BRYAN BETANCUR is a Spanish professor in the Bronx whose writing focuses on Latine identity and representation. His creative work has appeared in Acentos Review, Five South, Litro, Jet Fuel Review, Latin@ Literatures, and elsewhere.

Alongside the centuries-old association with theater, a new concern had arisen: disproportionate pampering of children. What drove this development in meaning? How was “excessive indulgence and tenderness” understood in the context of child development? 


The most disastrous art

My research next led me to El niño, a Spanish translation of an 1869 book by Félix Dupanloup, a member of the French Academy and bishop of Orléans for nearly thirty years. The ecclesiastic dedicates an entire chapter to el niño mimado and calls the spoiled child “the mortal enemy of authority and respect.” Dupanloup exhorts parents, in language so catastrophizing I wonder if I’m reading satire, not to mimar (gâter in the French) their children, condemning such behavior as “that most disastrous art of corrupting an age that is the hope of an entire life.”

Even after turning 4, Azalea still (only occasionally!) sat on my lap during meals, and every night I lay on the floor in her room until she fell asleep, sometimes (very rarely!) for over an hour, my body contorted into joint-straining positions so she could hold my hand over her chest. During one extended vigil, as I stared at a pink stuffed unicorn hanging off the edge of the bed, I wondered if Dupanloup, who I presumed never had children, would have relegated me to the category of imprudent parents “who… seem to have no occupation other than to spoil their children in the first years of life.”

While mimar was condemned in books like El niño as ruinous parenting behavior, the term also retained its historical relationship to performance. Other Romance languages, such as French, separated the theatrical (mimer, “to mime”) from the pampering/indulging (gâter), but neither Spanish nor Portuguese made a similar distinction. I found evidence of the word’s continued theatrical denotation in an 1892 book written by a Uruguayan physician named Luis Bergalli. In full 19th-century positivist (and misogynist) pomp, the text is titled Maternity: Advice for Mothers and Young Wives about the Physio-Psycho-Hygienic Education of Children. We raise children improperly, claims Bergalli, “by leading them to artificially acquire defects that they would not acquire on their own [and] by dressing them up in our ridiculousness and foolishly admiring in them our own extravagances.” The physician calls this pattern of emotional dress-up and imitative performance “mimar a la niñez,” spoiling childhood.

When not playing school or dress-up, Azalea sometimes approached me holding a plastic briefcase full of toy medical supplies, to which I would lie on a sticker-strewn area rug and rattle off symptoms of mimositis. While Dr. Azalea checked my vitals, I thought of the many medical appointments to which I accompanied my mom throughout my childhood. From a young age, I was my mom’s de facto interpreter, as well as her unwitting guardian in ways that extended beyond doctors’ offices. Over time, I was expected to take on my first jobs to help her pay bills, drive her anywhere that required using the highway (which she is too afraid to do on her own), and remain sensitive to her chronic depression and disinclination to try anything new. As my daughter told me to be brave and jabbed my arms and legs with a plastic syringe, I looked back at the unvaried routine that filled countless Sundays of my youth: Mass at the same church, lunch at the same restaurant, and a stroll through the same mall, saying little and buying nothing, my mom wiping away tears at times, insisting it’s allergies, mijo when I ask why she’s crying.

As might be expected from the appearance of mimar in books about unconsciously rearing children as mirror images of ourselves (in all the wrong ways), it doesn’t take long to come across the term in a psychoanalytic text. The book is a 1979 Spanish translation of Psychoanalysis and Family Therapy by German psychiatrist Helm Stierlin. One mimo-filled passage immediately catches my eye. Stierlin calls the mother-child relationship an example of a “predominantly useful human symbiosis” in which both members mutually satisfy vital needs: “the child fills the mother’s need to [mimar], and the mother does the same with the child’s need to be [mimado].”² A normal filial symbiosis—healthy mimos, as it were—encourages the emotional development of both members. But a pathological relationship—Dupanloup’s disastrous mimos—can result in a kind of “reciprocal slavery” that leaves no room for growth and makes “the release of one [member] from the other continually more difficult.”

After discovering the joys of demanding that music be played on a phone or tablet, Azalea started donning a felt wolf mask and directing me through chaotic enactments of Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. As I alternately swam like the duck, slinked like the cat, and frolicked like Peter (while belting out cacophonous imitations of the oboe, clarinet, and violin), I thought of the ancient buffoon or mimo’s “ridiculous gestures and masks,” rendered psychological processes in texts like Maternity and Psychoanalysis by the empiricist demands of modernity. A kind of mimetic performance (a mimo) on the ancient stage was considered vulgar; centuries later, the same terms (mimo, mimar) would describe other kinds of reflective behavior also deemed shameless and censurable.

