My mother was born in Huntington Park, a Mexican girl in a family that wore hardship like a second skin. She had an older sister, the kind of beautiful that was a ticket out. The sister had a face like Elizabeth Taylor and the good sense to find a white boy with blue eyes who punched that ticket for her. She became the golden one, the proof that you could escape if you were pretty enough and played your cards right. Marry up, move out, and shed your past like a snake sheds its skin. That was the only fairy tale my mother ever saw up close.
But my mother, she wasn’t called beautiful. She wasn’t delicate. She wasn’t soft. She was all sharp edges and coiled fire. And fire doesn’t charm its way into a comfortable life—it burns, it fights, it clears its own damn path or dies trying. She saw the world for the rigged game it was, and she wasn’t about to be one of the losers.
So at seventeen, she decided to write her own escape plan. The setting was the parking lot of a Tommy’s Burgers, the air thick with the holy trinity of grease, exhaust, and desperation. She wasn’t looking for love; love is a luxury for girls who have time to waste. She was looking for an exit. And then she saw him. My father. A boy with brown eyes and, more importantly, a car. That was enough.
She made her move. Quick, unapologetic, predatory. A few words, a ride home, and then the inevitable collision on the side of some dark road. A frantic scramble of youth and bad decisions. And in that moment, she carved out a future neither of them was ready for. Nine months later, I crashed into existence.
I wasn’t a fresh start. I wasn’t an escape. I was an anchor, dropped from a ship that was already taking on water.
For my father, it was just a detour. A story he might tell his friends in a bar once and then forget. He did what men like him do. He signed some papers, wiped his hands clean, and vanished. I was barely old enough to make a sound, let alone ask where he’d gone. He was a ghost before I even knew he was a person.
For my mother, it was different. That one night sealed her fate. She’d gambled everything on a long shot, and lost. She’d dreamed of a bigger life, and instead, she got me. And I was a screaming, needy, constant reminder that she had made the wrong goddamn bet.
Regret does something to a person. It’s a poison that seeps into the bone, hardens the heart. She didn’t hold me with warmth; she held me with resentment. Her sister had played the game right. My mother had gone all-in on a shitty hand. And I was the living, breathing proof of her failure.
She wore that bitterness like armor and wielded it like a weapon. The world hadn’t given her what she wanted, so she lashed out at what she had. At me. At the men who came and went. She still clawed for an exit, but every door was now locked from the inside.
My father was just a whisper on the wind, off living his life, leaving us to clean up the wreckage. Except you can’t clean up a life like that. You can only survive it.
I grew up in the long, cold shadow of her anger. I absorbed it, I dodged it, and finally, I learned from it. I learned that escape isn’t found in the arms of a boy with a car. I learned that status is a joke if it’s built on someone else’s back. And I learned that bitterness will eat you alive from the inside out if you let it.
She spent her whole life wanting out, and she only ever got more trapped.
I was born in that trap, but I found my own way out. Not by following her path, not by chasing some shortcut wrapped in a pretty lie.
But by rejecting every last rotten piece of it. By forging a life she could never touch.
