Last week, my daughter started preschool. In many ways it’s a small deal, moving to a new classroom but still being in daycare. But it’s also big because she’s at a new school too. I thought she’d be happy there because her dad & I had taken her there before. As I carried her in , she said, “I don’t like this place.” My heart shattered in a million ways and immediately started to question my choice of sending her here. Maybe we should have tried to send her to the campus with all her friends and teachers ? What was I thinking ? Yes, that place was much further away but I hated watching her play alone and barely eat or sleep on the daycare’s app.
So much of being a parent is constantly questioning your choices.
There’s so much I want to write and say to you. I want to tell you that it’s been 2 years since I found my original mother and I still haven’t seen her face to face, despite being only 4 hrs away. I haven’t talked to my sisters in months because I can’t hold the information that I know and they don’t. But I want desperately to know them, to laugh in the way sisters do. I want to tell you I just got back from vacation with my entire family. Where my adoptive mother mooned over my brother and his family while treating mine like a burden, like me as a daughter , and by extension my daughter are too much, too difficult to love. So I’ve turned to writing as I always do. I looked at old poems both of mine and of others that are my guideposts toward hope.
I have been working on my memoir more and more these days, I just started an essay collection incubator and it is my audacious hope to finish my manuscript by the end of the course. So today, I’m sharing an excerpt from my essay “On Mothering.” This essay deals with so many things , all the things and more that a mother can hold. Primarily, it chronicles my labor and delivery , my early days of motherhood and the harsh realities of birthing while Black in a racist medical industrial system. I barely made it alive and I definitely didn’t make it unscathed.
These pieces are about the joy of forming a brave and beautiful relationship with my daughter , the first biological relative I get to keep.
Last night when I was trying to put her down, I sang twinkle, twinkle little star , as I often do and she sang along very loudly. I wanted her to go to sleep so badly but instead I laughed and cried. I want to focus on joy. In a world that is obsessed with consumption of trauma and violence on Black and brown bodies, I want to conjure joy. So here goes…
I love neighborhood walks with my daughter. From her stroller, she coos at the world as I try to forget it. She reaches out her hand, somehow both delicate and chubby, to grasp the petals of a pink Dahlia growing through the fence. An acorn falls to the ground, it is the size of her fist.A spotted Great Dane and his owner trot up to us, the dog put his larger than life nose into Opal’s face. She giggles and screams, reaching out for more. A bee buzzes by and she falls asleep to its rhythm dreaming of nectar. I watch her sleep. It is another thing that I love. I get lost in the way her eyelids close, long brown eyelashes curved toward her eyebrows. Besides me, she is the only person I know with eyebrows that curls at the end. My grandfather used to tease me about it all the time. Why is just one of your eyebrows curly, he would ask. Now I know, it is because of the legacy of curls given to me , to my daughter, from my mother, my grandmother. We are all braided together.
I received my daughter’s birth certificate today. Her full name was there. My full name was there. Her father’s. The time and place of birth. How much she weighed, how long she was. These are the normal things that birth certificates should hold. But as an adoptee, my birth certificate was fabricated. It had been altered to meet the laws of the State of Pennsylvania. Instead of stating what city I was born in, it said my place of birth was “The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s Orphan Court.” My original mother and father’s names were replaced with the names of my adoptive parents. There was no information under how much I weighed, how long I was or what time I was born. Instead there was a seal of approval, allowing this information to be erased because it was more important that I grew up in a white evangelical family.
When I received my daughter’s birth certificate, my eyes welled with tears of gratitude. I felt like we were starting something new, her and I. Something where we could claim our own names. Where we could write family history and plant new truths of belonging and hope.
This summer the tenderness of childhood is in bloom. My daughter is almost three and she is beginning to describe everything she sees. “Look, bubbles,” she says as their iridescent perfect roundness bounces on the breeze. “Look, dandelions,”she says, blowing their pom-pommed tops from the stem.”Look, there is the moon,” she says. Another mother in the sky lighting our darkness. “Look, there are lightning bugs,” she says. They are stars in the grass. One came into our house, slipping in as we closed the sliding door. The lightning bug flashed her lantern belly at us three times, as if to say this way to all that is good, glimmering with wonder.
All of my life I have longed for this kind of joy. My daughter has given me the name I love the most, mama. She calls for me with her songbird voice. She wants me to come with her and catch the magic that she sees. I have lived most of my life without a mirror of sameness. I grew up as the only Black girl in my rural midwestern town. Yet when I see my daughter bend down to pick a flower, when I see her running towards me, curls everywhere, I see myself. I see a little girl, finally set free.
Thanks for reading my essay! I’d love to know what you think. As a parting gift, here is one of my favorite albums on motherhood that buoys me through the waves of toddlerhood.
Very beautiful and touching essay! How your struggle to mother is also a struggle to love yourself and to be whole. Thank you for sharing and for committing to getting your story out and up and over into this world