The first thing I wrote in my notebook was: “Keep working.”
I stared at those two words for several seconds.
Then I crossed them out.
That wasn’t quite what I meant.
I still wanted the workshop.
I still wanted to walk through its doors, touch fabric, hear the machines running, and see a finished garment spread across the table.
But simply saying I wanted to “keep working” didn’t explain what I actually needed.
So I tried again.
“Choose how much I work, who I work for, and how long I work.”
I read the sentence twice.
This time, it felt right.
Underneath it, I added several things that somehow embarrassed me even though none of them were unreasonable.
Take a dance class.
Have two afternoons each week that belonged to no one but me.
Travel because I wanted to, not because someone else had already made the plans.
And stop saying, “Whatever you want,” whenever I actually had an opinion.
They were simple things.
Yet writing them down felt almost rebellious.
When I heard Ernesto walking through the hallway, I closed the notebook.
I wasn’t ready to show it to him.
First, I needed to understand what I wanted without immediately hearing someone else’s opinion about it.
The weeks that followed were not dramatic or romantic.
They were messy.
There were phone calls we didn’t know how to handle.
Receipts we couldn’t find.
People asking for money earlier than expected.
Some evenings, Ernesto and I sat across from each other reviewing expenses and barely spoke.
We even argued about groceries.
One afternoon, Ernesto came home carrying several shopping bags and told me he had bought something on an installment plan.
We had never discussed it.
“Why didn’t you ask me first?”
He dropped the keys onto the table.
“Now I feel like I need permission just to breathe.”
I was tired, and my voice came out sharper than I intended.
“Talking to me before making a major purchase is not asking permission to exist.”
Within minutes, the argument had stopped being about money.
He brought up San Blas.
I brought up the workshop.
Then the house.
Then old decisions.
Eventually, we ate dinner separately, both of us feeling as if we had repeated the same argument yet again without knowing how to finish it.
The following day, we called our daughter, Paola.
For several minutes, she listened while we explained our sides.
Then she sighed.
“I love you both, but I can’t keep being your translator.”
Neither of us answered immediately.
And I realized she was right.
Whenever I couldn’t make Ernesto understand something, I called Paola.
Whenever he thought I was being unreasonable, he called her too.
Without meaning to, we had placed our daughter in the middle of conversations that belonged to us.
That week, we found a couples therapist.
During the first session, I sat with my purse resting on my knees.
Ernesto folded his arms.
At first, we both spoke as if the therapist were a judge who would eventually announce which one of us was right.
When Ernesto talked about wanting me to close the workshop, he pointed toward my hands.
“She’s in pain almost every day. I thought I was helping her. I wanted her to stop working so hard.”
The therapist turned toward me.
“What did you want?”
It took me a moment to answer.
“I wanted to change how I worked.”
