We like the telenovelas anyways. We get the news anyways. I get it from the women who get letters from the outside where the Spanish news is not blocked. The telenovela stars are all blond and thin and rich and most of us look like the maids and witch doctors and farm peasants on the shows, but this is as close as we get to the outside, as close as we get to the life we imagined outside these walls. What would it be like? we think. What would it be like if our problem were a fight over a man or an inheritance? If the only violence we knew was killing a nemesis to steal away with her lover? Laughing, laughing. How funny to imagine this alternate universe.

In this alternate universe, maybe I wouldn’t be a mother. If I am being honest, I don’t always want to be a mother. Sometimes I want to be a dancer, at Salsa Rueda on Fridays at my favorite spot, the one by the Miami airport. I was learning. Sometimes I want to be a swimmer, in Key Biscayne, where the wealthy Salvadorans live, where the beach is uglier than Miami Beach but where fewer people venture so I can sink beneath the green-gray water and watch the clouds blur and no one asks anything of me. Sometimes I want to be a fighter, as when I consider attacking the men who stand guard over me. What about not caring about the consequences? Throw me in prison, beat me with your batons. Give me up to the television, another headline. Some moments I want my daughter returned to me, but God forgive me, others I want a different life for her, away from me. It is ugly to admit. But don’t believe the mothers who tell you motherhood is vocation or sacrifice or beauty or anything on a greeting card. Motherhood: question mark, a constant calculation of what-if. What if we just gave up?