On one of my stops back home from touring, my dad pulled me aside and asked me, “How would you feel if your mother and I moved back to Ecuador?” I appreciated that he asked but I was honestly more curious to know how he felt about it. He said he had been watching me pursue my dreams, and wanted to do the same. He wanted to be a surgeon again. My dad knew it would be hard to convince my mom to leave me, but he was aware that, at almost fifty, he had only so many years left of “his hands” (it’s a surgeon thing). He had only one more shot to see if he still had it. But he wanted to know how I would feel?
“I think you should do it,” I said, feeling like he’d sacrificed so much for me and my own dreams. I felt like it was his turn to pursue his, even if it hurt me to see them go.
The most heart-wrenching pain I’ve ever felt was saying good-bye to my mom. We were at LAX once again, but this time she was hopping on a plane with a one-way ticket to Ecuador. I didn’t want her to leave. But while I was off touring, my parents had decided that I was old enough and successful enough to take care of myself. Without me knowing, my mom had prevented my dad from returning us to Ecuador when I was in high school. She thought I was too young to leave behind or disrupt my education. But when he broached the subject again post college, my mom no longer had any excuses. I admired my parents for wanting to return to Ecuador to be doctors again, but that didn’t mean I was ready to put an entire continent between my mom and me.
The two of us were alone at the airport because my dad had left a few weeks earlier to look for a house in Guayaquil. When he left, I thought he would be back. But he never came back. He was eager to set roots in Ecuador. I get it. Can you imagine going fifteen years without seeing the people you love? My dad played his cards perfectly. He was starting to get paranoid about the housing market. They became homeowners immediately after getting their permanent residencies, but real estate value wouldn’t stop rising. My dad thought it was too good to be true. No country could sustain this kind of housing market, not even the great United States of America. My dad was certain it was all going to collapse. He was new to the real estate game, but all of this seemed too fishy. That’s when he realized that if he was ever going to try to go back to Ecuador to be a doctor again, now was the time. He had one shot to cash out before it was too late. The year was 2007. The housing market crashed one year after my parents left.
My mom and I hugged each other tight inside the Tom Bradley International Terminal. I never knew why people hated airports so much until the very moment I had to say good-bye to my mom. I watched her go through security and walk toward her gate. Every step she took away from me was more painful than the last. We had gone through so much together in this country. As I watched her get farther and farther into her gate, I chose to believe that my mom was off searching for her own piece of the American Dream, just in a different part of America—South America.
The decision to return to Ecuador was possible only because of our permanent residencies. My parents would never have dared to leave if they had still been undocumented; otherwise they would not have been allowed back into the country. Our new legality allowed my mom and dad to imagine something different for themselves. They would have rather lived in the United States doing what they were put on this earth to do: saving children’s lives. But since they couldn’t make their dreams work here, they packed up and headed out in search of a better life… just like they did fifteen years earlier. Only this time, I wasn’t by their side.