Photo of author, Marcela Gómez in Nashville (1996)
“Ma, you know how when you drop me off at Miss Polly’s Day Care, you get out of the car, sign me in, and walk me inside? I need to tell you that I am old enough to do that myself.”
I can feel my heart trying to find a peaceful landing place. He’s sitting on the flowery sofa bed I bought with my first bonus for exceeding my sales goals. Coat on, lunch box next to him, he is asking me to sit next to him because, as he put it, he needs to talk with me. We are minutes away from getting in the car so I can drop him off at daycare and then drive 35 minutes on Interstate 24 to get to work. I don’t have a lot of time to process how I feel. He is asking for independence in the most polite and mature way. I understand he can handle this small measure of independence, but what he can’t comprehend, not at his age, is that I am the only parent taking care of him full time. If anything happens, I have only myself to blame.
I make his meals or warm up TV dinners in the microwave. I wake him up every morning with a gentle nudge and hand him his chocolate milk drink, or what I thought was milk, although it never had to be refrigerated. I taught him how to dress himself, how to put on his socks, and tie his shoes. I taught him English before we moved to this city. I take care of him when he is not feeling well. I play with him after school, take him to the movies on Saturday, and church on Sunday. I hold him while the doctor is giving him a vaccine and examining his ears. I watch him perform film characters for hours and watch The Lion King on repeat for days. I put him to bed every night on a single bed in the same bedroom as mine and then walk out of the bedroom quietly to go cry in our bathroom.
My evening cries are always the same. While I sit on the floor of the bathroom, the door closed so he can’t hear me cry, I tell God, as if He needed to be reminded, that I am the only fully present parent Esteban has. Whatever I am guided to do will also affect him. Over several nights I ask the same questions: Why are we here? Why did we come to Nashville?
The Bible group we attend every week is our first safe space in this new city; they are our new community. I am the only single mother. The women in the group mean well, but they ask me questions without thinking. “Have you considered homeschooling?” one asked. Diane jumps in and responds on my behalf, “She’s a single mother, she has to work. What kind of question is that?” And another starts enumerating everything I do as a single mother, as if she wants to make sure I know everything I have to do to take care of myself and my son. I stop her. Please don’t tell me everything I have to do, I couldn’t bear it. I don’t think about it, I just do it. I do it in fear, in between tears, in waiting for my paycheck to arrive, in hoping I am making the right decisions for my son, and while praying that someone will come and rescue me.
In their well-meaning questions, I realized how invisible single mothers can become, seen for what we carry, but not for how much it weighs. Never Diane. She always fully saw me. She still does.
Some days are easier than others in our small one-bedroom apartment off of Edmonson Pike. The trees outside make the apartment dark and cozy. Next to our sofa bed we have a square coffee table with a glass top covering a display drawer where I have placed all the handmade gifts Esteban has made for me. He’s a loving, easygoing, obedient, and happy little boy. He is caring and compassionate. He sits very close to me when he can sense that I am sad. I had never felt this lost before in my life. This is my first time as a single mother. It’s lonely, so I hold on tight to John and Diane and their girls, my safety net, a family who begins to call me their daughter. A new lesson is taking life in me; vulnerability is not weakness, and asking for help is a sign of strength.
How did I get here? I blinked and went from a young woman planning her next steps for after college, which included moving to Mykonos for a while, to living in Nashville with my son and feeling cracks all over my body like Humpty Dumpty. Deciding to go to college in Bogotá had given me a sense of having my next steps figured out, of having control of my life. Then having my husband leave the marriage over a phone call when our son was two years old made me feel powerless.
To believe that we must have it all figured out on our own is a belief I’ve challenged several times in my life. Sometimes I think that because I have already lived through several hardships, I should be able to do life on my own strength, and nothing can be further from the truth. We are here to build, nurture, and be nurtured through and in community. Have you found this safety net for your life, or is it time for you to challenge the belief that being strong means doing everything alone?
After my heart settled and I could find the words to reply to my son and tell him that I believed he was right, that he was old enough to sign himself in at the daycare and walk inside on his own, we got in the car, drove to Miss Polly’s, and as I pulled a few feet away, I watched him through the rearview mirror. He signed his name in the entry book, opened the door to the daycare, and walked himself in, all with a huge grin on his face. I am so proud of him. But now I am crying my eyes out in the car, and I have to drive to work with black mascara running down my face. It’s a good thing my work is 35 miles away and I won’t look like Rudolph when I walk in.
