The First Time I Met My Mother

It was a hot, humid December afternoon in Santo Domingo when I first met my mother. She had just finished having lunch at her house and was starting her walk back to work. The hair salon she owned and managed was around the corner from her home at the time.

Thinking back on it now, as an 18-year-old pipsqueak, meeting my mom was so awkward. I could have evaporated on the spot LOL.

My uncle, who I had also just met that same day, picked me up at the airport and we drove straight to my mother's house to surprise her.

My father, who was in prison at the time, had planned the whole thing. He reached out to my mother, who he also hadn't seen in a long time, to feel out whether a surprise visit was the best way to go about this. Then he called in his younger brother, who lives in the Dominican Republic, to arrange for him to pick me up at the airport and take me to my mother's house.

My dad asked my mom over the phone, "How are you doing these days? Are you healthy?" He told me he wanted to make sure she didn't have "a heart condition or something." I guess seeing your firstborn for the first time in 17 years was one of those surprises that could shock a woman to death.

Though we were driving to her house to see her, we ended up spotting her on the sidewalk halfway between home and her salon. My uncle and my dad's girlfriend were both in the truck with me and were probably just as nervous as I was about this whole thing.

Excited, my uncle said, "Oh shit, that's her. That's your mom!" I went fully numb. The only thing I did was smile, and that smile froze on my face for 30 minutes straight. Like picture day at school. SMILE!

He stopped the truck right in front of her, which, if you know anything about the capital of the Dominican Republic, is hardly ever a good thing when a car stops right in front of you.

"Open the doo…" Before my uncle could even finish the sentence, I opened the left rear door of his truck and jumped out and into my mother's arms for the first time in 17 years.

"Ho-ly shit," my uncle whispered right after pressing record on his phone camera to document the first time I ever hugged my mother.

I was giggling like a toddler at anything my mom said in those moments because I didn't know what else to do or say. Can I call her Mom right now? Or do we need to get to know each other more first?

The crazy thing is I've always known I had a mother. But I didn't know she talked. That she moved and walked. That she had a smell. That she could see and feel.

In between our hugs, we stopped so we could take each other's faces in… "Oh, pero usted es bonita!" Oh, but you're so beautiful! I said. Which in NYC slang would translate to "OKAY queen, I see you." And we hugged again.

After we had our moment, my mom walked me over to her salon and introduced me to every single client who was there. Before that, she introduced me to her mother, my grandmother, who was the main hair washer at the salon.

Not one person said, "Wait, you have an older daughter?" Not the woman with the see-through shower cap letting a deep conditioner marinate under the hair-dryer bowl. Not the woman at the hair-washing station with her neck tilted back at the sink, one eye closed because water had just sprayed into it. Not the woman grabbing cash from her purse to pay for her services. Not even the woman who'd just walked in from the street, grateful for the air conditioner. No one ever said, "Amanda who?"

I remember feeling deeply happy that everyone in my mother's life already knew who I was. Everyone knew an older daughter existed, and that she's always "vivía fuera," which in Spanish translates to "lives out," and in Dominican Spanish means "lives in the United States."

This felt good because I thought I had been forgotten about. I learned the phrase "out of sight, out of mind" in middle school, and I carried that phrase around with me because I believed it applied to me in my mom's world. I was out of sight, so surely I was out of mind. Right?

Wrong. Her world, which included this salon, these women, and these kinds of afternoons, knew who I was to my mother.

Later that evening, my mom hosted a party at her house. That's where I was introduced to new members of my family, which now included one grandmother, three younger sisters, a stepdad, and a dog.

Not having a mother growing up was hard. Add growing up in New York City as an immigrant to that, and you have a really tough, hyper-independent, lost, and scared girl who thinks life will always be this dark and lonely mystery.

There were a lot of things that were hard about not having a mom. Growing up, there wasn't an obvious person in my corner encouraging me to be no one other than myself. Validating me. Cheering me on. That alone made self-trust and self-worth difficult to understand and apply.

Building friendships, for a long time, was extremely difficult too. I believe our relationships with our mothers dictate so much of our relationships with other women. Not having an initial friendship with a woman at home made trust and confidence in friendships almost impossible, especially during my middle and high school years. In college, my closest friends were five boys.

Taking up space in daily life was also not allowed, because I always felt like a burden to people who had to take me to school, do my hair, or feed me, even if those people were family.

What I've always known to be true is that our circumstances do not have to define our reality. The things we inherit, the things we lacked, the way we wished things were, the way our lives took form before we had any say in it. None of it gets to direct our present or our future. It's all just information.

The truth is when I met my mother, I met myself. It wasn't until she became real to me that I became real to myself. Integrating all of that wasn't easy. I had wounds I didn't know I had before meeting her.

Since that hot afternoon on the sidewalk in Santo Domingo, my healing journey has been about finding my way back to myself and helping other women with complicated parent dynamics do the same.

If you carry your own complicated story with a parent and the self-doubt that comes from it, that's the work I do best. One-on-one, we find your way back to yourself by shining a light on what wants to come up.