To be fair, my mom’s mimos more than compensated for my dad’s lack of affection. But with her abundant devotion came smothering care and unconscious projections of the fears that have long plagued her. My mom’s overprotective parenting stifled my emotional development. Unlike Prokofiev’s rebellious and intrepid Peter, I never strayed from home. I didn’t live on campus during college, didn’t study abroad, didn’t frequent social events. I convinced others, and myself, that I needed to stay home to care for my mom. This was true, but it wasn’t that simple. Our life together was an unending process of donning masks of her neuroses and dressing up in her exaggerated beliefs about the dangers of the world. She didn’t work through her psychopathology, and I didn’t assert my autonomy and individuality. We were an inextricable skein of neediness and repressed emotion. We lived, in effect, in reciprocal slavery.

In 2012, during my fourth year of graduate school and well before I thought about having children, I decided to write a dissertation on father-daughter relationships in 17th-century Spanish theater. I told anyone who asked that I chose this topic because conflicts between fictional daughters and dads provided dramatists a metaphorical avenue for commenting on pressing social and political issues. But, deep down, I didn’t know why I wanted to write about fathers and daughters. None of my rehearsed explanations felt as compelling as I claimed.

Several months into the dissertation, I learned that my mom’s depression is rooted in a history of severe child abuse at the hands of her dad. I have almost no recollection of my maternal grandfather, whom I met only once when I was nine. He exists in my mind as an amalgam of horrifying accounts of abuse, a kind of offstage murder in a classical Greek tragedy, minus the catharsis. His gross failings as a dad would eventually force upon me the nurturing, protective role he neglected to perform. My mom’s need for paternal love was insufficiently met, and this led her to overcorrect when she became a parent and suffocate me in affection that was both a desire to mimar and a desperate cry to be mimada. The more I wrote about dysfunctional father-daughter relationships on the early modern stage, the more I found myself confronting the problematic dynamics in my own family. I felt sorry for and resented my mom; I abhorred my grandfather for hurting her; I felt angry at myself for not being more empathetic.


Crossing the waters of oblivion

Now, years into therapy grappling with my childhood issues and mending my relationships with my parents, I work as a Spanish professor at a community college in New York. Every spring I teach a course on the history and culture of Spain, and I assign a short story by Antonio Muñoz Molina titled “Las aguas del olvido” (“The Waters of Oblivion”). In the story, the Guadalete River in southern Spain is found to have a magical property: Anyone who crosses the river forgets their entire life. Only one character, Márquez, is aware of the Guadalete’s mnemonic powers due to his predilection for researching etymologies. While showing a guest his impressive home library, Márquez asserts that “we use words without realizing that beneath their form, worn away by use, lies a golden nugget.” A dictionary in Márquez’s library lies open to the entry “Guadalete.” The river’s mystery is readily available for all to see, yet nobody reads the text. Only Márquez knows that “Guadalete” is a composite of the Arabic wādi (riverbed) and Lethe, an underworld river in Greek myth that caused complete forgetfulness to anyone who drank its waters. Crossing the Guadalete in Molina’s story becomes a striking metaphor for the erosion of a word’s history. Characters who enter the river emerge oblivious to a past that will continue to shape their lives outside their consciousness. So, too, Márquez believes, words retain the multiple influences of their etymologies even though most speakers remain ignorant of the terms’ evolution.
               
Before writing this essay, I asked people from six different Spanish-speaking countries if mimar held positive or negative connotations for them. I found near unanimous consensus: mimar denotes loving parental care, but the past participle mimado describes a coddled child. I should have expected this pattern of replies. After all, don’t most behaviors exist on a continuum between deficiency and excess? The call to find the golden mean was there all along, in the Royal Academy’s definition of mimar and in the old parenting books I came across. Mimos are fine but in excess can create a spoiled child (niña mimada). Simple.

So why the fuss? Because I’m terrified of never finding the golden mean. I conducted a Márquez-like excursion into the history of mimar because I wanted the term to hold strictly positive connotations. Now that I’ve emerged from that research rabbit hole, I’m left wondering about the points of contact between those phases of a word’s evolution that exist outside a speaker’s awareness and the aspects of our genealogies that reside in our subconscious. It is here, at the intersection of linguistic and personal history, that I’ve found what I’ve been searching for since Azalea’s first mimi. My difficulty translating mimar, the unsettling flashbacks while playing with my daughter, everything can be traced back to the dual, ineffable weight of etymology and genealogy. I refuse to accept that my mimos can be considered coddling, partly because mimar does in fact reference healthy parenting, but also because the potential effects of excessive favor seem paltry when compared to the opposite extreme, to paternal failure. I rush headlong into mimos because I don’t want to find myself on the precipice of neglect like the dads in my family tree before me.

