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We Have Known Boys (But None Have Been Bullet-Proof).

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Jordan Davis (1995-2012)

I have known black boys, known them in airless classrooms where the scent of their too-strong cologne worked overtime masking the cling of their sweat to skin and hormones. And I have known their scratching, grabbing, tugging at the belt loops of too-big pants, have involuntarily memorized the plaids and imprints on their boxers.

I have known boys like underripe fruit, a pit of eventual sweetness at the core of them, encased in a bitter pulp, toughening from too little tending or underexposure to light. I have watched them become principles in death when they were not finished learning what it would mean to be principled in life.

I have known them nursing dreams with slimming odds of realization, heard them reasoning with the wardens behind their private walls, scraping at the doors some white man’s stubborn shoulder intended to force closed.

Listen. You have heard them, smelled them, touched them, too. Groping boys. Maddening boys. Boys who, had they the luxury of longer lives, would grow to regret how they treated girls, how they dodged their daughters or fought the smallest dudes on the yard.

Had they lived, they would’ve shuffled home, hats in hand, hugged their mamas, clapped their daddies’ shoulders, nodded like men who understood remorse, who’d been leveled by regret and learned to talk about it.

Had they lived, they would’ve borne enough concussions to concede their desire for millions at the the expense of unscathed minds. And maybe they would’ve been Marines like Jordan Davis hoped he might be, maybe aviators like Trayvon envisioned himself or husbands like Jonathan Ferrell and Sean Bell were so close to becoming. Maybe they would’ve grown to guess that the cost of longer life was a hunching of one’s height at a white woman’s door, a soft knock rather than the screams that often escape the frantic or crowded or injured. Maybe they would’ve conceived children with women with whom they couldn’t bear to live — and all over again, they would find themselves having to grow, to lean toward a quickly dimming light and to become tender when it was far more tempting to coarsen.

They would’ve learned to be less clumsy, less clawing, to kiss as though they had the promise of many unthreatened years. They might have lived long enough to make tenuous sense of the finite number of American fates black men meet, long enough to marry well, then poorly, then well again.

Perhaps.

But we are losing them too soon to know, while they are yet boys. We are replanting our underripe fruit, graveyards becoming our gardens, and tending far more memories of boys than moments with full-grown men. It gets harder to talk to these could-have-been-towering trees, these possibly-flowering plants whose fruits we’ll never know.

And every day, there are new boys among us. We raindance for them. Grow. Live. We campaign for them. Grow. Live. We keep them from harm even when harm might be their better mentor. Hide. Grow. Live. And we guess for them. Grow. Live. And we know for them. Grow! Live! Living alone never ensures what a boy will become, but black men, above all, are the boys spared long enough to live. This is the look of hope, our lowest bar to clear: boys reaching bullet-free adulthood and outreaching everyone’s fear.

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I’m writing a monthly column for Vitae.

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Vitae, a new social media/interactive extension The Chronicle of Higher Education, recently launched, and it’s starting out strong with fantastic columns by professors, higher ed staff, and students. I was fortunate enough to be invited to be one of them!

Here’s my first piece, “The Greatest Mixtape Ever Made.” Exciting!

If you’re a college instructor/prof, a grad student, or an alumnus/a who just likes to keep up with other academics and academic musings, I encourage you to start a profile there and add friends to your circles. It’s fun!

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Going Off-Script: On Re-Defining Co-Parenting.

With every visit, you more closely resemble the man I recognize: tall enough to provide shade but slighter of frame than you’ve been for a long while. You’d gotten larger in these last years, enough so that on those rare occasions when I consented to your request for an embrace, you felt unfamiliar inside my arms.

But I suppose this was because there were other reasons you were uncomfortable there.

To celebrate our daughter’s third birthday, you came to town two days afterward, at 7 am on a Saturday. We’ve been warmer with each other for weeks, having little choice but to bond, trapped as we were under an avalanche of bills: reopening closed off corridors en route to an escape, outrunning, outwitting, repaying, rejoicing.

(Maybe love among people like us is just leading each other through labyrinths, is just doubling back after you’ve left.)

At the airport, you asked for a hug. “No,” I said. “Maybe later.” There are the confidences shared struggle restores — and there is affectionate touch, which is earned in other ways entirely.

Even so, I am surprised at our ease, surprised to find not even a hint of the old anger, my insides untightening with you near, rather than winding themselves into ulcerous knots, willing you to leave.

