By skyforbes 
When I first started writing on Medium, I shared parts of my life that I had never said out loud before. Writing became a way to make sense of the chaos, to find peace in things I didn’t quite understand. One of those early stories was about my mom.
My mother has always been a complicated woman. She is strong but fragile, wise but impulsive, loving but inconsistent. Her story is one that I’ve carried with me for as long as I can remember because so much of who I am is tangled up in who she is.
She has been married twice.
The first time was in her home country, a small developing nation in South America. She had her first child, my sister, at sixteen. She came from a large, poor family and for her, marriage was not a romantic choice. It was survival. Access to contraception and education about women’s health were limited, and for women in her world, security often came in the form of a husband. By the time she was in her early thirties, she decided to start over. She came to the United States to build a better life and to eventually bring her children here too.
That’s when she met my father.
Their relationship was secret, like most of my mother’s relationships have been. My brothers and sister didn’t even meet my dad until my…