I was never one of those women who had an eternal boyfriend. I never celebrated five-year anniversaries nor filled boxes with love letters. While many of my friends lived long relationships, I barely accumulated a couple of attempts.
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My first boyfriend came in senior year of high school and lasted, literally, a month. In college I had another, maybe we lasted five months. After that, nothing. I simply was never a girlfriend.
The truth is that my great love, before meeting José, my husband, was studying and traveling. I was fascinated by learning, discovering other places, getting to know other cultures. I traveled around Chile, also toured other countries, and one day I went to study in Spain. Later I arrived in the United States to continue my education.
I never returned to Chile. Many believe it was because I kept studying, but the reality was very different: I fell in love.
José and I started as classmates at university and little by little we became friends. We shared conversations, homework, dreams, and a very similar way of looking at life. Without realizing it, friendship turned into love. I never had to ask myself if he was the right man, I never made pros and cons lists, I never felt afraid to take the next step. With him, everything was simple, everything flowed. In less than a year we got married, became parents, and my life changed forever.
At thirty years old I was married, with a baby barely three months old, living in a house in the United States, I had a home. Suddenly I stopped being the international student who had arrived with a suitcase full of plans to become a wife, mother, and immigrant.
Everything that until then defined my identity seemed to stop. My life in Chile, my job, my studies, the possibility of returning. Everything was suspended while I learned to care for a newborn in a country I was still learning to know.
I never imagined I would get married so soon, much less that I would be a mother. It was not in my plans, but I was (and still am) very happy. Over time I understood that God writes stories very different from those one designs.
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Our relationship also didn’t seem to meet others’ expectations. He Mexican and I Chilean. Many thought cultural differences, the little time together, or simply statistics would work against us. Eleven years later we are still here, against all odds. We don’t have the perfect marriage, but we have two children and continue building a home in Memphis, Tennessee.
A home where Chilean and Mexican words mix; where Spanish coexists with English; where we celebrate traditions from different countries and where every day we learn that raising bilingual and bicultural children in a mostly monolingual country is a gift, but also a challenge.
Because forming a family far from the country of origin also has a silent side: missing, raising children far from family, missing birthdays, funerals, hugs, and family gatherings, not having a support network, learning that being an immigrant means living with a heart divided between two countries.
For years I tried to understand that grief that few name: migratory grief. Missing without stopping to be grateful, loving two places at the same time, and feeling at home and foreign, simultaneously. And it was precisely there where writing appeared, my healing process. It wasn’t easy, but I am achieving it. I discovered that putting into words what we lived as a family could also accompany others.
I began to write about migration, identity, belonging, and motherhood. Very soon I will publish my first novel about the migratory experience in the United States and I am working on a new book dedicated to immigrant motherhood. I never imagined that my love story, my motherhood in another country, and my migratory grief would end up making me a writer.
Because, in the end, writing was never born only from my passion for literature. It was born from love, love for José, love for our children, and love for this multicultural family we have built far from home. It was born from the desire to heal in order to keep building a home.
I was never the woman who collected long relationships. Life had another story prepared for me. A story that began in a classroom, and that crossed borders. And a story that, without knowing it, would make me not only a wife, mother, and immigrant, but also a writer.
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