My story starts with my mother.

My mom was four when she was uprooted from her home and family. She left to go on “vacation” to Alaska and she never returned. She was informed mid-road trip that she’d never see her father again. She was wailing and ripping the braids from her hair when her aunt decided to teach her a lesson. She was torn from the car and tossed in the snow and her aunt took off down the road.

My mother learned that it was not safe to feel or express her emotions, the first of many lessons she reinforced in me. I’ve only seen her cry twice in my entire life. But denying her tears for so many years took a toll on her.

The universe must have a sense of humor, because I was born highly sensitive. I was even returned from the nursery because I couldn't sleep and I wouldn’t stop crying. This became a familiar feeling. I felt like a burden on others and a burden on my own mother. It felt like a burden to even exist and have needs and desires at all.

As my mother’s only child, I spent a lot of time alone in my imagination. That was my happy place, where I felt most at home. I was a lover and a dreamer. I was also a hopeless romantic, raised on Disney and fairy tales. I had dreams of finding true love, meeting my prince, and living happily ever after. But my sweet dreams were often far from my reality.

I loved my mom, but I lived in fear of her. She was a minefield of emotions. I had to tread lightly.

I could sense the shifting tides and weather the storms of her emotions, but there was no room for mine. My feelings were often met with silence or emotional violence. My sensitivity was a threat and she set out to destroy it.

It didn't feel safe for me to feel or express my emotions. But I had deep empathy for others. I learned how to mother my mother and my father reinforced it. But I prayed for my mom to mother me, by way of some great tragedy, like an accident, or an illness... That was my childhood dream: to die knowing my mother loved me. I wonder now if she had the same dream, because she's the one who got sick years later and my dad and I took care of her. 

As an adult, I attempted to share all of this with my father. He was more concerned with how she would feel if she were to find out. “If she kills herself,” He started. I knew. It would be my fault.

That moment confirmed how alone I had felt my entire life.

I became who I believed I must be to be loved: the good one, good girl, good student. I played a role for others and I played it well. But in the privacy of my poems, I wrote, “I wear a mask. I wear a thousand masks, and none of them are me.”

I learned how to hide. We do what we must to survive, especially as women. This fear lives in my DNA. As a child, I locked doors and looked under my bed every night for years, not for monsters but men. Now, I imagine my mom as a child as her mother was raped in the room next door.

I was a freshman in high school when I was molested for the first time. I was touched in ways I had never been touched. I had barely been kissed. My father found me afterward. I can still hear him howling in broken Spanish in the streets of Mexico, “Los hombres son males. [Men are evil],” all the way home.

We lost my niece at the hands of her stepfather when she was two years old. I was left with a hole for a heart. At some point, I mastered the one tear cry. I'd allow myself one tear. That was it. But sometimes I’d listen to emo music and dream of death.

I had a deep distrust in men and in myself as a woman. My own father had failed to protect me from the shadows in our home. But I can thank him for the fact that I believe in love at all. Despite all of this, in my heart of hearts, I was still a hopeless romantic.