How I Lost My Mother
This grief ain’t nothing new, but my choice to heal is.
I.
There is no easy way to lose your mother.
Perhaps mine was gone long before I became a seed in her womb, when she was a young girl desperately searching for her own mother.
There were times I encountered her. Brief moments in which she would see me for who I was and not as an extension of herself. She always said that I came at a time when she needed someone to love and to befriend. Someone who needed her.
I saved my mother’s life.
My birth became the first of many hands-on lessons for a Black girl child who would learn the world and her mother would not value her unless her throat throbbed from servitude.
One day when my sister and I were in middle school, my mother told the story of a young girl whose attempt to help her classmate with his math homework was met with brutal violence from him and at home from her own mother. As I listened, I pieced together that she was talking about herself. My mother was the oldest girl child who experienced the rite of passage of many Black girls: rape.
I imagine she is somewhere floating in the eighties, looking for the stolen pieces of her soul. She searched for their replacements in her work, in her children, and in her things, but could not find them. We cannot give her what was lost.
II.
I too had entered that rite of passage as a girl. A boy in gym class told me he thought I looked pretty, and I never believed anyone when they said that, but I wanted to believe him. He took my hand and led me to the room where he would claim a piece of my soul. I could not trust my mother to hold my truth, so I wandered for years begging for someone to give me what I lost. I floated around my teens and half of my twenties until I learned only I could give myself love I would never lose.
III.
Grandma told me this grief ain’t nothing new. This loss is generational. The mourning is predetermined. (You see, some of us take on the burden of carrying this world while others of us have the privilege of moving through it.) She began with the story of how the weight of the world split my great great grandfather’s skull with a single bullet. He couldn’t handle the pressures of living his Black Southern life, so he went into his backyard with his dog and a gun. He was gone long before though.
The weight of the world pressed upon my great grandmother’s heart so much so that her only solace was to make frequent promises to disappear herself. Something about the pressure of being a mother to thirteen Black children, and a wife to two men, and there being no rest for the weary made escape through death alluring. She would stand at windows and threaten to jump. Though cancer finally claimed her life, she too was lost long before.
Growing up, my own mother whispered those same promises of disappearance to us. Carrying the weight of the world tightly in her fists made her release her dreams of becoming an educator. The only reasons she has to live are her three children and grandchildren, and yet she reminds us, “I won’t always be here, but I’m always here when you need me.” Without our dependence, the baggage she carries and has named “duty” would crush her under its heft.
Being needed saves her life.
IV.
I spent much of my life trying to save her. Trying to be the force that stood between her and death, not realizing that I sacrificed my own life at the altar of daughter. I imagined growing up and giving her the home she could never give to us, a place where she could rest and learn to love me. We spent much of my upbringing wading in the cycle of homelessness and poverty, bouncing from house to Grandma’s to apartment to someone’s living room floor. My desire to provide for her was a cover for what I truly wanted: to feel loved and cared for, a sense of stability that I did not have to struggle for. I thought I could save her, save us, with every cent I gave for bills, with every moment I shapeshifted from daughter to mini-mother, with every time I denied myself and my own needs.
Eventually, I learned that I could not save her and live with what remained of my life. One of the first moments this became clear to me was when I asked for new jeans because mine were ripping at the thighs. She told me not to gain weight because we couldn’t afford new clothes, even as the ones she hoarded piled high. My teenage self processed that as “don’t eat,” so I gathered the food I could stand and pecked away at it. I diligently watched my plate and my waist and thought I had bested puberty while pleasing my mother, who continued to inspect every article of clothing I wore. Every time she said, “Those shorts fit different,” I committed myself to fasting more for her love. But my mother could not give me what she could not spare. I was forced to find it elsewhere.
When I left home, I found lovers who pinched and prodded and gawked at the size of my bras and my skirts, who exclaimed disgust at the ripple of fat on my back and then claimed they loved me anyway. Lovers who repeatedly met my kindness with violence. My romantic relationships reinforced childhood lessons; I defined my worth by my blood sacrifice for salvation. Their needs almost always came before mine, a trauma response I had renamed as “love.” What felt natural and loving was actually a lifelong discipline of martyrdom.
By looking for my mother’s love, I abandoned myself.
V.
Now my work is to release the weight of the world that lays heavy on my bridge-back and my womb. The weight that binds my throat and says I must compensate through martyrdom, offer my life as tribute, peel off the pieces of my flesh that are too fat, too queer, too free, too Black, too smart, too sharp, too knowing, too loved, always already too much and yet never enough.
I no longer exist as an extension of her desires, needs, and wants. I am no longer prostrate at the mercy of her ever-elusive approval. I call back the pieces of my flesh that I cut away to make room for her in my life. This practice of loving myself and seeing myself as worthy of love has been more difficult than any ritual of self sacrifice. I know this to be true because the world says that I, as a Black woman, am only meant to be a vessel to serve, and that my brokenness is not only “natural” but necessary.
I’m learning to love and to approve of myself outside of what I can offer others. How do I release servitude’s throbbing in my throat? One that has been lodged for generations? How do I accept that nothing I create outside myself — my legacy, my relationships, my scholarship, my service — will satisfy the longing I have within to be mine and mine alone? How do I embrace that I — in all my glory, in all my imperfection — am worthy of my own love, attention, and protection?
These days I find the mother within me by dancing in the mirror and saying “I love you unconditionally, without caveat or pretense. I love you because you are who you’ve always needed to be.” I note the curve of my belly and my lips, the dips in my hips, the gathering of marks on my ass and thighs. I behold my body now that I’ve given it permission to expand. I ask what I need and provide it knowing that I have begun the repetitive process of mothering myself.
What I give myself, I cannot lose.
This essay was inspired by the lines “see me brown girl throat/that throbs from servitude” in June Jordan’s 1969 poem “Who Look at Me.”
