When my mother started a cosmetology business to support our family, I lost my sense of home. Our dining table was no longer for sharing a steaming plate of white rice, ground beef, and black beans. Instead, it was for crisp white towels, bundles of thin, pointed wooden sticks, sterilized tweezers and scissors, and hundreds of bottles of polish.

At first, her clients were quiet. I heard nothing but the gentle hum of the air conditioner accompanied by the whirring of the electric foot rasp, and the occasional ring of a phone echoing through the hallway of closed doors. As her clients returned, they developed familiarity — the one with bleach-blonde hair in heaping curls bound together on the top of her head, her shrill, high-pitched voice wanting her nails lacquered in the darkest crimson; the 50-year-old Cuban woman who always brought pastelitos and complained about her single life, hoping a new haircut would bring her the man of her dreams; the hearty laugh that boomed through the house every Saturday morning was my human alarm clock when a mother of three was happy to have a break from tracking her toddlers. My mom had become a therapist attending her clients’ hands and feet under a white-bulb lamp with watchful eyes and open ears.

Yet, my mother and I never went out to brunch like Natalie and her mom. We never went shopping like Daylin and her mom. She’d never ask me how my day was.

“Mami, why don’t you talk to me?” I’d ask as she was hunched over the sink and up to her elbows in soap suds.

“Why don’t you come out of your room for once?” she’d scold in Spanish.

Maybe she had a point. To me, “home” was a small room with a twin bed, a desk piled with yearbooks, magazines, newspapers, and a dresser covered in college flyers, polaroid photos, and an assortment of candles. It was my own world. To my mom, however, “home” was where family met work — all her little worlds collided. Six years after she fled from Moldova to Cuba, she and my father headed for the U.S. by raft. My mother left her own family behind, but keeps the door open to those who seek to be a part of ours. Reluctantly, I realized I had to open my own door as well.

Now, when I hear the voices of my favorite clients through the paper-thin wall separating my bedroom and the dining table, I join them. Vivian, dyeing her roots to hide the gray, recounts the stories of her son hitching rides through France, Ukraine, Italy, and Spain. My mother — the diligent listener — occasionally chimes in with questions. Tania comes in for her weekly manicure at 3:50 p.m., complaining about the day’s difficult clients at the attorney’s office where she works. Lily comes on Fridays, taking clients’ phone calls and documenting therapy sessions on her laptop while my mother tends to her toenails. From these women who seek comfort and find vanity, I hear endless stories about family betrayal, the neighborhood chisme about who’s being evicted from the apartment complex, and complaints about overcharged phone bills.

These conversations constructed my new “home”: maybe someday I’ll backpack across Europe, or work for a law firm, or travel with clientele right in my pocket. In the meantime, my mom and I talk more than ever before, trading the whereabouts of my day at school for the moments she shared with her clients. We share our own moments together — and a new definition of home.