The end is the beginning. Or the beginning is the end.
I’m deeply aware that these hours are the last ones I’ll be as me. Me as I know it. A solo actress. Who reads a book in my pajamas indoors even on a sunny Saturday morning. Who has a rich internal life, looking at patterns to make sense of the world. Who started dancing when I was 39. Who survived trauma and whose scars still need to be tended, mended, daily. Who stops to watch a butterfly. Who feels others’ pain.
I realize though, this whole time I’ve been navigating a life, an identity, or identities as they are in relationship to and with others – as a daughter, a sister, a granddaughter, a niece, a great niece, a cousin, a wife, a partner, a daughter-in-law, an aunt, a friend, a survivor. I was born with many of those identities, and only later chose others, or they chose me.
So this forthcoming identity – mom, mama, mommy – while it was a choice, I admitted aloud today that I’m not enthusiastic about it. I’m even dreading it. I feel so strongly I said it twice.
Aren’t you so excited about becoming a parent? Isn’t this a miracle? Can you believe how lucky you got? Isn’t this something you’ve always dreamed of?
No, yes, no, no.
This cult of motherhood – the tedium, the physicality, the longest days and shortest years, the needs and wants and desires of another being so fully reliant on me, the survival, the mom’s groups, the milestones, the complexity, the recognition that there is no perfection and yet we all are encouraged – no, forced – to strive for it – there’s so much packed into this ending, or beginning, that it will take the rest of my lifetime to sort through.
I don’t know this person. This new roommate who I didn’t interview, who is born with my DNA, my cleft chin and cheek shape, maybe my genetic mutation, god, I hope not. And born in a month with the longest light of the year and in a month where death has been in the darkness.
Maybe I’ll wear this identity like a badge. Maybe I’ll bury it. Maybe I’ll refer to myself as “Mom of Person X.’ Maybe I’ll forget about it sometimes. Maybe I won’t. Maybe she’ll be the one to forge this new identity for me, through her birth and in my newly born relationship to her.
As we stood holding our dishes in the kitchen, Mike said, “you’ve been singing a lot lately.” I turn to him, thinking of the constant chorus that takes up all the free space in my waking mind, and wondered aloud, “But I’ve always been singing. Did you just now notice?”
And then I wonder to myself, “Or am I just starting to sing aloud, the governor of my inside voice somehow giving up her post during the pandemic. The one to say, oh you have a horrible voice don’t sing aloud please. Maybe she’s gone? And my only voice is now my outside voice, the one that sings?”
But maybe it’s this: in the dark times, there will also be singing. Yes, there will be singing about the dark times.
The darkest of times.
Losing a parent, losing a life, losing a sense that I have an ounce of control, losing a freedom of safety, mobility, connection, breathing, losing faith…in humanity, in the goodness in people’s hearts, in the system, in the manifest destiny, in the artifice of whiteness, in arguments that are based in truth, in arguments that are based in love, in arguments that are based in the sanctity of the 99.9% of shared DNA that we have.
Don’t tell me that it wasn’t really a thing where and when you were growing up.
Don’t tell me that it’s not your problem.
Don’t tell me I’m too sensitive.
Don’t tell me that you’re a devil’s advocate.
Tell me you get it.
Tell me you’re a shit person. Aren’t we all.
Tell me that you could imagine, empathize, step into someone else’s shoes when you were growing up – no matter rural, urban, suburban – to see how it could be impossible, impossibly difficult.
Tell me that it’s your problem.
Tell me that my sensitivity will change the world.
Tell me you advocate for the devil.
Tell me that Brene Brown’s work on empathy and vulnerability has made a difference.
Tell me that the heightened adrenaline and anxiety and othering go away when we take away the echoes of social media and 24-hour news cycles’ appetites.
Tell me how you topple down centuries of strategic systems doing what they were designed to do.
Tell me how to create joy that sustains the movements.
Tell me we’ll get there in someone’s lifetime.
Tell me us white folks will share power and resources back to those from which these came.
Tell me where to heal the wound, put pressure on the artery, connect head, heart and hands.
