I woke up on an especially cool winter morning and looked over to my mother’s side of the bed. She was not there, I knew that, but I secretly wished she was. I swung my legs off the bedside and rushed to the bathroom to brush my teeth and get myself ready for school. This was a typical morning for me. My mother worked from before the sun rose until late after the sun was already down, she is a Mexican immigrant who had spent only two years in the United States when my father left us. She had to raise us on her own, struggling to live in a country she was completely foreign to, learning the language as she went along, depending on her own children to help her navigate through the world. My childhood was nothing abnormal, I had shoes on my feet