She has been here only 30 years. She is not good at learning a new language. She tried phonetics with a place that help foreigners learn it as their second language, but this was very hard for her. She has only had one year of education, the first grade. Her parents took her out of school telling her that she was stupid. At the age of 13, her parents had her moved alone to another city. There were people there that had her work a full time job, and work additional hours doing what she said as “cleaning rich peoples homes”.

A green card holder came and wooed her, telling er that he was able to take her away from all of this and give her a much happier life. So he had her brought in illegally in the States. Her husband severely restricted her to where she can go, one place being grocery shopping. He beat her and their children. He also would bring his girlfriends home with him. After ten years, he abandoned her and the children. A friend of the family took her in. She immediately went to an immigration attorney to see if she can legally remain in the United States. This is when they gave her a work permit. They gave her a work permit because one of their exceptions is where spousal abuse is involved. This is when I met her working at Denny’s.

She is semi-illiterate. She can speak very well considering her lack of education. However, she cannot read or write. Still she is able to pick out some words in a written document. She is able to make intelligent decisions. I wonder what would have been possible with the right education. She can be very perceptive. I do think her very low self-esteem got in the way.

Due to our lack of understanding of each other’s language, we used part Spanish, part English, and words we made up which were our poor attempts at real words. Most of the time we were able to communicate unusually well. I can totally mispronounce some words, use very poor sentence structure, and many times I made very creative use of the words I understood. She still understood me. I do not understand how she did this. The rest of the time we managed, and at times, we used a friend of the family, or one of her children to translate more complex communication.

Why am I writing all of this? It is to communicate what I am willing to do for her, and why. She had a terrible past. I was taking action to make it better for her and her children. I came to care very much about her, so the relationship took a turn where we ended up having a child together.

IF we do get married, I hope I am emotionally up to doing this. But if not, I suspect I will be very depressed. She does know about my MI.

PS How did I come to believe in what she told me? By purposely interviewing her friends, including her children.