Listen: I am very different. I have loved and lost another. I’ve a life you no longer know and having new things to hold aloft excites me. Even the pain is new; even that is an odd relief. I am still collecting the parts of myself I’ve sloughed while risking fresh affections, still accepting that some things cannot be reclaimed, still wondering if, both with him and with you, the problem is me.

Do I drive you all away by being too writerly, too willing to retreat onto pages, where all the comfort, confessing, caressing and madness occurs in a place apart, when it should performed in person?

Only you know how far I can be from timid. Only I know how dark your days have been. My own days were darkest when something of you sat stirring in me, curling into the girl we gaze at today, in abject awe. Five months is a long time to grow a girl alone. A long time wondering over my worth. A long time spent listening to others’ whispered predictions. He’ll come back, they said. He’s a good guy.

They meant that when you did — and I suppose I always suspected you would — I should be grateful to have you. I should coerce you into marriage so both we and our child could suffer the delusion that neither you nor I would ever leave again.

But I’ve liked the leaving. I’ve liked flitting to spaces away from you — and relearning each other on return. This is the foundation of our friendship.

Before the girl, it was I who did the leaving. I’m sure it was unfair to insist that you were not allowed. But the baby meant you owed me; I knew the script. “Good men” dive headfirst into fatherhood with women they claim to love. It is only the cowards who need time, only the villains who leave.

If I had listened to you, looked at you, limb-walked far enough out that your words were not drowned in the chaos of the he-never-loved-you winds, I may have understood that we would always find ourselves here again: at ease and okay. (But would we have salvaged something worth sustaining? Would we have avoided the avalanche?)

Our daughter is wary when you appear, seemingly out of thin air: on screen, in person. She turns her head away; she tucks her chin. She needs to be coaxed out of an instinct to close herself off.

Of course, she has inherited this from me. It occurs to me now that I do her no favors by not appearing open with you.

This time, I sang her the refrain of a song she understands. Like you, she understands better in song. “Grow-own-ups! Come baaaack,” I cooed. And she turned to you and offered her first hug, ten minutes into your stay. She would sing it to us again throughout the day. It would rend our hearts.

What is rote for us is insurmountable for her. Perhaps love among families like ours is to stop sojourning toward other loves and to settle here. Maybe the only happiness we deserve is hers.

You were only here for two days. On the way back to the airport I said: I don’t want to get back together. You said you understood. And there is something different in these rides away now, a wistfulness, a reassurance.

It has been twelve years. You always come back.

I left the car this time, walked around to your side, offered an unsolicited embrace: brief and fairly far apart, but an offering. You are thinning out again: a recollection in my arms. “All right,” you said to yourself. “All right.”

Maybe the truest love is a resignation. Maybe it is resisting the pre-written script. I do not know.

But here we are. Here we are.

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For Now, We Are Still Alive.

Beloved, the hope that I owe you — the hope to which you are entitled — is not something I can cloak in gossamer metaphor. I cannot paint you the Pangaea that all parents feel they should.

But neither will I speak to you as though the very sky is a fraud, as though our lives are a set breaking down, are a studio lot in foreclosure. There is no walking away from this, as we would from a dimly lit theatre at the close of a sobering film. 

We are real. And for now — just for now — we are still alive. 

When the time comes, we will not speak of expectation. I will tell you what happened to the lanky boy down South, taking the shortcut to a home after dark in what once was a sundown town. It will be more than a familiar narrative, even the first time you hear it. It will be an ancestral refrain; it will moan from within your own marrow.

I will tell you: at the moment when his murderer was acquitted, I did not hold you closer, as many black parents do in these seminal moments. I did not hold you at all. For a moment, my arms would not lift. For a moment, you were all but alone. You were smiling, your dark eyes dancing with gorgeous mischief, as you held out a box of Teddy Grahams you weren’t supposed to have.

Distracted, I poured you more than a handful. I poured you all that was left.

The murderer smiled when he heard he was free and his lawyers boasted of their own legal prowess. They preened and grandstanded like heroes. They clucked over how long it took for the murderer to be granted his freedom and surmised that he would never have been charged at all if he were black like the boy that he killed.

The State Attorney also smiled, as she had many months ago, when the murderer was in fact arrested — 45 days after he left the boy dying in the grass, of a gunshot wound to the heart. I remember her then and how she basked beneath a press conference halo, being alternately terse and coy, playing to the rafters with actress’s affectation. “Those of us in law enforcement are committed to justice for every race, every gender, every person, of any persuasion whatsoever. They are our victims,” she’d said.

