Jan 02, 2019
Writing Motherhood Taught Me About My Emotional and Psychic Inheritance
I felt abandoned and alone. I was told that it was at odds with what mothers should feel, do feel, after childbirth.
I felt abandoned and alone. I was told that it was at odds with what mothers should feel, do feel, after childbirth.
These women showed me how to love and care for myself—the only way a Black woman could.
My eating disorder dictated my relationship to food. Then I moved to Wyoming, whose unforgiving landscape reminded me: We eat food to survive.
It was satisfying to see those robins, sparrows, and starlings, because they were still with us. They had stayed.
Beauty and its pursuit can be art, a delight, a terrific party. But a party you must attend every day isn’t a party at all. It’s an unpaid job.
Inside her small body lives every answer to every obstacle. No maps are necessary. She is the map.
I am at the nether reaches of my fertility, curious as to what I can still grow. This remains a shock.
“What I know is this: Some part of me, however small, is already dead. I live around it.”
“We were free and naïve enough to believe we could navigate the terrain of men’s hunger and their hands unscathed.”
I have been afraid most days of my life, which is what anxiety is, and the months of this pregnancy have been the most anxious of my life.
“What does it mean when your body is your art? Can a thicker brush not make just as beautiful strokes?”
I hope the voices of people who haven’t necessarily had the words when they needed them can also be heard.
On the day when two pink lines stared up at me, I wondered which set of events I had set in motion. A baby? Or not a baby?
My bad teeth are slowly shrinking my world. They are not of my body; they haunt my body.
Even when I think I am at peace, when I think I have healed, I find myself still thinking of my scar.
My changing body made me the object of stares and comments from men far older than my father.
Here is how the story of your new face begins.
“Culture should change as people do because people should define culture.”
At fifty yards, I wave like I see someone I know. Ten feet away, I flash my pepper spray.
On Election Night, I thought again of the boy who assaulted me. When had I finally stopped blaming myself?
