“No, no, no, Mija,” she rushes, horrified. The panic I feel is bleeding through her words and into my phone. “Not you. No! You are the best thing I’ve ever done. You hear me? The best.”
My shoulders drop, but the tension doesn’t ease. Not fully. The word mistake still hums in the air, like an alarm I can’t turn off.
“Then what?” My voice is too small. Too much little girl and not enough independent woman. “What was the mistake?”
She sighs again. But this one is weary. Like I’ve asked her to open a door she boarded up and set fire to a long time ago.
“My mistake was loving a man who didn’t know how to love me back,” she says. “Loving too blindly. Loving too completely. Loving with no protection. No boundaries. I gave him everything, Mija. And he still left with more than he came with.”
My jaw clenches. How does history repeat itself? Isn’t it enough to have an ex who did this too? Took pieces of me I didn’t realize I was offering. Took so much that when I left him, it felt like leaving without any part of me. Like he sucked the life force from me, and I was hollowed to the core.
“And then,” she adds, when I’m still lost in my thoughts. “I found out he had other women. Other families. I was not the only one. I may have been the first, but I wasn’t the last.”
That panic climbs up my throat. A bitter taste rises into my mouth. Other families.
“Mami,” My voice cracks, too scared to ask but needing to know. “Do I have half brothers and sisters out there? Ones I don’t know about?”
My mind races down old roads that are long overgrown. Thinking back to my childhood, and if I could have met him in our little town, without knowing it. He left when I was a baby. But if he had another family, do they know about us? Know about me, and just never reached out?
“No, Sofia.” Her voice is barely above a whisper, sensing the rising fear in mine. “They were already born. Another man’s children that he lived with. Then he left them too. A womanizer, is what I think you call it.”
Piece of shit or bastard is what I say. Suddenly, the hurt becomes anger. For using women like my ex. For sucking them dry and moving on. I never met my papi. Would never have known if I had run across him in town while growing up. And I’m glad I didn’t. I’d probably kill him myself for what he did to her and me.
“You were too young,” she continues when I don’t answer. “I didn’t want another man. Didn’t want to need a man the way I once needed him. And I didn’t want you to think love was something found in another. I wanted to give it to you the best I knew how. It’s all I hoped for.”
That’s exactly what I thought. I thought love was found in another. Muttered those words to him so many times until I stopped hearing them back.
“I figured if the first man I loved broke me like that, why try again? Why risk another heartbreak when I had you to raise? A daughter watching everything I did. Depending on me. I could not bring another man into that. No quería que tú sufrieras por mis errores.”
My chest twists.
This is the first time she’s ever said it so plainly. The cost, fear, and loneliness she must have felt . . . she wrapped herself in strength, love, and happiness so I wouldn’t see her bleeding. Hemorrhaging in pain and disappointment.
An example of that every day I was growing up. If she said she loved me right now, it would pale in comparison to how much of herself she gave up for me. Her nagging is her worry on steroids because of what she sacrificed for me.
It makes me feel horrible. Tears come from nowhere, and all I want to do is hug Paco to comfort me, even though he’s not in the room. I hear him playing with toys in the living room.
“Do you ever regret it? Do you ever wish you had someone then or even now?”
My breath catches on the guilt that she built this small, safe life for me at great cost to her.
“No. Not for a day.”
She says it so quickly. So forcefully that I believe her.
“And now?”
“Mija, no. I’m too old for foolish things. I have my life, my things, my friends, and you. It’s all I need.”
The tears I held back are flowing down my cheeks. I muffle my sobs. It’s so sad for her. So upsetting to think she’s only in her fifties and won’t try again. Never considered it because of him and me, and just everything.
And it hits home.
I could so easily be her.
I already have ten years of nursing experience. Could easily go another twenty or thirty more. The days fly by, and I could look up and be her, living that same life. Only mine is shrinking smaller and smaller, with the long hours I work and the way I come home and collapse.
“Should I do that? Not bother with men again.”