I recall the “our” clearest of all. (Few words, you’ll learn, are more disingenuous than “our” when a black child has died in the street and black folks begin to understand that the law will not hold his killer accountable.) 

Last night, before I could reanimate enough to embrace you, I watched the State Attorney grin again, just after she chastised all the parents and advocates and media — both social and mainstream — for raising our voices loudly enough to force an arrest in the first place. “For a case like this to come out in bits and pieces served no good to no one.” 

Here is all that you should know: we are the only our there is. There would be no case for her to concede had our bits and pieces not been lain at her feet and then cobbled together to give voice to the gun-silenced child. 

No, I will not speak to you of expectation. Expectation of any protection at all feels an increasingly empty enterprise for black mothers. But I will find the hope I owe you. It will be communicated with candor, not fear. I will stoke it with dreams of an imagined eternity, where every man gives answer for every of his actions. I will build it, floor up, in communities constructed with care and by choice. We — you and I — will get through this, together. We — us and our own — will invite the bewildered to join us. And when we have amassed enough hope to shore us up, we will run toward this behemoth, which cradles in its bottomless belly a legion of unavenged black bodies.

If we die, we won’t do it afraid. We will do it while standing our ground. 

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Wishes for Daughters in Darkness, at Dawn.

May affection be a simple enterprise for you. May you never know entanglements with men who disengage quickly while you thrash about like a swan in the rings of a six-pack. I wish you friendships with discreet women; relatives whose opinions of you are not forged by the opinions of others; gentlemen callers who do not condescend. I wish you emotional slip knots, the limber stealth of escape artists, the willingness to remain tethered at the right times.

(Indulge me; I am your mother. My wishes are potent.)

May your heart never become such that it is only contented by playing the Nightingale. Do not be too tender, neither too eager to heal. May you never learn to use your own ribs as splints; do not break any bit of yourself to reset the men who are broken. May you laugh at the idea of women like your mother, who seek only the feral and the numb, then romanticize bringing them home. Do not wait by the shore for anyone’s return but your own — better, may you never know this pining. May you never set yourself adrift to become more present for others. Know the sound of yourself, listen for the whisper of your God, hear the hiss behind the lips of the man who cannot love you.

If anyone is able to indict you, may it be for the bluntness of your honesty, not the dullness of your deprecation. May your chest never be a bat-filled belfry. Love is crazy-making; may its loss leave you mercifully sane.

And when you grow, child, when you grow: may you never apologize for it. When you feel yourself unfurling as a tree, may you never withhold your figs. No one is owed your origin story. Give it only to those whom you trust and only when there is something to be gained.

Do not long for those who’ve made themselves isles. There is water between you now, but someday the plates may shift. You must be able to breathe regardless; may you never deprive yourself air. Never dive into seas for those already wielding life preservers; when the time comes, they will not share. May you never believe yourself a rescuer where you are regarded as little more than a spectacle.

And when you go, child, when you go: carry all these many wishes with you. May they never feel as weighty as a burden. May they ever be airy as embers. May they aid you in bearing quite little resemblance to me.

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Excavating Emotion with Stacia L. Brown.

One of the most consistent bits of positive feedback I receive about my blog is that it has the ability to make people feel. Not all writing connects with the reader’s emotions. Not all writing is meant to. But there is perhaps no greater frustration for the aspiring writer than to intend for readers to feel her work and to get the sense that she has not quite succeeded.

If that’s you — whether you’re writing creative nonfiction, fiction, an op-ed or even an academic essay (yes, academic papers can convey intense emotion) — I’d like to help you.

To convey the emotions of others, be they fictional or real, you must be in touch with your own. You must become a projector. Think of your feelings as light. You cannot build a lively world of moving images if you are unwilling to let a flash of wild rage; a burst of ecstatic joy, a confession of secret jealousy, a surrender to impregnable sorrow, a yielding to devastating, life-altering love and an equal acquiescence to devastating life-altering heartbreak flow through you.

If the words you need feel trapped under the rubble of denial or self-protection, and somehow, in spite of yourself, you want them on the page to be read by friends and strangers anyway, I can take through a series of exercises, readings and discussions that may help you unearth them.

