Day 27: The Day My World Cracked Open
A lot of my childhood is blurry. Survival trauma does that. Your brain learns what to keep and what to lock away, and for a long time I thought I had lost more memories than I kept. But there is one moment that never left me. One memory that feels so alive, so sensory, so magical, that when I return to it, I swear I can still smell it.
This was the day my world cracked open.
I was sitting on my grandmother’s lap, her bosom soft beneath my cheek like a pillow made of safety. We were in her rocking chair, the slow, steady motion moving us back and forth, back and forth. The Libro de Nacho was spread open across my lap, its pages worn, familiar, waiting.
Outside, life was loud.
We lived on a busy carretera in the Dominican Republic, with a bakery right across the street. Traffic moved in a way that only makes sense in memory: motorcycles weaving past cars, buggies rolling by, horses clopping along like they belonged there too. The air was thick with contradiction. Smoke from engines. Horse dung baking in the heat. Fresh bread drifting out of the panadería, warm and yeasty and comforting. It shouldn’t have worked, but it did. It was chaos and rhythm and life all tangled together.
And inside that noise, I felt calm.
Mamá held me. That alone mattered. But there was also this quiet apprehension buzzing in my chest. How was I going to learn all these words? The page felt overwhelming. Letters stacked together, sounds I didn’t yet own. The book was open, but the world inside it felt far away.
And then she began.
Her finger moved slowly, deliberately, pointing at each letter, each syllable, each word. She pronounced the sounds softly into my ear, her voice patient, rhythmic, sure. I mimicked her. Again. And again. And again. The rocking chair kept time, my body learning alongside my brain. When I got it wrong, she corrected me without frustration. When I got it right, we moved on.
That’s how I learned to read.
Not with pressure. Not with fear. With motion. With repetition. With warmth. With someone believing I could do it before I believed it myself.
That moment feels magical to me now because I didn’t know what was being born. I didn’t know that reading would become my saving grace. That books would become my refuge, my rebellion, my home. I didn’t know that stories would teach me language for feelings I didn’t yet have names for. I didn’t know that one day I would be a writer.
But that was the beginning.
When I think back on it now, what strikes me most is how held I felt. Even surrounded by noise, even unsure of myself, I wasn’t alone. Mamá was there, anchoring me. The world outside was messy and loud and real, but in that rocking chair, there was focus. There was intention. There was love.
It’s wild to think about where that moment led.
Now I write stories that get read by parents sitting with their children. I write books that people turn to because they want to see themselves reflected, or because they want to step into a world different from their own. I write stories that hold people the way I was held. Stories that say, you belong here.
And every time I think about that, I circle back to her.
To my grandmother.
To that rocking chair.
To the Libro de Nacho.
To the smell of shit and pan mingling in the air.
There’s something deeply poetic about that contrast. Beauty and mess existing at the same time. Learning unfolding in the middle of noise. Magic not being clean or quiet or curated, but real and grounded and human.
That’s probably why this memory survived when so many others didn’t. It wasn’t just a moment. It was a doorway.
That was the day my world opened.
That was the day stories found me.
And everything I’ve written since traces back to that small girl, on her grandmother’s lap, sounding out words she didn’t yet know would one day shape her entire life.
#childhoodMemory #DominicanCulture #grandmotherWisdom #LearningToRead #magicalMemories #readingJourney #storytellingOrigins
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