Graduating from medical school last month still feels almost surreal. Sometimes I catch my reflection and see the kid who studied under a flickering streetlamp when the power went out, and I remember: we made it—my mother and I. Every page I turned carried her presence, her fingerprints in the margins.
My mother, Maria, came to the U.S. with nothing but determination and an unwavering love that never wavered. She worked three jobs, attended English classes at night, and survived on catnaps on buses. Her hands were worn from endless work, yet she adopted me and built a home of warmth and encouragement. People often didn’t know where to place us—me, white, her, Hispanic—but she held my hand and kept walking. “You belong because you’re mine,” she’d say.
She sacrificed endlessly for my education—tutoring me in Latin roots while scrubbing counters, paying for SAT classes when groceries barely fit in the budget. If anyone deserves the title of hero, it’s her.
A few weeks ago, during a layover on my way to a medical conference in Chicago, I invited her to lunch at a hotel near the airport. She teased about the “fancy” setting, and I told her she deserved the best.
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