsession, Bear's best friend, the one who likes to give into the hurts.

Different rooms, similar jobs.

Luisa

First, Luisa's not the main character. In fact, she's only in the frame for one scene in one song. But what a scene. We see them crouch, lift, and move their body to a song called Surface Pressure.

Listen to her name in the metaphor. She's called the family donkey. She literally carries everything, including the donkeys. And this song does that thing that Tóxica Tarot is built to do. It names a survival strategy.

Drop the ball, the family collapses. Hold it forever, and you collapse. Either way, something's getting dropped.

The film never solves this for Luisa. It closes on the repairing of the house, and La Hermana Mami knows the truth that the film can't really say out loud. The house gets repaired in part because Luisa keeps lifting it.

Sometimes people get it twisted and imagine that you love carrying it. A compliment that ends up being an invisible tax, but still a tax.

Nikki

Then we have Nikki. Bear's best friend since childhood. She lends twenty dollars to a man on the street without thinking about it. She was there when his grandmother died. She held the room for Bear when nobody else could.

Everybody calls Nikki when the wheels fall off. But nobody asks who's driving.

Bear gives us a long list of reasons why Nikki is so naturally selfless. He lists out her attributes and never mentions her writing, her father. He could not name a single thing about Nikki that isn't a service she performs for somebody else. This is what lands her in the Hermana Mami camp.

When you carry someone else's weight every day, sometimes their legs stop working. Bear can barely confess his feelings to Nikki without practicing with his friend first.

When Bear gets his hand on a magic tree that grants wishes, he doesn't wish for courage. He doesn't wish to be a better man. He wishes for Nikki's undivided attention. And the Wish skips consent completely.

We see similarities to parentification here, with the job arriving before the consent does.

Freaky Nikki is what happens when the helping has no off switch. Nothing is more important than showing her love. Not other people, not other feelings, just the singular need to express her devotion.

Things eventually get sticky for Nikki, who ends up holding the bill. Does Nikki go too far? Yeah, sure. But we do have to admit that there's an invisible force that everybody can feel, but not everybody can see.

Luisa carried donkeys. Nikki carried a whole man. Only one got a song about it, though.

Mythical Tóxicas · Selu

Mythical Tóxicas. Once an episode, we go further back to find the figure who's been running the pattern before we had words for it.

Tonight, we go to Cherokee Nation, where we learn about Selu, the corn mother.

Selu is a married boy mom with two sons. Her husband, Kanati, is a hunter, and they eat well. Selu is amazing in the storehouse. Corn and beans every night.

The table is full and the boys start to realize they need to start to learn where the food comes from. The sons follow their father hunting, observing, learning. Kanati's labor is visible, watched, and studied, preparing them for the future.

With time, they get curious about what their mom does in the storehouse and how she prepares the beans and the corn that they love so much. So they decide to spy on her.

They sneak into the storehouse and they watch. They see their mother rubbing her stomach. They watch as corn and beans came from her body.

They were horrified. They accused their mother of being a witch. And there's only one thing you can do with a witch.

Selu knew her children well enough to know what would happen next. She asked them, "Before you go through with anything, I need you to do something. I need you to take down these instructions so you can eat forever."

"Clear a large piece of ground and drag my body over the dirt seven times. Stay up all night and watch. Wherever my blood touches the soil, the food will grow."

She handed them these instructions, and they couldn't even follow three steps. They unalived her and dragged her body twice instead of seven. They did not stay up all night, and they only cleared small patches instead of the whole field.

The corn grew, but kind of wonky and only in patches. Only twice a year and not everywhere, not all the time.

Her dying instructions required a competence they hadn't really developed. She gave them a recipe they couldn't execute. She had never let them practice, and this is why corn does not grow everywhere.

Her love and work was real, but not as visible and valued as her husband's.

Think of the times you don't want to call a friend when you're unraveling. You think you're being a good friend by refusing to be a burden, by hiding what it costs you to be strong.

You are closing the door and depriving the people who love you an opportunity to truly see you.

Before the Operator takes you out, three questions.

Closing Questions

You can choose to share these with a friend or not. Just think about them.

Whose emergency have you accidentally made your full-time job?

What would happen if you let someone else pack the sunscreen and deal with the sunburn if they forgot?

When was the last time someone cared for you without you having to earn it first?

Thank you for calling the Tóxica Tarot Hotline. La Hermana Mami call is now closed. Call back next week when we open the line to La Mandona. She's already called twice and has notes.

I gotta go. Nobody in the house has eaten since I left, and I can feel it from here.

And remember, Not Saints, Ni Tóxicas.