Jorge Villafana won’t be able to spend time with his mom this Mother’s Day.
The rigors of the job means the Portland Timbers' starting left back will be on a plane almost all day, returning from Saturday’s game against the Montreal Impact rather than treating his mother, and wife and mother of his two kids for that matter, to a leisurely brunch or picnic in the park.
But he knows that’s just how Juanita Villafana would have wanted it.
So when he calls her to wish a long-distance Happy Mother’s Day before hopping his flight, Villafana will be thinking of the sacrifices she made to help him get to where he is today. He’ll recall her awaking at 4 am for work to put in a full shift before returning home in the evening to shuttle him to soccer practice at night. He’ll remember her driving him all over the state of California for tournaments on the weekend, or how she left her native Mexico to find a better life for her only child.
And he’ll thank her for all that she did.
“They go to work and they come home and they’re tired, but they have to take you to practice,” Villafana said in a phone conversation with MLSsoccer.com from Montreal. “It’s those things that come to mind, and I’m really thankful for the help that she gave.”
Villafana’s story, and relationship with his mother, is well-known.
In late 2011, fresh on the heels of his most successful season with Chivas USA, Villafana, who had a virtually non-existent relationship with his father, chose to change his name from Flores to his mother’s last name to honor all the sacrifices she made for him.
Now, looking back on that, Villafana said he gains more and more appreciation for her and what she did for him.
“When you’re a kid, you don’t pay attention to those things, but when you grow up you understand more,” he said.
Villafana was born in Anaheim, California, but when he was just a toddler, he and his mother moved to Mexico to be closer to family. And when Villafana was 6, his mother made the difficult choice to leave her son behind and return to Southern California and find work to support her family from afar.
“She would call, send money; it’s those little things that even though you’re not with your mom, you know that you are always on her mind and would hear from her, and it was special,” he said.
At the age of 15, Villafana left Mexico to be with his mother. And that’s when opportunity blossomed, culminating when he became the winner of the inaugural Sueño MLS competition to earn a contract with Chivas USA in 2007. And after seven seasons in Southern California, Villafana was traded to the Timbers ahead of the 2014 season to play under Caleb Porter, the coach who tabbed him for the 2012 US U-23 national team for Olympic qualifying.
It was his mother, along with other families, who pushed Villafana to enter the Sueño competition when he had originally intended to follow the more traditional college soccer route to the pros.
“I’ll be calling them both and give them thanks for everything they did and everything they’re doing,” Villafana said of his mother and wife, Celina, with whom he has two young daughters.
And now with a family of his own, Villafana said he hopes to instill some of the lessons of hard work his mom instilled in him as a child. He said they’re still too young to understand the challenges he had growing up, and how what his mom did paved the way for their current lifestyle, but those days will certainly come.
“You understand better when you’re in that position,” Villafana said of now being a parent himself. “So it changes you a lot when you have kids. Those stories are going to come out when they’re a little bit older and they understand better.
“But that’s why you work and you kind of want them to have the things that you didn’t have when you were a kid.”
Dan Itel covers the Timbers for MLSsoccer.com.
