MY MOTHER was denied all help when she had her firstborn. It is only natural that she denied me the same. I was a 30-year-old single woman; a victim of a victim. My child’s father had given me an ultimatum in blood: either we raise the child together in Texas or nothing, nothing at all.
And by nothing, he meant me – I would be nothing. Simply removed from her life. I would stay; he would take the baby and leave. And, in a matter of speaking, this happens in the first year.
But let’s go back. After he gives me an ultimatum, I plan my escape. I take my daughter, two months, all flesh, all milk, and run home to my mama.
There is a story surrounding my girlhood that goes something like this: I was the baby that made my mother a mother - the first to pull her by the umbilical cord and make her forge a maternal, feminine bone. I was the one to make her inhale and exhale my newborn cries.
My oldest sister did not gain such a luxury. Her conception came with a denial from her father, my mother’s broken heart, her arrival nearly written in my mother’s last breath. And so, when she learned to talk, my mother gave her government name. She sent her away to be with her godmother. She put distance between herself and motherhood, unready; unsure.
When I am born, my mother is still in love with my father. She is hopeful. Softened. A little more sure, she accepts me as a gift. And I become the one who gives and gives again.
Some 30 years later, I show up on her doorstep with my 2-month-old, and she is angry at me: one, for running away from a man; and two, for having a baby alone. Had she taught me nothing if not to let a man put a baby in me?
In time, however, she comes to love my daughter, and it almost feels like she loves her as an extension of herself – if she can go back and love the little girl she never was, it would look like the kind of love she gives my daughter. She would dance with her all night in her kitchen. She would dress her like a baby doll. She would coo and ooh and ahh at her in the mornings.
But with all motherhood journeys – I run into my failings: I enter the family court system, and that system – that my mother warns me to stay away from – takes my baby. It takes me 11 months to summon my daughter back to my skin. And I fear my mother has never, and may never, forgive me for it.
My daughter is back home; and by home, I mean she is back with me. My mother is angry. Angry because she wants me back. She wants us back where she can love that little girl again, openly, expressingly.
And the ultimatum arrives, this time, from my mother’s purple lips and not my abuser’s. You either come home and raise her here, or you stay and be doomed to the same fate all over again.
My mother doesn’t trust men. Especially not the man I met a year ago, when I was broken and childless, who loved me in all my broken pieces.
I stare at my daughter when she is sleeping, still wondering if she is really here, really mine. And all I can hear is my mother, telling me how wrong I am, how bad I am at motherhood. I am too soft. Too native. Too loving. Too forgiving.
I go against all prerequisites for motherhood – I rewrite it every day I am without her and on my own. And that, I fear: the rewriting, the undoing – purely and surely, is the unknown of new motherhood, is what both scares and wounds us.
And where do we go from here, but into the darkness, with the light of my daughter’s eyes to guide us towards the reckoning of ourselves.
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