When you get a little bit older, my love, I hope you’ll understand better that each one of us is different. Each person is unique. That means ‘one of a kind’. There are no two people in this world that are exactly the same. Even if you had a twin, he or she would not be an exact copy of you. We are different by the way we look and we are different by the way we act.

Do you remember how a week or so ago you got a task at school to do your family tree? We’ve never done one before, and I felt excited. Whenever there is a chance to talk about your daddy, I’m happy to share the stories I know.

You had a quick glance at the tree. ‘Mommy, what’s your favorite dish?’ – you asked. ‘I need to write it here: mommy’s or daddy’s favorite dish’.

‘Put down ‘sushi”. But after a moment’s hesitation I said: ‘No, better write ‘hudut’. It’s a dish from Belize’.

‘Hudut?’ – you wrinkled your little nose and suddenly became all sad. ‘No… I don’t want kids to laugh…’

‘Why would they laugh?’ – I asked and instantly remembered a very similar talk we had before you started school. ‘Kids would only laugh if they didn’t know what it is, but you would explain. Hudut is so delicious!’

‘No…’ – you didn’t sound convinced. ‘I still don’t want to…’.

I didn’t say anything anymore on the subject to you then, but I thought that you didn’t want to be different. I felt it was so important to you to be just like other kids, to belong.

But, my love, you are beautifully different, and so am I! We are all different. I want to shout from the top of my lungs that your daddy indeed was from the other side of the world. I wanna tell to whoever will listen that there was a time when I did nothing but ride in the back of the trucks, sleep in tents and meet new people every day. I want to remind them and myself that yes, my life then was different. And our life today is different from our life in Mexico.

I understand you, though. School is not easy. Better to belong than stay misunderstood. You need to be strong to feel happy about your differences. But I… I love our story, our life, however sad it was at times.

And so I simply let it be for a few days. Then later I showed you the pictures of hudut, explained to you how it was made. This time you eagerly agreed that it looked so good!

And still, in the family tree you added daddy’s favorite dish, not mine, and not the boring ‘ground beef with rice’ that I mentioned, but ‘the pigtail‘ which I remembered daddy cooking for me. Your friends will definitely laugh, but maybe you’ll laugh with them?

One more thing… Do you remember Pippi? The Longstocking girl whose adventures we read about in the evenings, at about the same time we did your family tree? What did we say – she was a bit odd. And I myself was not sure I liked how Pippi behaved at times. She was very different from her friends. But little by little we both understood why, and by the end of the book we got to love her. Pippi was extremely kind and always cared so much about her friends and all the other kids.

So it’s OK to be different. And it’s OK to not want to be.