My momā€™s gift of gab convinced me to wear girly roller skates (1/3)
When I was 12, my mom got a pair of roller skates as a gift from a friend who had returned from Miami.
The boot was a bright white, two wheels were magenta, and the other two were fuchsia.
Rollerblades had been on my list of "Mom, buy for me, please!"
Rollerblading and attempts at 360s and backflips had become popular among the cool kids in Barranquilla, and I wanted to do what everyone else was doing.
My mom was still figuring out her way through the financial maze of being a single mother in a country without paths to stability for people without a college education. Money was always tight; it was hard to even pay for the electricity and water bills, let alone rollerblades.
She learned early on during the divorce that she could tell us stories to make up for things we were missing. My sister and I were young and gullible and no match for my mom's gift of storytelling. She diligently started to sell me on the idea that maybe I didn't need my own rollerblades but her roller skates.
But I couldn't get past the obvious, "Mom, those are girl rollerblades."
"Tsk, tsk, no, mijito!" My mom responded. "They are unisex. And girls like men who are comfortable wearing unisex things."
Many of my things growing up were unisex, including the perfume I used for a long time. And sometimes they were unisex, like my Calvin Klein One cologne, and sometimes they were not, like my mom's and my roller skates.
She worked equally hard to provide for us as she did to make us live a life of make-believe. She did it when she tried to sell us on the idea that oven-roasted beef round with copious amounts of salt and pepper tasted exactly like hamburgers.
It didn't.
Round, of course, is a metaphorical word to evoke different emotions than its accurate description would, ass. And that was what it tasted like; it tasted like chewy ass with copious amounts of salt and pepper.
But my mom had labia! Which is not the same as labia; don't be gross. Labia is the Spanish word used when someone can convince you that up is down and left is right. They are verbose, loquacious, they have the gift of jab, they can spin a yarn, or convince Eskimos to trade you their fur coats for needless ice.
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