But I know what it means to love a child so completely that your body becomes the bridge they walk over to reach a better life.
Marco was two years old when I understood that I would be raising him mostly alone. His father drifted out of our lives the way some men do, leaving behind apologies too weak to hold any weight. After that, it was just me and my son.
I learned how much a woman can carry when she has no other choice.
For years I woke at three in the morning. I would tie my hair back, wrap a shawl over my shoulders in the colder months, and walk in darkness to the place where the produce trucks unloaded. My hands grew rough from crates. My back ached from lifting. In rainy season, my shoes stayed wet for hours. In dry season, dust settled into every crease of my skin. Some mornings I sold enough to feel hopeful. Other mornings I came home with half my stock and a heart so tired I thought it might crack.
But every day, I kept going.
I kept going because Marco loved school.
He loved books so much that when he was little, he used to read signs out loud while we walked down the street. When he was older, he would do homework beside me at the market when I could not leave him at home. I used to watch him under the weak afternoon light, bent over his notebooks while customers came and went, and I would think, Please, God. Let him go farther than I did.
He did.
He studied. He earned scholarships. He worked. He graduated from college in a pressed shirt that did not quite fit his shoulders because we borrowed it from a neighbor’s son. I wore the green dress that day too.
That dress was never special to anyone else.
But it was special to me.
I had worn it the day Marco was born, when I was still young enough to believe life might become easier if I just kept being patient. Years later, when he graduated, I took the same dress from the trunk at the foot of my bed, smoothed the fabric with both hands, and wore it because it was the one piece of clothing that felt tied to both the beginning of his life and the proof that my struggle had meant something.