This summer, I’d like to work one-on-one with writers from all levels of experience who are interested in exploring emotion on the written page. Each writer will work with me individually  to design four hour-long sessions over a four-week period. The dates and times will be scheduled according to each writer’s availability. Sessions will be conducted online via Skype, Facetime, or Google Hangout+, and the content of each client’s sessions will be tailored to his/her writerly needs.

If this is of interest to you, contact me here to initiate the process. Sessions will be booked on a first come, first serve basis.

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I Am No Sybrina Fulton: On Single Mothers, Loss and Hope.

(Cross-posted from BeyondBabyMamas.com)

Sybrina Fulton, center, in happier times. Credit: Twitter
Sybrina Fulton, center, in happier times, with sons Jahvaris Fulton (left), and Trayvon Martin (right). Credit: Twitter

Here is the difference: I can check out. There are days when my heart holds vigil, when I can consume commentary from useful and inspiring angles and I can be useful and inspiring myself. Then, there are days like today, when I am so overcome with empathy and when what’s happened to Sybrina Fulton feels so close to home that I cannot look fully into her face on television. And that’s the difference between single mothers who still have their children and those who’ve lost them in unexpected, arbitrary ways.

We can check out.

From this not-so-comfortable distance, I can admire Ms. Fulton’s unwavering fortitude, her composure, her faith, her love, her ability to lean on her son’s father and admit how much she needs and is grateful for his presence and support. She never appears catatonic or sedated. She is letting as much of reality in as she can, only removing herself from a space when her son’s recorded final moments are being replayed as evidence, and somehow, remarkably, listening to obvious lies about her son, without violent outburst.

I am nothing like Sybrina Fulton. I do not have her grace, and I do not have her courage. I can’t look at George Zimmerman’s impassive expressions or recall his crowdfunding efforts online or read his account of that fateful night’s events without feeling a very rational, concentrated anger and a very real need to remove myself from the sight of him.

I can check out.

(Or can I?)

In Jackson, MI where my mother was born and spent most of her childhood, crime is spiking and, as is often the case in small, economically depressed towns, that crime is hitting black families hardest.

Rakeish Brown's senior photo, Credit: WLNS.com
Rakeish Brown’s senior photo, Credit: WLNS.com

On Saturday morning, June 22, single mother Latonia Hemphill heard what sounded like firecrackers outside her mother’s home. Moments later, according to reporter Justin Dacey, she heard her 20-year-old son Rakeish Brown asking, “Why’d you shoot me, dog?” Those were his last words. His alleged shooter was a neighborhood “friend” he’d apparently run into at a nearby store and offered a ride.

17-year-old Aquilla Flood, Credit: Twitter
17-year-old Aquilla Flood, Credit: Twitter

We are losing our children in the most unexpected ways, whether in suburban neighborhoods during All-Star Games or on Saturday mornings outside their grandmothers’ homes. We are losing them ten days before high school graduation, as in the case of Aquilla Flood, who was reportedly shot while sleeping, allegedly by an ex-boyfriend whose prom invite she’d refused.

In each case, their black mothers — often single, sometimes with the support of a co-parent and usually with extended family and friends lending bewildered, helpless comfort — are left to talk to the press and to appeal to the community. If we live in any major city in the U.S. or any economically depressed community where crime is on a steady uptick, we’ve seen one of these mothers on local news. Maybe she’s teary, maybe in shock, but she’s there. Present. Showing up day after day. Answering press conference questions, walking the street bearing a candle, holding up photos of her child.

We’ve almost come to expect that level of composure. And it can feel, at times, that viewers outside our own communities, whose ability to check out far exceeds our own, believe that we were somehow prepared for this possibility.

By virtue of poverty or city-dwelling or the number of blocks from our children’s school the nearest gang territory is or the thuggishness of our daughters’ ex-boyfriends or the prevalence of racial profiling or simply because we were two black people giving birth to a black child anywhere in America, there are people somewhere who expect us to remain calm and patient and to have faith in the justice system. There are those who actually believe that whatever confidence in our justice system we’ve managed to hold onto will comfort us after someone’s murdered yet another one of our children.

Dominika Stanley and Charles Jones hold a photograph of their slain daughter, Aiyana

They can check out. And they can do it because they aren’t Aiyana Jones’ parents. They’ve never had to hear a judge declare a mistrial in a case that should’ve held accountable the SWAT officer who murdered their sleeping seven-year-old.

