Free Margarita Wednesdays: Making a New Life by the Mexican Sea by Deborah Rodriguez Page A

actually wanted to become a hairdresser. Though it had been kind of fun playing hairdresser in my mom’s salon when I was little, folding the towels and taking the rollers out of the old ladies’ hair while they sat under the dryers, I was all too aware of what it actually meant to be a real one. I can, to this day, picture my mom on the couch at night, heating pad stuffed under her spine and swollen feet propped up on a cushion, her smile slowly thawing from having to remain cheerful whether she felt cheery or not. Back then I wanted to be a princess. That, or a famous opera singer. My doting mother never failed to indulge me in my fantasies. Nevertheless, when I turned fifteen, she sent me to beauty school. “It’s a great skill to fall back on,” my overworked and underpaid mother insisted.
    So for a year after earning both my high school and beauty school diplomas, I worked in my mom’s salon. It was expected. It was easy. But I wanted more. Though I had struggled in school, I longed to be an educated, sophisticated world traveler, a woman of importance. So I told my mom that I wanted to go to college. “Oh, honey child,” she crooned in her sweet southern drawl, “you know you’re not college material.” After one year at John Brown University in Siloam Springs, Arkansas, I proved her right.
    I fell back on hairdressing, of course. And when, a few years later, with a husband, two kids, two cars, and a house, I called my mom sobbing, she was perplexed.
    “Are the kids okay?” she asked as she rushed through my front door, scanning the room for any signs of an accident or mishap. I nodded.
    “Are you okay?” She took my chin in her hand, my tears cascading over her fingers and onto the floor.
    “Yes. I mean, no. Oh, Mom, I just don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’m miserable, and I have no right to be.” She went into the kitchenand put the kettle on the stove. I followed. “I mean, I should be happy, right? I have so much.” Mom nodded. I plopped down on the kitchen chair. “I just don’t get it. Why doesn’t this work for me? I still keep feeling there has to be more.”
    Mom poured the hot water over a tea bag and handed me the cup. “I’m not sure, baby girl,” she answered as she stroked my hair. “But I do know one thing. You can do anything you set your mind to. What do you want?”
    “That’s the problem,” I said, sobbing. “I just don’t know.”
    She pulled a tissue from under her sweater sleeve. “Well, that just doesn’t make any sense. You’re a dreamer. Always have been. Come on, what does your heart tell you?”
    “I’m a hairdresser. I’m already a mom. What else can I be?” I whined.
    “Listen to you. You don’t have to be just one thing, or even two. You can do anything you want. And that, child, is not a reason to cry.”
    “I know, Mom.” I sighed. “I just wish I could figure it out.”
    My mother sat down across the table. “You know, you always did want to be a princess. It’s not too late . . .”
    I snorted a laugh in response.
    “Well, that’s not very princesslike of you,” she admonished, producing yet another tissue.
    “Thank you, Queen Mother.”
    “Debbie, I think you can be a mother, and a hairdresser, and a princess.”
    And as she reached across the table to take my hand in hers, I wondered if this woman, whose own mom had died when she was just a baby, who married at sixteen to escape a household of fourteen kids, living a dirt-poor existence in the Arkansas cotton fields, who remained trapped in a disappointing relationship until death did them part, had once wished for someone to tell her she could be a princess, too.
    I carried my mom’s words with me wherever I went. They were there as I patrolled the prisoners’ bunks for shanks and battled themisogynistic prison staff, they were there while I was swatting away the killer insects on the Bahamian beach, and they were there when I boarded that first plane to Afghanistan. I