The Women Who Raise the Women Who Impact the World

I was six years old when my life changed. That’s the year my mother adopted me.

I was eighteen when it changed again. That’s the year she died from cancer.

As if it happened yesterday, I remember the day my mother walked into the orphanage, placed my hand in hers, and she became my mother.

Even at that young age, I knew distinctly the fate I was being saved from. My birthmother had been raised in poverty, and her mother as well. I was another spoke on the cycle of poverty, of which orphanages are a part.

When my mother came to adopt me, I had an intuition that she had come into my life for a reason I could not yet name. I embraced it wholly, without any questions, and felt an instant relief, like I could finally exhale.

But my relationship with my mother was tumultuous. We did not agree on many things. We had completely different dispositions. There were few things I understood about her, and most of the time I was seeing her through frustration and anger. We argued incessantly.

When you’re young, you have no concept of time. You have no understanding that if you do not seize the moment to say the things you want to or need to say, they can be lost forever.

My mother died with many unspoken words between us.

When she died, I was in my own eighteen-year-old frailty and her death spiraled me into a darkness I was not sure I’d be able to pull out from. Much of it was enveloped in my disbelief that the world had given me not one, but two mothers, and I had lost them both. 

For a long time, I could not see beyond the anger. 

Until, one day, the light began to break through, and little by little, precariously, I stepped towards it.

And there she was, my mother.

My mother who not only adopted me, but also my little sister upon coming to adopt me and discovering she was also there.

My mother who took me back to El Salvador every year so I could visit my birthmother and my birth family.

My mother who collected donated items to take with us on our trips to El Salvador and deliver them to the orphanage.

My mother who helped other families adopt children from Central America.

It took me a long time to see my mother for the whole person she was, a single mom of four daughters, science teacher/educator in an underfunded Brooklyn High School, part-time travel agent for extra income, a fierce, independent woman who had her own painful history, her own story to tell. A woman who I watched carry around large bags of dog food in her trunk so she could feed stray dogs, a woman who mentored teen girls in her class while they cried to her, a woman who broke into her own tears when once we landed in El Salvador with thousands of dollars’ worth of donated items only to have them seized by the hands of corruption at the airport. 

These little acts, these little glimmers of light she was placing in the world, I witnessed, not realizing that they were slowly being added into my own story of how I see the world, and how I would contribute to it.

Now, the fights, the disagreements, the problems are not what I carry around with me. Instead, I carry all the small acts of kindness that I learned through her.

 With each kindness I was being shaped into the kind of person I wanted to be. The kind of person that through one small act of kindness at a time, can make the world a better place for all.

My mother provided the steppingstones I needed to know how to use my history of being adopted to help transform the world.

During Women’s History Month and beyond, I honor my mother and all the exceptional women in the world. Women who have their own stories and are doing amazing things one act at a time.

You are all amazing.