In a growing number of black communities, a living child is beginning to feel like a luxury. No. “Beginning to” is wrong. Historically, being able to parent a living black child has long felt like a luxury. And it shouldn’t. Of course it shouldn’t. Being able to see your children survive gun violence should not feel like a conferral of mercy or good luck.

But it absolutely does. When we talk about holding our children closer, whenever we hear about yet another mother who can’t, we are feeling blessed and fortunate in ways that say so much more about our nation that they do about us.

The fact is: there is no checking out. We have very little control over the ways our children are living and dying and very little choice in how we’re publicly handling our losses. Watching so many other black mothers lose their children carries a kind of psychic damage for us all. No amount of changing the channel or pushing the newspaper away or locking our doors insulates us.

We can’t all handle what’s happening to minority mothers and their children with the grace of the Fultons’ or the patience of Aiyana Jones’ parents. We can be grateful, but we cannot prepare. All we can do is pay attention, remain engaged, lobby for change, look out for our neighbors’, and — yes — hug all the children who remain. In so many daily ways, we are checking in. And we must keep doing so, if we’re to have any hope left at all.

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Breathe Into the Bag.

Sing invented songs for every action. Hold toys utensils clothing foodstuff at eye level and label it — every time. She counted to twelve in the morning. Make her draw straight lines — both vertical and horizontal. Make her draw circles. If she resists, place your hand over hers and guide her toward it. She looks deeply into my eyes and says with firm convention things I cannot comprehend. Hand her her clothing; putting on her clothes is a 28-month-old skill. In August, when summer starts its slow, hot last hurrah, she will be three.

Here is yet another yellow carbon; read every line, as it reiterates what they’ve told you. Decide on whether she will go to school in the fall; it may be prudent to place some of the impetus for acquiring these skills on a classroom, a teacher, on interaction with other children. She jokes; she laughs at appropriate moments; she says, “Delicious!” “Mmm, yummy!” “That’s not funny!” She says tons of moderately discernible things, knows the alphabet, identifies letters out of sequence, has the patience to wait for the resolution of a story. Note that this yellow carbon has been careful to credit her for what she does well: uses catch phrases appropriately. Picks up visual cues fairly quickly, is excellent with rhythms. Appreciate that no one who visits your home is condescending; the women seem duly charmed by your daughter. Do not assess their genuineness. Try not to be fearful of her upcoming ear test, though one of the women has mentioned that some of the children she visits have needed their adenoids removed, have — like your daughter — never had ear infections, but may still have standing fluid in their ears making it difficult to hear.

Do not spend every waking moment wondering what is wrong. Make knots in the rope, at each interval where you’ve already been given a solution; use those to climb. She sings hourly; her voice, a modulating lilt, is rarely off key. She plays the piano for over 30 minutes, rarely choosing to hop down from the stool. Imagine her a virtuoso. Imagine her an American Sign Language interpreter for the UN. Imagine her in a concert hall, bringing up a well of sound and pitching it forth with her whole body.

Do not be so quick to cry when your mothering feels micromanaged; no one believes you are bad at it but you. (But would it hurt to hear that you’re good at it from the people who see you do it most?) Do not be ungrateful. Articulate your need to discover more of this on your own; becoming a grandparent — even a live-in one — does not mean re-parenting your own child. Do not take advantage of the other caring eyes and hands; she is yours, and the memory of her daily needs is yours to initiate. Meet them before you must be reminded.

When you are not with her, do not leave so much of yourself at her feet. But also avoid giving the same fathoms of love to those you’re with; the bottomless concern, fierce protectiveness, and doting adoration with which you parent are not owed to anyone else. It will likely be misconstrued. Who could ever understand the rawness of it, save perhaps the single father, save perhaps the man who mourns?

Meet the home visit teacher at the library, to join the special playgroup. It will be good for her, she says, and it will be good for you. You will meet other mothers who are going through this. Do not think the phrase “going through this.” This is not a malady, just a difference.

Go back. Start short and slow. Do not overwhelm her. Forget sentences for now. Forget enunciation. Forget how we treat our children like thoroughbreds. Forget whatever inadequacies you’ve developed as a mother and a daughter and a lover and a friend. And just sit with what is happening. Quiet your raging, voluminous insecurities. Tell God you’re sorry; He will know for what and why. She likes farm songs. Cow is one of her clearest, most confident words. She does animal impressions. Imagine her the next Temple Grandin. She likes sky; she is a budding Mae Jemison. Imagine no one else. She is herself herself herself. Do not compare her. She is herself herself herself. And she is mine. 

