I tend to do things backwards. I’d like to think it’s because I’m special, but it’s probably because I’m just not all that smart. In the early 90’s, when everyone else was coming North across the Border to share in America’s blossoming economy, it occurred to me to head South of the Border to make my fortune. Fifteen years later, I woke up one day and found myself deeply in debt, the father of two Mexican children, and on the verge of full-scale divorce. Oh well, there’s always next time.

I did get lucky, though, when somebody came along and made me an offer I couldn’t refuse on my coffee company, Mondo Caffè. I sold-out, paid-off my debts, handed-over my shorts to the ex, and came back to America to make my fortune. Things were looking great: the market was booming, real estate was worth more than ever, unemployment was basically non-existent. I invested in stocks and my brother’s contracting business just in time for the first economic depression in almost a century.

Although an entrepreneur by nature, I figured I would have to get a job now, and because I am so back-asswards, I decided to take another trip South of the Border—much deeper South, this time—to sort of clear my head and figure out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life...where to migrate to next…

Be careful what you ask for.  My ex-wife wrote to me from Guadalajara and asked if it would be okay with me if she sent our two, tween-age daughters up to Seattle to live with me. “Ya no puedo,” she wrote me, and my jaw dropped and I stared, dumbfounded, at my computer screen. My immediate response was that, of course, I would take them. I had been fighting with her for three years to let them come up and spend a school year with me, and all of a sudden she was sending them to live with me indefinitely. The Cold War was over.

But, the girls and I really hadn’t spent enough time together in the last several years to establish a solid relationship, not to mention that they had somehow become young ladies while I was away. The initial feeling of excitement was overcome with dread, and I was suddenly very afraid. Everybody tells me that I’m an excellent father, and although I like to think that’s true, if I were to draw-up a parenting-résumé, I doubt that anybody would give me a job.

Loving your children doesn’t necessarily mean that you are capable of taking care of them; and doing so alone, as every single parent comes to find out, is so much harder than doing so with a partner. Add to that the fact that I’m a man, that my girls are from another country, and that they are on the verge of womanhood, and you have a recipe for disaster. Throw in the fact that they’re suddenly going to a school that is 95% black, and you’ve got a sit-com ready to write.

But children are resilient and quick to adapt. They’re still not to old to learn new tricks. You can throw them into the melting pot, and somehow they blend-in, whereas I always felt, as an adult, that I just sort of bobbed around in the stew like an odd-ball carrot or something. Their best friends are also immigrants—one from Korea and two from China—and I find it amazing that, although none of them was born in the U.S. or spoke English as their first language, they are among the best students in a very good school full of other good students. With absolutely no formal schooling in English, after being yanked out of one school in one country and thrust into another school in another country, my little Mexican daughters got all A’s with the exception of one B+ each. And within four months, their English is better than my Spanish ever will be.

I’m not sure if we’ll stay in Seattle; I’m not even sure how much longer the three of us will be together. Maybe their mother will come out of her crisis and decide that she wants her daughters back—“ahora mismo.” Maybe the Cold War will escalate again to the same international crisis that it was last year, causing yet another migration of either some or all of the Mexi-Monda family to migrate to yet another, new beginning.

It wasn’t so long ago that I was on my knees praying to God for an answer: what am I supposed to do with the rest of my life? I was without direction, I was bored, I was lonely… I expected a burning bush—some sort of a sign—not a phone call from my ex-wife. Be careful of what you ask for—you just might get it.

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