Of course not.
For almost a year I had to chase him through excuses, hearings and papers to get a miserable amount that arrived late, incomplete or did not arrive. Ofelia, when I once mentioned her on the phone, gave a harsh giggle.
—Be grateful that my son signed the divorce without fighting the girl. I could have taken it from you if I wanted to.
I froze with the earpiece pressed to my ear.
—He never loved his daughter.
—You say that. But a single woman has no way to prove many things.
That phrase left me shaking. Not because I believed her. Because I understood the type of people I was dealing with. People for whom everything was a tool: money, children, last name, other people’s shame. I hung up without answering and swore I would never ask them for anything again. Nor moral justice. No compassion. Not an explanation.
From there, my life became a survival project.
I moved with Ximena to a room on the roof of an old house. It had a tin roof that sounded like a drum when it rained, a stove, a single bed where we both slept tightly, and a shared bathroom in the hallway. But it was ours. For the first time, no one came in to check the dust. Nobody gave an opinion on how I carried my daughter. Nobody twisted their mouth if Ximena cried. Poverty, when it is at least yours, sometimes humiliates less than the comfort provided.
There were nights when Ximena fell asleep hugging me and I stared at the darkness with such a great fear of the future that it was difficult for me to breathe. I thought about school, supplies, illnesses, rent, whether one day my body would just stop holding on. But then it dawned. And the girl woke up saying “mommy, I’m hungry” or “mommy, look at my drawing” and life went on, stubborn, without permission to give up.
Little by little I stopped being just an abandoned woman.
I became something else.
A full-time mother and worker by necessity. In penny manager. In improvised nurse. In a seamstress in torn uniforms. In which he knew how many tortillas lasted until Thursday and how to get rid of a fever with cold cloths while waiting for a cheap medicine to take effect. In which she learned not to get rid of when the landlord raised the rent or when the teacher ordered “simple” materials that for a girl were simple and for a single mother were a crisis.
When Ximena was six years old, a woman for whom I cleaned the house, Mrs. Renata, asked me one afternoon if I knew how to use a computer. I told him the truth:
—Very little.
He looked me up and down and said:
—You learn fast. It shows. My secretary is leaving. I need someone part time in the office. Answer phones, organize files, make payments. If you want, I’ll show you.
I accepted without thinking.
That job changed my life.
Not all at once, not like in movies where one opportunity solves everything. But enough to start breathing differently. I learned to keep agendas, to use Excel, to deal with patients, to fill out forms, to dress in simple but more formal clothes. My hands stopped smelling like chlorine all the time. My knees no longer ended up swollen every night from mopping so much. I started saving little. Very little. But something.
Ximena grew up watching me study at night, in front of a used computer that a nurse at the office sold me in payments. I took free courses, I practiced typing, I learned things that at thirty years old I was ashamed of not having learned before. But that shame became fuel.
—Why do you study so much, mommy? —Ximena once asked me, already nine years old, while I was doing homework next to me.
I looked at her.
He was frowning just like I was when I was concentrating and his straight hair was tied up in a makeshift ponytail. She was pretty in a clean, strong way. Not like those girls everyone calls “princess”. She was pretty like someone who already has a character inside.
—Because I want to give you a different life.
She thought a little and then said something that still makes my heart race when I remember it:
—I already like this life if you are with me.
I had to turn my face so he wouldn’t see me cry.
Over time, I went from secretary to administrative coordinator of the office. Then I helped Mrs. Renata open a second branch. Then a third. When she retired, she left me recommended to a medical group that needed someone exactly like me: reliable, efficient, and used to solving with little.
At thirty-eight, ten years after the divorce, I was no longer the woman who left the court with a diaper bag and a broken heart.
He had rented a modest but bright apartment. Ximena had her own room, full of books, notebooks and small plants because she loved watching things grow. I managed the administrative operation of three private clinics and had a decent salary, real savings and a peace that I did not know when I was young. She wasn’t a millionaire. It wasn’t powerful. But no one decided again whether my daughter and I deserved shelter or food.
We had built something.
Without them.