Azalea is now five, and I continue performing. The purple tutu and medical kit have been replaced by pastel nail polish and plastic firefighter helmets, but whether we’re playing salon or “rescue service,” I still worry about how much of my parents (and theirs), how much healthy or harmful behavior, comes through in my daily portrayal of Papá. I’m tempted to call this kind of performance and the anxieties it entails mimetic parenting, but mimetic is overdetermined. The term calls to mind everything I’ve read about mimetic desire in the work of Jacques Lacan and René Girard, and in theory-heavy literary criticism. Instead, I’ll use a Spanglish term of my own invention that pays homage to my biculturalism, to my family history, to the etymology of mimar: mimotic parenting.

National Dictionary, or Great Classical Dictionary of the Spanish Language, 1849 

1. A kind of comedy performed by the Romans, whose argument and setting were ridiculous and liberal to the point of vulgarity. In it, the manners, tone of voice, and actions of a known person were imitated with much shamelessness.
2. Actor who performed in the Roman mimo.
3. The buffoon who, in ancient comedies, entertained the populace with ridiculous expressions and gestures while the other actors rested.
4. Tender and loving expression; praise.
5. Indulgence and pampering, especially when speaking of children.  

mimo (n.):

In the Dictionary of the Castilian Tongue, mimo describes both genuine and affected expressions of tenderness, as well as the buffoon character in ancient comedies who amused spectators using “ridiculous masks and gestures.” Real love, affected love, performance.

Azalea’s fascination with playing pretend also led to frequent dress-up sessions. She especially loved to twirl and sing wearing glittery bunny ears and a frayed purple tutu. Once her dance routine ended, she would hand me the accessories and ask (demand, really) that I imitate her. Like a good daddy bufón, I obeyed and performed.

During one such lively dance fête, another long-forgotten memory resurfaced in my mind like the rubber animals Azalea liked to hold underwater in the tub and release to hear my feigned surprise at their “unexpected” emergence. I recalled the day my dad called and invited me to his house. An unplanned visit! He asked (demanded, really) that I dress up because we would take photos for our relatives in Colombia. I arrived, a beaming, dapper 10-year-old eager to spend time with my dad, only to learn he was getting married that evening and I was the designated ringbearer. Married? Did I even know he had a partner? Torn between wanting to demand an explanation and remembering the lonely afternoons looking out the bay window for a truck that never arrived, I said nothing. I stood where I was told, presented the rings when I was told. Like a good son bufón, I obeyed and performed. I showed affected happiness and received affected love in return (or so I felt). After the ceremony-performance, I rushed to my dad’s room, away from a dance party that would rage late into the night, and sobbed on his bed.

Though I was perplexed and concerned about these flashbacks from my childhood, I kept resorting to what I did best: burying my emotions under nerdy research projects. I dove deeper into the etymology of mimos and found the first references to parenting in the Great Classical Dictionary of the Spanish Language published in 1849.

Dictionary of the Castilian Tongue, 1726-1739

1. Love, praise, or expression of affected tenderness.
2. Affected scrupulousness and care.
3. The rogue or buffoon who in ancient comedies, with ridiculous masks and gestures, entertained the populace while the other actors rested.   

mimo (n.)

When Azalea turned three, the theatrical connotations of mimos started resonating with me in unexpected ways. My chatty toddler loved imaginative play. In one of her favorite pretend scenarios, she would stuff toys into a pink polyester backpack and go off to school (walk to the living room) while I stayed home (sat at the dining table). She did circle time with imaginary classmates, somersaulted on the couch, then returned “home” and told me how much she had missed me. We then switched roles, and I would march off to “school” holding a fuzzy bag too small to sling over my shoulders.

The first time we played this game, I sat on the couch and rifled through the backpack while exclaiming how much I missed my sweet mimosaurus. Then everything froze. I lost awareness of what my daughter was doing in the dining room and felt like my insides were evaporating. I looked down and didn’t see Azalea’s pink pack in my lap, but a blue Ninja Turtles gym bag. I lifted my gaze and saw a bay window at once familiar and out of place, and, through the glass, an empty street. I was a kid, maybe 7 or 8, a few years after my parents divorced, waiting on a faux fur sofa for my dad to pick me up for a sleepover. Waiting. Gnawing my fingernails raw, rubbing the Ninja Turtles logo on my gym bag harder and harder. Waiting. Leaping up when a red silhouette appeared on my street because it might be dad’s pickup, then sinking into the couch like a deflated Christmas lawn decoration. Waiting. Imagining reasons why he was late, wondering if they were the same excuses I made up on his behalf the time before, or the times before that. Waiting. Refusing to accept that the phone would soon ring with another noncommittal next time, promise. Waiting.

