Dear Mother/Dear Grief
when mother's day feels like grief's day
Dear Mother/Dear Grief,
You are the wound that opens her mouth to mourn at every sunrise. You are the woman I crave to be like even though I don't know what that is. There are so many things I want to tell you.
I spent the first 25 years of my life in hiding, hiding from who I was meant to be. I was like a dove with a broken wing unable to see my beauty because the portal to home was cut off from me.
I do not blame you, I blame society. I blame the white supremacist evangelical culture I was sold into. I blame the adoption agencies who profit off of child trafficking, just like the man who profited off selling your body.
For most of my life, about 30 years, I believed what my birth file said. I thought of it as a looking glass into what could have been. I got my birth file when I was 16, after supper. It said my grandmother did not want me because I was born “too white.” Those words curved into me like the round wagon wheel table I sat behind.
Dear Mother/Dear Grief,
I recently met my sisters, the daughters you kept, and they told me my grandmother, Cornelia, did want me. That she babysat me while you worked and that my aunts, who were teenagers at the time, skipped school to watch me. They knew me.
My Aunt T said she had looked for me in every doe-skinned girl with green eyes, in every person named Jessica. She didn’t know my name had been changed, that my identity had been erased.
Dear Mother/Dear Grief,
What did it feel like to lose me after four months of keeping me? I imagine it's a grief that has traced the map of your body, so you do not know yourself apart from it. My sisters say the man forced you to get rid of each “white baby” pushed out of you. That you relinquished another child, year after year.
Until the man finally went to prison and you finally were free.
Dear Mother/Dear Grief,
Every year on Mother’s Day I buy you a bouquet of fresh flowers . This year I got lilacs, white anemones and dark purple tulips. I believe a mother’s love is perennial. It lives in her body, in her daughter's body & her grandchild’s body. If you could see my face and look in my eyes, you would find hope like the curved petals of the anemone.
Dear Mother/ Dear Grief,
I think of myself as an infant often. I imagine what it was like to be curled up into you, my baby cheeks and thighs that had just the right amount of chunky. I try to listen for your voice in my heart. I want to hear you call me by name so that I can come home again. As a four month old, my eyesight was near full development. I may have finally turned over for the first time.
I may have begun to hold my head up for the first time without support. Did you help me with any of that? Did your eyes sting with proud tears when you saw me roll over from my stomach to my back for the first time?
Two years ago I gave birth to my own daughter. I remember the early weeks and months, when everything is surrender. I know now that the communion with grief is something all mothers take part in. Motherhood is a constant return to a self you no longer know.
Dear Mother/ Dear Grief,
My sisters say that you aren’t ready to meet me again. Though you did ask to see a picture of me and recognized me instantly. My youngest sister said you cried and you don’t show emotion often. I pray that if we don’t get to meet in this lifetime, that we can meet in the next. I imagine us sitting in rocking chairs on grandmother’s heavenly porch, cackling about the sorrows we have left behind. I imagine the smell of fresh cornbread and grits wafting from the kitchen on a gentle purple breeze. I imagine that we’d ask each other our cocoons of questions & that each answer would be wings lifting us out of grief & into joy.