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Dovetails.

1.

The last time you were here, you left an open pack of tube socks in the trunk of my car. It’s still there, two weeks later. It will stay there until you return.

I often feel responsible for the things that remain when you leave. There are imprints of you where I do not want them and one beaming emblem of you I could not live well without. I am accustomed to keeping things safe till you reclaim them. I suppose I will continue to; it does not seem to do me much harm.

I can say this without animus now, but it is not always as easy as I lead everyone — including myself — to believe.

2.

Loving anyone other than you had long been an alien concept. Twelve years long, if we’re honest. We were only together for eight (nearly nine) but even when it ended — even during the pregnancy, when I hoped and I prayed that alone or reconciled to you would not be my only options — I did not truly believe I’d fall in love again. I would not let myself, not if this was how I’d feel at love’s departure.

But what could I tell my daughter of love if I could not remember its shiver? How would I hear her fawning first brush with a tremulous hand if my own palms knew only a craven kind of emptiness? How could we parse her first heartbreak if I never let go of mine?

3.

This is the supernova, the white burst, the back-pressed-to-wall, the unending kiss, the lips that won’t leave yours even to whisper, the words you get to roll on your tongue and relish the fact that they were once, just moments before, not your own.

You are holding them now. You are holding him now. And being held and being held and — Father in heaven — being held.

It hardly seems sane, for your arms to know an embrace other than your wriggling toddler’s, to know kisses other than the ones she sees fit to bestow, in boredom, in blessing, at bedtime.

And it isn’t sane, really, or sustainable. It peters as quickly as it popped, a fire in a lidded jar now. And this great, ghastly, heart-pounding, promise-eating love is swallowed up in air, in sky.

4.

Weeks ago, Father John, the eldest priest in our small parish, preached of love.

I wanted him to say something sense-making about women like me, alternately afraid and excessive, who understand love simply as being someone’s priority. I wanted him to tell me how such a low bar could be so difficult for some men to clear.

But I wasn’t entirely listening. I was thinking of all the things and people to whom I’d come second and third and sixth. I was wondering whether or not I was worthy of preference, whether it was fair or childish to expect to be preferred.

“You know that passage, that 1 Corinthians 13 that people like to read at weddings? That’s God’s love. Agape,” he said with a wave of his massive hand. I watched him shake his head, as if all we romantics were a bit misguided.

Father John moved on quickly; for him, this was just an aside.

For me, it was a lifeboat.

Someone else would find this alienating, this idea that we should not use agape love as a matrimonial blueprint because we could not possibly erect it properly and would feel as if we were failing whenever a window shattered. Someone else might scoff at the notion that we shouldn’t strive toward a perfect, selfless care for our fellow man.

But all I could do was think of my own loves: often impatient, sometimes insecure, disinclined to hope or believe all things, occasionally self-seeking, and certainly — if nothing else — susceptible to failure.

I leaned back in my seat, and I sighed relief.

5.

How do we do this? How does anyone do this?

6.

I used to believe I would never be rid of you because you were my predestination. Then I thought I could never be rid of you because of our girl, who looks back and forth between us, whenever we’re together, with calculating eyes.

You make moving on difficult, because you are a kind amnesiac: giving and grinning and hoping to catch us, even as we flutter on, mostly without you. For all your texts, your calls, your checking in, you do not remember — and sometimes do not even accept — what you are not here to witness. You will always believe that I am the keeper of things you happen to leave behind.

I am your safe deposit box. I am your cage.

7.

The other one was elegant, an autodidact, confident in ways I couldn’t imagine, calm in a manner that requires discipline not artifice. He was meant for a family — but he was not meant for mine.

Of all the things that are difficult to accept, this is perhaps the hardest.

He, himself a cage, a keeper of things left behind, always treated me like a bird who’d forgotten the grace of flight.

We who understand what it is to be a series of gilded, bloodied bars want nothing more than to bend them for others. We are the freers, even at our own expense.

8.

I used to be a woman of many compartments. But motherhood makes you an open space. Anyone you love must stand on your floor and face the things and the people you once had an inclination to hide.

There are no fallout shelters. There is no time to assuage hurts, massage egos. No strength for mediating others’ aughts, for carrying burdens larger than those upon which we’d already agreed.

