Motherhood Defined
The day I threw up tamales, I knew I was pregnant. You cannot tell a Mexican girl from the west side of Chicago—someone who has been eating tamales her whole life—that she isn’t pregnant after throwing them up. I walked out of the bathroom, looked at Mike, and said, “I’m pregnant.” He gave me that dumb, teenage-boy look, and I told him, “Yes, because I just threw up tamales, and that has never happened before.” That was all the proof I needed.
Mike and I had moved in together when I was 16. I left my mom’s house because of the chaos—getting jumped by my sister and chased down the street by the Latin Queens in our neighborhood. I grew up in a world where girls didn’t get to have value unless someone picked them. I didn’t want to get picked. I wanted to be a nerd, read books, and be invisible, but the west side of Chicago didn’t let girls like me exist in peace. One day, after Mike watched me get jumped on the street, he offered me a way out. His dad—a hippie limo driver—didn’t seem to mind that I moved in, so I stayed.
Mike didn’t like being around his mom, and I didn’t like being around my family, so we found refuge with his dad. And for a while, it worked. No mothers, no rules, just two teenagers playing house in an apartment that wasn’t really ours. But when I got pregnant, everything shifted. We had to call someone. We had to choose between my mom and Angie, Mike’s mom.
The choice was practical, not emotional. Angie had a house with space. My mom had a house too—a family home—but it was crammed with too many relatives and too many problems. Angie’s house was quieter, and we thought it would be better for a baby. We didn’t realize, in making that choice, we were walking into a prison.
Angie stepped in immediately. She took me to the doctor, took over decisions about what would happen next, and took control of our lives. At first, I thought she was helping. She gave me a grocery budget, showed me how to shop, and told me how to manage money. But it wasn’t help. It was control. I had to go to school and come straight home. No friends. No family visiting. No hanging out. Angie had rules, and I had to follow them.
She even timed my phone calls. Back then, you had to pay for long-distance calls, and Angie allowed me one call to Mike a week, limited to 30 minutes. Thirty minutes. Mike was at college, living a regular college life—parties, weed, girls—while I was stuck in Angie’s house, watching the minutes tick by during our weekly calls. Of course he cheated on me. What else was I supposed to expect when his world kept expanding and mine kept shrinking?
When Angie decided to send me to Arizona to be closer to Mike, it wasn’t a conversation. It was a command. She framed it as a way for Mike to focus on school, but the truth was she believed I was the problem. Mike’s grades were slipping, and Angie didn’t want to admit it was because he was too busy enjoying his freedom. She wanted me there to keep him on track, to make sure he stayed tethered to his family. It was all about optics. Teen pregnancy wasn’t something people admitted in 1996, so Angie made sure Mike got to be a regular college guy while I stayed stuck in her house, playing the role of mom.
Looking back, I hated it. I hated the way I was caged, the way my life wasn’t mine anymore. I wonder sometimes if it would have been better to stay with my mom, to raise Xavier there. Maybe I would have had more freedom, but I also know he wouldn’t have had access to the education he got through Angie. I have no regrets, but I do think about what could have been if I’d had more room to figure things out on my own terms.
Years later, when I moved in with Xavier, I didn’t know they were losing their house. They had been taking money from me as “rent,” claiming it was for the mortgage. But it wasn’t their house. They didn’t own it. The betrayal hit hard—not just because of the money, but because when it all came to light, they deflected. Instead of admitting what had happened, they dredged up every mistake I’d made as a teen mom. That’s Angie’s influence right there: the refusal to say sorry, the need to control the narrative, the ability to make me the villain to avoid accountability.
Over the years, I’ve realized something: I’ve been unmothered my whole life. My own mother didn’t nurture me the way I needed, and Angie wasn’t the parental figure I thought she was. She didn’t care for me—she controlled me. And that gap, that lack of mothering, shaped everything about how I parented my son. When I had him, I poured everything I could into him. I wanted to fill him with love and support in a way I’d never been filled. But when you’ve been empty your whole life, how much can you really give? I tried, but I could only do so much.
Do I wish I could have done more for my son? Of course. What parent doesn’t? But I also know that I gave him something no one else could. I encouraged him to live freely, to explore the world in a way I never could. When he wanted pets—bearded dragons, hamsters, turtles, birds—I let him have them. At one point, we had 13 animals in the house. No other parent would have agreed to that, but I did because I believed in his right to experience joy, even if it made my life harder. I see that part of myself when I’m on farms now, surrounded by animals. I encouraged life in all its forms because I always felt so caged in my own.
Mike doesn’t talk to Angie anymore. He’s broken away from her, but what he doesn’t see is how much of her he still carries. His need for money, his refusal to acknowledge what Angie did to me, even the ways he interacts with our son—it’s all her. And I think that’s what hurts the most. Mike refuses to see how his mother’s influence shaped his relationship with me and with our son.
And yet, there’s something about the relationship Mike and I still have that feels important. In a strange way, we’re bonded by surviving Angie. There’s something about sharing that experience—of being gaslit, of having your reality rewritten—that ties us together, even if it’s not a connection I would have chosen. And I think the fact that he trusts me with his new daughter speaks volumes about what he thinks of me as a mother. Angie doesn’t have access to his current daughter, but I do. To me, that says more than any words ever could.
As for my son, I have faith that our paths will cross again one day. And if they don’t, I’ll be okay with that too. There’s a quote by Walter Payton: “When you’re good, you tell everyone. When you’re great, everyone tells you.” And I’ve learned that I don’t need Xavier to validate me as a mother. The world has already told me who I am. I’ve nannied babies, cared for children, helped people in their homes and on their farms. I know what I do. I am a great caregiver, and I don’t need that truth to come from just one person.
If my purpose was to help Angie feel like she had a second chance, fine. If my purpose was to give Mike a son who helped him separate from his mother, fine. And if my purpose was simply to create Xavier, then that’s fine too. Motherhood, for me, is about purpose and acceptance. It’s about understanding that some things are only meant to last for a season, and that’s okay.