Then I was my adult self again, wiping away tears with clenched fists. My mind was a maelstrom of fucks: what the fuck had just happened; who the fuck does that to their kid; how the fuck can I hope to be a good dad with so much unresolved childhood shit? Afraid a curse would escape my mouth and enter Azalea’s hyper-absorbent lexicon, I ran to the dining room, squeezed her tight, and said in a cracked whisper that I loved her. That night, unwilling to confront the emotions that had burst out of me like floodwater from a crumbling levee, I opened my laptop and delved into the etymology of mimar.

Centuries before mimar described “excessive indulgence” and made insecure dads with lingering childhood issues feel inadequate, the term was understood in the context of theatrical performance, flattery, and deceit. In the first Spanish-Latin dictionary written in the 1490s, mimar is translated as blandior (to flatter or fawn), while momo, a predecessor of mimo, is translated as mimus (mime, farce, actor). As far as I could tell, the terms didn’t come to express affection that wasn’t flattering or farcical until the eighteenth century.

Dictionary of the Spanish Language, Royal Spanish Academy

1. Affection, praise, or expression of tenderness.
2. Excessive affection, kindness, or indulgence with which children especially tend to be treated.
3. State or attitude typical of a person who wishes to be pampered.
4. Care with which something is done.
5. Theatrical performer who acts using only gestures and body movements.
6. In Greco-Roman theater, the buffoon, who imitated other characters.
7. In Greco-Roman theater, a festive farce or performance that was vulgar at times.

mimo (n.):

Cuddle and praise thy child at thine own risk, the Royal Academy seemed to caution, for the road to spoildom is paved with mimos. The reference to excessive affection and kindness forced me to wonder: Was I an overindulgent dad who didn’t know his maternal tongue as well as he thought? Or were my linguistic doubts textbook Freudian projection? Did I prattle on about some indelible quality in mimar that couldn’t be captured in English because I was neck-deep in denial about molding my daughter into a spoiled, mimi-ing brat?

Undeterred, I looked up mimo in the Royal Academy’s dictionary as well. The entry highlighted the term’s performative denotations in greater detail than the definitions of mimar. 

Dictionary of the Spanish Language, Royal Spanish Academy¹

1. To caress and praise.
2. To favor and treat someone with much consideration.
3. To treat someone, especially a child, with excessive indulgence, affection, and kindness.
4. To treat something with special care. 
5. To act out through gestures.

mimar (v.):

I turned to the verb form mimar, but the translations I found were even further from what I wished to express. Almost every English translation, except pamper and mime, alluded to overprotection and inordinate indulgence. Even pamper, I read in Meriam-Webster’s online dictionary, means treating someone with care and attention that is “extreme,” a modifier that seesaws between positive and negative implications, or outright “excessive.”

Evidently, I had stumbled upon a disconnect between the way gringos and Latines interpret parenting behavior. As the U.S.-born son of Colombian immigrants, I have spent my life navigating cultural and linguistic nuance. Sure, I violated the sleep training commandments and scooped Azalea out of her crib at the slightest cry, and I sometimes (daily) laid her across my lap at breakfast (and lunch, and dinner) because she fussed if she was left on her playmat during meals. But I absolutely did not mollycoddle her. What I did was mimar. Loving, tender, harmless. Those damned Puritans, I thought, so incapable of showing a little affection.

Unable to formulate a satisfactory translation of mimar, I turned to the Royal Spanish Academy’s dictionary. I trusted the centuries-old linguistic authority would provide the vocabulary I needed to tell inquisitive parents at the playground that mimi was Azalea’s way of seeking wholesome, nurturing parenting far removed from cosseting.

Wordreference.com

1. To spoil, indulge, mollycoddle, pamper, fuss over.
2. To mime.

mimar (v.):

I’ve always spoken to Azalea in Spanish. Soon after she was born, I began feeling both surprise and frustration whenever I tried to translate mimos for English speakers. I grew up with both languages, so my difficulty didn’t stem from a lack of vocabulary or cultural fluency. Rather, the equivalent English terms—caress, cuddle, care—lacked a connotation I couldn’t articulate but which I intuited was key to understanding mimos. Did I cuddle Azalea when she reached for me and said mimi? Always. Did I shower her with loving care generally? Every waking second. But none of that captured the essence of mimos.

Wordreference.com

1. Loving care; caress, cuddle. 
2. Mime.

mimo (n.):

Mimi was one of my daughter Azalea’s first attempts at a word. She would crawl to me, reach out her chubby arms, and repeat mimi, mimi, mimi until I picked her up. She was trying to say mimos, a Spanish term she heard every time she asked to be held in this way and I responded Oh, quieres mimos?, Ay, mimos, Uy, mis mimos lindos, or something similar. By then she could double the syllable ma to say mama, so repeating mi was within reach for her burgeoning linguistic system. But that practical, straightforward explanation felt insufficient to me. I sensed there was something more transcendent in her mimi parroting, something related to the word mimos itself.