Everyone’s interests must dovetail. Or else, the only door stands open. All are free to exit at will.

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Respectability Is a Burden.

1.

I was not meant to be corseted. What is truly feral should never be made to feel trapped. But beloved, I have spent interminable years binding myself so tightly the skin ’round my ribs was raw and the heart their cage protected thrashed wildly against its constraints. This, I mused, was womanhood: a submission to cords and strictures, a wriggling rawness, an escape artist’s act.

Once an adult, I went into the world with shuffling steps, with halted breath and a scandalous, reveling circuit of hopes scrawled in the tiniest of fonts, in the most clandestine of diaries.

A woman who shuffles takes twice as long to find her footing. She is the late-blooming crocus. She is not taught to run with her breasts unbound through meadows where it makes more sense to be shoeless than shod. When she runs, if she runs, the air itself becomes admonition: Your heels will turn black and no one will think you were raised.

But oh, how painstakingly I was raised, told to lead and not to follow, yet also taught that the house where I lived belonged to a man bound by matrimony not blood, a man who did not know what it meant to love us. Tread lightly, always. It is his house, not ours. But you will always be welcome, my mother would whisper, wherever I live.

We were no Grandma Moses women, not particularly brave, neither freedom-seeking. We could’ve left him, before he left us. But it is the one who is left, and rarely the one who leaves, who gets to be viewed as “respectable.”

At the time — and we were 12 years younger then — we needed edicts, needed pushing, someone’s approval — certainly each other’s, if no one else’s. Even now, we seem locked in a prism, demanding each other’s light. My mother has forgotten the feel of her corset; she has lived in it so long, born that pain that yields traditional beauty for too many years to be rid of it. But she is braver now, stronger, even as she asks: Am I doing this well? Can I do this well? Is wellness still attainable?

Always, always, beneath any question, I hear: do you believe in me more than I believe in myself? (Is this not what daughters are for?)

My own questions cool on my lips. A mother’s belief in her child should be beyond investigation. Bound women owe their mothers silence. Or perhaps we are simply too short of breath to trust our lungs and tongues as couriers.

(But does she believe in me, more than I believe in myself?)

(Should she?)

(Is this not what mothers are for?)

2.

When you were born, your shoulders twisted and you launched yourself free well before I was prepared for a final push. I had been naked for hours by then, under an inadequate and starchy gown. Everything I’d been taught to keep under lock and key for all these years — in order to appear “respectable” — was being pilfered and prodded, tugged taut with needles and stitches. A different kind of corseting, and yet: an untold freedom.

Pregnancy is the great liberator. One looks at a woman’s filling womb and understands just how many things about herself she will not and cannot reveal. Somewhere, perhaps in a room lit with laughter or darkened with apologies, someone has likely known her in ways that you won’t, though he also may never quite know her at all.

If he is not her husband, she is secretly considered — by some — to be salacious. And if she is unapologetic, she’s informed that she deserves to be brought low. Respectable folks then levy what they believe is their greatest of barbs: you have lost your virtue and, if we’re honest, our respect.

But a child shifts a bound woman’s gravity. No longer able to shuffle, she must widen her stance. If that child is to survive her, she cannot remain in bonds. Before long, it becomes quite clear how little the earth will move if she bares her body or soul.

Do you understand what I’m telling you, child? Respectability is a burden, bigger than any one woman should bear. And poor impulse control is not only acting on every desire; it is also believing you must never succumb to any at all. It is subscribing to the belief that the only men worth having are the ones who care too much about how many men you’ve had. It is being deceived about God Himself and how He looks at women who govern themselves as though they do not know when to say when. It is this idea that education and career make you respectable, but only if both yield you enough income never to need the kind of help that requires deep humility.

Poor impulse control is your mother, writing: always confiding to so many strangers and still, still, struggling to look her intimates in the eye. (And even myself in the mirror, child, even my own reflection…) I am not sure I have ever made an unapologetic decision in my life.

And some days, I am stiff, both muscle and mind still uncertain of just how far they are able to stretch without a respectable exoskeleton ever tightening around them.

3.

This is what mothers are for: rawness and rules to be read, to be broken. We are no more meant to be fully understood than our daughters. But here is our upperhand: you — your life, its freedoms, its unmarked skin, its unimprinted ribs — are the parts of ourselves we’ve gnawed loose.

You, walking outside of us, are the evidence: we can both be free of these traps.