What makes me sad is that we have one word for love in the English language. No singular word that evokes the soul-stirring precise description of what we mean. We need modifiers to really describe what we mean. Tough love, love at first sight, tender love, slow burn love, compatible love like peanut butter and jelly, granny panties love which is different than bikini wax love, sibling love, sisterly love, brotherly love, the parent’s love of a child, the child’s love for a parent, sliding doors love, missed connections love, love love. Like they were in love love to indicate that it was a serious love, above a crush love.
What do you call love for someone who is dead?
What do you call the love that still exists in this world, passing from the dead back to the living, it circulating among the stars, passing over our heads by the north winds and landing with a gentle beat in our hearts? The whispers of conversation, exchange of memories? In the quiet moments, deep in the mind’s eye, a glimpse of someone walking in the distance, a few city blocks away, his head leaned back and mouth open in a wide laugh, the gait stirring up a pang of familiar love?
We sat there last night, the three of us, savoring the last bit of birthday cake. Talking about our favorite parts of her visit here. I asked her what she would want to tell my dad. She said, oh don’t worry I’ll be telling him a lot of things.
“Mother is a very powerful identity,” she said. This was today, 26 of us in our respective zoom boxes with the festive baby shower virtual backgrounds. The year is 2021. The zoom baby shower the stand-in for the hugs and collection of words of wisdom and wishes that we would otherwise string together as beads on a necklace to hand to the new parent.
I had sat contemplating this fact, this coming identity shift, over the last few days in particular. We saw our baby on the ultrasound for the first time in person. Before that, it was only the wonders of the human endeavor that could keep us tethered to the growing being in Temecula, us in San Francisco, a facetime here, a video recording there, texted pictures of her progress. This time, we heard the thump thump of the heartbeart, fluttering, a fast drum in the big house, a hummingbird’s wings, the crow’s hops. The baby’s hands were by her face. We saw her yawn and then smile.
As I try and focus in on my laptop, I listen to the backyard chorus of the daycare next door, the 40 three-year-olds screaming, singing, chanting, laughing, squealing with their outside voices, blowing whistles – those are particularly long days in trying to work – and sometimes puffing homemade kazoos. Things that some teachers do to pass the hours together, growing the bright young minds.
I thought, well, what is 215 divided by 40? It’s over 5. So it would be over 5 of those daycares full of children that were found last week on the grounds of a Kamloops residential school – the place where Native children were sent, kidnapped really, forced to march at times, to assimilate and erase and mute, snuffing out languages and cultures and carefree joy of childhood along the way, the Canadian government, the United States government, the Catholic church, writing it in policy together to “kill the Indian to save the man.” These 215 skeletons, with no marked graves, no crosses, no flowers, no talisman sending them from one world to the next, no nothing. Hiding them, the reality. I wondered though, how did the people know where to look? The bends of the willow trees, the patterns in the patches of overgrown grasses, wildflowers coming back year after year, enveloping these beings, when the mothers could not force their way in, could not track where their stolen children were, what became of them. Mother earth took them in, their last exhales are what she breathed in.
There are at least 129 other residential schools in Canada. More than 350 in the United States. Starting in the 1800s. The last one closed in 1996. I don’t do the math.
In the zoom baby shower today, everyone went around the circle and gave us advice. Beautiful stirring words, practical wisdom, ways to make humor out of something that many say is the hardest thing you’ll ever do. Don’t be perfect, let that go, the cult of perfect motherhood will bury you. Eat her good snacks too – you can always get more organic raspberries. Nap when she naps. Be prepared to have your schedule and routine turn upside down and then work to turn it rightside up. When you think you want to go somewhere, stop thinking and just go. When you get there and it’s a disaster, just leave. No guilt. Don’t get buried in books or songs that will haunt you forever – the child will find and madly request over and over again “Baby Shark” no matter what you do. So, to start, read the books you want, listen to the music you love. And they will adapt too. It goes by so fast. Take the time to enjoy it. They’ll all end up in therapy in the 30s anyway. The dishes can wait, the laundry will be forever piling up. You cannot get ahead. So don’t even try. They will always be your baby. Before you know it, you’ll be looking at colleges and sending them off into adulthood. Wishing they were babies once again. Get an Airb&b for family when they come. Your relationship is like a thick rope and this baby will try and fray and wear that rope down. Don’t forget about yourselves and do all the things you need to make that rope taut and strong. You need someone to take care of you too. Since the grandparents are more than a flight away, find grandparents here too, to share their wisdom and love. Everyone needs hope in the form of new life.
