With their mother in Mexico and the rest of the family in Tucson, 9-year-old Naomi de la Rosa knew she had to grow up fast.
With her small hands she grabbed a broom and a mop to help keep the house tidy — not the way her mom used to do it, but as best she could.
She learned how to prepare her father’s morning coffee just the way he liked it: one teaspoon of instant coffee and four spoonfuls of brown sugar stirred into three-parts water and one part milk — served with a small silver spoon in the white cup with chips on the sides.
She has been the family’s head cook and housekeeper since 2009, when her mother, Gloria, went from Tucson to Juarez to apply for a green card and instead found herself banned for 10 years from returning to the United States because years prior she crossed illegally after overstaying a visa.
Now 15, Naomi starts her days at 6:15 a.m., when the alarm on her phone blasts pop music.
She brushes and tightens her curls or pulls her long black hair up in a bun, applies mascara and gets ready for school. She takes about two hours to get ready, finishing off with a spritz of body spray that smells of flowers.
Most of the time she skips breakfast at home and grabs a bite at school.
When she gets home there’s cleaning to do. She decides what to make for dinner and does the dishes before she starts her homework.
“How did you do your sardines?” she asks her older brother Bill one Saturday when he is home for the summer.
“I can’t remember,” he replies as he prepares chicken for lunch.
In equal parts Spanish and English, she tells him she tried to make sardines like his, but they didn’t turn out. She was going to call him for advice, she says, but didn’t.
Gloria tries to send meals to Tucson with visiting family members so her only daughter doesn’t always have to cook. But Naomi doesn’t mind.
Music keeps her company as she scrubs the toilet or makes her dad’s bed. She carries her iPhone wherever she goes, humming to Britney Spears’ “Pretty Girl” or whatever is playing on pop radio.
She does this while making mostly A’s and taking advanced classes. The only exception is a C in art, which Bill wanted her to bring up so it wouldn’t drag down her grade point average and risk her chances of getting into Bowdoin College in Maine — his college choice for her because that is where he goes to school and he’s built a support network there.
He suggested she could talk with her teacher and offer to take a trip to a museum and do a 10-page report to raise her grade. She never got around to it.
Her brother is her role model and she usually follows his advice.
“I like to have someone there for me,” she says, even when it gets annoying.
Naomi wants to go to college and help the community, perhaps by becoming a teacher or a counselor.
Her first experience in Bill’s world was this summer, when she volunteered as a juror for the Pima County Teen Court, which he has been involved with every year since middle school.
“Oh my God, dude, it was so much fun — like, I’m not even lying!” she tells Bill when he picks her up after the first day.
She had been nervous to go, and feared she was overdressed in her purple shirt and black slacks. But she was quick to make friends, chatting between cases with a group of girls about their favorite TV shows. Hers is “Pretty Little Liars,” a teen mystery-thriller. She loves thrillers and scary movies.
Afterward, she tells Bill about the case of a guy who had marijuana on him and got arrested, and the case of a boy who said he threw a rock in self-defense. In another case, a girl got in trouble for spraying perfume in the classroom.
“Were you the foreperson?” he asks her.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“This girl who was right next to me. I was going to be, but then I was like, hmm …”
Naomi trails off and Bill tells her how he was attorney in Teen Court and took the bus from their house on the south side of Tucson to the Ronstadt Transit Center wearing a suit and tie.
She wants to do it again, she says, when she is not in Nogales with her mom.
Naomi doesn’t visit as often as her little brother Bobby, who spends his summers there, because she has to clean and cook for her 82-year-old father, Arsenio. Besides, she doesn’t feel too comfortable there.
“A lot of people stare at you and they disrespect you,” she says. “Like, let’s say there’s a 40-year-old guy passing by and a little girl and he’s like, ‘Wow, you’re really hot.’”
She never seriously considered living in Nogales with her mother, she says, because of her school. She sees her mother as a warrior for sacrificing so much for them, but their relationship is not the same.
Without a mom around, Naomi has found refuge in her younger brother, Bobby, and family friend Lety Rodriguez.
“Lety is so funny — she’s so crazy too, good crazy,” Naomi says. “She’s always like, ‘Don’t be sticking your butt out.’ Her daughter Selena is like my best friend. She’s like another Bobby, someone I can trust.”
Rodriguez was there for Naomi’s fifth-grade promotion. She has been there when Bobby or even Gloria called to say Naomi wasn’t feeling well.
“I would imagine what if it was my daughter who had a toothache and I wasn’t there to tuck her in or that they go to bed on an empty stomach,” Lety says. “That hurts.”
Naomi is still a teenager who bickers with her siblings, but she is aware that she balances multiple roles.
“The student life is to always do good in school, don’t let drama get to you,” she says. “Then, the mom life is like, this needs to be clean, what if visitors come?”
The mom life is also about Bobby.
When their mother first went to live in Mexico, Bobby was not quite 4.
“Every night I would cry myself to sleep,” she says. But then she would look at her little brother sleeping next to her and see what a baby he still was.
“I would hug him and I would be crying,” she says. “But then I would be, like, ‘No, no, I’m strong’ and wipe those tears and go to sleep.”
One night after Gloria had left for Mexico, Naomi woke up to go to the bathroom and saw a silhouette in the middle of the hallway. It was Bobby, with his eyes full of tears.
The siblings went to work. Bill took Bobby back to bed to read him tales like “La Llorona,” the ghostly story of the weeping woman, which their mom used to tell them. Eldest sibling Jim made a puppet show with blankets and a big teddy bear. Naomi warmed up strawberry milk.
Their mom was a country away. Their aging dad’s health was fading fast. But they had each other — and that’s something she would not let Bobby forget.
On the nights they missed their mother most, she would hug her little brother tight and make him a promise: “I’m right here for you.”