I’m sitting on the sofa again at his request. This time it is a brown leather sofa in a larger living room. He has his own bedroom, and I have mine. We even have a large family room. He says he has something to tell me. “Ma, I love going to the movies with you, but now that I’m 13, I want to go to the movies with my friends. I will still go to the movies with you on your birthday and Mother’s Day.”
My heart and brain can’t find that peaceful landing place. Did I ever really find it? I know he is right, and I tell him so. I remember at that age going to the movies with my friends in Bogotá. My dad would drop us off at the main entrance of the first and at the time only mall in the city. He gave us instructions to keep us safe. “Don’t accept candy or sodas from anyone,” he would say. “You get your own,” and he would hand me some cash. “Always have cash with you, always.”
I drive Esteban to the movie theater, give him my own safety instructions, some cash, and tell him the time I will be back to pick him up. I watch him get out of the car and walk up to his friends with a huge grin on his face and a cool power walk I had not seen him do before.
What’s my worst-case scenario, I ask myself. I feel an enormous amount of pressure in every part of my body, my mind, and my soul. I can afford to either keep paying my mortgage or pay for my son’s film school education at New York University. I can no longer pay for both. These words and emotions keep swirling around in me as I leave a client’s office after being told my contract will not be renewed because of a scheduling conflict. I sit in my car, and before I can turn the ignition on, I receive a text message from Esteban letting me know that USA Today wants to interview him for his film submission to a worldwide short film competition. “What does this mean?” he asks. As someone who has worked in public relations all of her career, I know that my son has either won the competition or is in the top finalists.
He won the film competition, and the decision to pay for film school becomes clear.
This life-changing moment for me is my choice. I allow myself to visualize what my worst-case scenario would be. I go there for 30 seconds. I am living with my sister and her family in Miami. They have a pool, and my sister cooks. In the same 30 seconds, I am living with the family who calls me daughter, near Nashville. They have a lovely home, and Diane cooks. You can see a pattern here, right? Even in my imagined unraveling, I was never alone. Every version of my “worst case” included love, warmth, and someone ready to cook for me, to catch me.
My worst-case scenario doesn’t destroy me; it makes me stronger as I become more vulnerable.
I walk into a huge circus tent somewhere in Queens. “Are you here for flying trapeze class? Put a harness on, take off your shoes, keep your socks on, and dip your hands fully into the bucket of chalk over there.” Wait, what?
There’s no one-hour instruction class on how to hold on to the trapeze, how to jump off the tiny platform, how to fall on the net, and how to get off the net. I’m climbing up the not-so-very-steady rope stairs to the tiny platform where one of the three instructors is waiting for me. She hooks the harness I have on to another rope that I can’t see where it is coming from. She brings in the trapeze with a long hook and tells me to hold on to it but not to let it pull me out. She tells me to stand with my toes hanging out of the platform and to bend my knees. I can’t find north. My brain is still twirling around, trying to figure out what the heck I am doing now. Isn’t being a single mother without blood relatives nearby in a city 2,300 miles away from my birth city scary enough? I jump off that platform, lift my legs over the trapeze, hang from the trapeze by my legs, lift my arms and grab the other instructor’s arms, swing from his arms a couple of times, drop to the net, and then dismount off the net like a gymnast. I think.
I do this three times in a row. The first one wasn’t as successful because, as one of the instructors pointed out in a very stern way, I wasn’t breathing through the motions. Ah, breathing… Yes, I must breathe.
I lived with my friends near Nashville for six months. I paid for my son’s education and his rent. I sent him canned beans, and so did my sister. He didn’t get a haircut for over a year; he couldn’t afford it. I found out twelve years later why he let his hair grow out. Another small step toward independence.
I left the circus life after three jumps off the platform, got on the train in Flushing (IFKYK), and, while sitting in a New York subway, I realized that my family, my friends, and the community I have nurtured are my harness, my net, my safe landing place.
I may be crumbling, but I will not fall through the cracks.
Check out THE C.R.E.A.T.E. FRAMEWORK™ which I created to help me continue to unlearn, remember, and evolve. I invite you to practice it.