I think of George Flloyd calling to his mom, his mama. Gone from this earth, she did not bear witness on this plane. How he summoned mothers everywhere. A sound that poured through solid walls, artificial boundaries and borders, the tendons of hearts, space and time. Their arms still aching, from phantom pains of their babies, here and gone.
Do you remember body odor? Or odor beyond the smell of your hot breath, maybe coffee breath, maybe dehydrated breath ricocheting off your mask back onto your tastebuds and up your nasal passages?
I think of the bodies I’ve smelled.
Past lovers and what remains on the bedsheet, the fresh newborn heads of my nieces and nephews, a waft of my grandmother some form of Estee Lauder or Clinique trailing behind her, my mom, my first home, a smell of warm spices and cold decaying leaves somehow existing at the same time.
And then I really think about the bodies, imagine the crush of humanity where body odor can be discerned. Typically in a place and time where bodies are standing close by for one reason or another. Public transportation, airplanes, Disney World, protests and marches, voting booths, the DMV, the grocery line.
I breathe in, I breathe them in.
What am I smelling? What bit of information can I glean? The mix of DNA and place? What they have for meals day in and out? Metabolism and metabolic rates? Other cultures and homelands? Whether we are relatives or only relative?
Resilient is said as a compliment, something heaped on someone for surviving, treading water, breathing through a straw for a moment or a lifetime.
But what about taking away the things that force one to become resilient anyway? Or to force others to see a person as resilient? Why is it a badge of honor? A trophy? A grade?
What if coming out of this pandemic – if and when we do as a world – the stores that make any one of us resilient are depleted, the battery is expired, the river is dry, the drought is in a new category of crisis, from red to purple to dark purple.
In school, I learned about this concept of shifting baselines. The slight or large change in a system, an environment, a person. How we quickly adjust like it was always this way, to correct and acknowledge in order to move through. It becomes the acceptable and relatable new normal. Ugh. The new normal. I hate that phrase.
This is where we are in 2021. Our baseline has shifted.
What is normal now would have required our minds – back in the before times – to move heaven and earth to even conjure an image of how life could be, would be.
These phrases that are now just rolling off our tongues day in and out – vaccine status, immunity, post-pandemic plans, I can’t wait to hug you again, I ate indoors at a restaurant. Do you have it stored in your memory? Our old baseline?
And then the other half of this horror show. The phrases that some have been saying all along…I can’t breathe. Racism is real. Seeing color is real. Accountability is not the same as being cancelled is real. I don’t have to smile at you just because you ask is real. Being born on this soil is real. I am from here is real. My lived experience is real. My life is real.
As we stood holding our dishes in the kitchen, Mike said, “you’ve been singing a lot lately.” I turn to him, thinking of the constant chorus that takes up all the free space in my waking mind, and wondered aloud, “But I’ve always been singing. Did you just now notice?”
And then I wonder to myself, “Or am I just starting to sing aloud, the governor of my inside voice somehow giving up her post during the pandemic. The one to say, oh you have a horrible voice don’t sing aloud please. Maybe she’s gone? And my only voice is now my outside voice, the one that sings?”
But maybe it’s this: in the dark times, there will also be singing. Yes, there will be singing about the dark times.
The darkest of times.
Losing a parent, losing a life, losing a sense that I have an ounce of control, losing a freedom of safety, mobility, connection, breathing, losing faith…in humanity, in the goodness in people’s hearts, in the system, in the manifest destiny, in whiteness, in arguments that are based in truth, in arguments that are based in love, in arguments that are based in the sanctity of the 99.9% of shared DNA that we have.
keeping abreast | keeping a breast 