By Anna Trevathan, Alumni Managing Editor
A multicultural, multiverse exists, and I do not wonder if there are gigantic green gargoyles on Congress or if tyrannical tarantulas terrorize the Senate floor.
I instead wonder if there’s one where my mother got to stay in Mexico, and if she got to raise my brother, I wonder if he turned to breastfeeding instead of beer guzzling?
In this universe, I imagine a version of her with her nursing degree, a nationally recognized nurse who trains with dazzling doctors and is paid the money she deserves.
I hope she is somewhere wearing one of those long white dresses, eating tortas and tortillas and tacos, I hope she drinks cafecitos and chews on chancla and chisme.
What does she look like when the world treats her with kindness? Does she stay her beautiful hundred-pound, double-zero, four-foot-eleven self?
I hope her hair is still long, that it didn’t fall out from the dollar tree shampoo/ stress combination, I hope she braids her beautiful black hair in violet vanities
Does she have nightmares about cleaning the toilets we clean together here? Would she choose a life where we struggle to put food on the table?
I wonder if there is a version of her that came here legally, one that thinks a coyote is just an animal and wouldn’t know where the human-sized hole in a desert fence is.
In this universe, I hope she had a good Catholic daughter with her black hair and skin that matches hers, I hope that she got the name my father couldn’t pronounce.
I pray that in another universe my mother is loving her daughter the way she could never love me in this one.
