What I Brought from Quito That's Still With Me 25 Years Later

On the 28th of December 2000, I landed in the UK wearing a pair of jeans. Twenty-five years later, my daughter wears them.

I was about to land in London. The plane had circled for an hour because of the snow — it hadn't snowed like that in years, apparently. I was 21. The plan was to study for four years and go back home.

Those jeans were with me when I arrived. They are still here. A 13 kilo suitcase was enough to keep the dream alive.

I was scared and excited to see my mum, she had been living in the UK for six years before I came. Six years of phone calls and photographs and the particular ache of a gap you don't have a word for. I hadn't seen her in all that time.

That is the thing about moving to another country. It is not one single story. It is a hundred stories braided together, some of them break your heart and some of them keep you alive.

Twenty five years on, I am lucky to have my mother spends most of the year with my family in Glasgow. It is not a visit. This is my mother choosing, every year, to come and be part of the life we have built in the country she arrived in before me. She, much like me, has made peace with the ideas that this is now home. That took time. I don't think either of us could tell you exactly when it happened — there was no conversation, no moment of formal acceptance. It was more gradual than that. One year she stopped treating the house like somewhere temporary. It feels somewhat like treason to think that the dream of going back is no longer a part of our lives, yet accepting it has made it much easier to feel that this is our home. It was important and necessary.

It was about a year ago when I walked into the kitchen, my mum and my kids were giggling about a joke she had told them, all making empanadas, then I realised, this is it, this is the life, this is what we all are now… and I would not want anything to be different. We are all now an amalgamation of our dreams and hopes and conflicts. All three generations being part of a world we build everyday.

It felt like watching two parts of my life all at the same time, my past and my future, not being opposite but being present.

I think about the girl who wore those jeans sometimes. She had no idea they would outlast furniture, friendships, and several versions of me. She had no idea that twenty-five years later, they would become a symbol of evolution and change. And yet, they are “retro” now so not only valuable to me, but my daughter… and so, exactly as language, tradition and customs, my jeans will pass down to her. A girl who has no recollection of the streets of Quito they once existed in, but wears them just as proudly, not changed a bit, maybe a little older, maybe a little wiser and most certainly, true to their essence.

The girl who wore those jeans all those years ago humbles me. For the strength she must have had — leaving everything behind, not knowing what was waiting for her outside the plane and she got on it anyway.

She didn't know her children would one day stand in a Glasgow kitchen learning to fold empanadas with their grandmother.

She just wore her jeans and got on the plane.

Sometimes that's all it takes.