Becoming…

This summer, life took its most special turn, like watching Baryshnikov spin through endless pirouettes. When the spinning stops, the scene has changed, and life is never the same again.

Images of my youth with my sisters are etched deep in me: a disco in some hotel in Vallarta. We had it all to ourselves. We danced, sang, and did our makeup through the smoke. That memory fades and slips through our fingers. These are the parties we will no longer go to. This is what I leave behind to become a mother. To become your mother, Elián.

Beautiful, translucent memories trickle away the moment we take the highway to the beach for our first encounter as a family: the three of us together, facing the sea, the waves, and ten sunsets.

Now we take a new road. We say goodbye to the yellow house; it is the day our life begins anew. I cry with love, with joy, and with fear. I cry as the road offers us its flowers.

Our days are tinged with home. At dusk, the three of us put on our pajamas, and I wake up a wifey. I put on an apron and my Manolos, and I feel powerful and sexy making breakfast. It is being tired all the time, until I lose track of the tiredness itself. I forget the stove and the iron, and things get burned.

I use the sleepless hours to tiptoe down to the studio and sketch this collection. 4 a.m. seems the right time for creative meetings with myself; I let impulse guide the moment. I have no energy left for doubt: you are asleep, and the day belongs to you.

At the heart of this unknown territory lies the fortune of keeping the promise I made to my sister, an unbreakable thread that made me a mother and changed us all in ways we never imagined. We threw ourselves into the abyss so we would never die wondering.

It is who I am today and who I stopped being. It is never having had a huge belly and still wanting to show it off. It is my grandmother’s wallpaper, witness to the family’s growth, as it wears away in melancholic joy.