Part I.
I lay in the water face up, floating on my back, letting the viscous, salt water of the Caribbean Sea buoy me. I could hear the sounds of my children and others around me as I drifted between the present and some other time. The sea had never been this delicious, this wonderful. I let myself be on my own. Closed my eyes even though I feared the waves might crash over me and go up my nose. I resisted the urge to raise my head and closed my eyes. The sun was hot on my face. I could feel the heat in my lips and inhaled the sea's aura all around me. I started to time travel. My ancestors who passed through Barbados on their way to the Carolinas stood closer to shore. I sensed the bleed of their garments swirling around me. In my mind's eye I saw their head wraps and skirts, watched them wipe their hands on their clothes, peeped them sneaking bits of mango into the mouths of their own children. I recalled a time when visiting Jamaica as a young girl sucking the juice from a sugar cane stalk and wishing we could take this sweetness with us forever. I remembered that the cane was the cotton of the Caribbean. I remembered the gnarled hands of my great-grandfather, Jesse Ben, and his clean, well-shaped fingernails. He was old when I was a girl and lived long into my adulthood.
I closed my eyes as waves rocked me and saw stars when I opened them to the turquoise and azure hues of the sky and sea. I thought, as I often do when I find myself alone in nature, how did the people of long ago experience this? I thought of Africans coming ashore in what looks like paradise, only to become slaves to someone else's heaven. I thought of poor black people washing themselves in the sea, rubbing the fine sand on their faces and knees and elbows and feet as I'd seen many locals do when we lived here. I recalled the old man who passed me going down the aisle on the airplane to find his way to the bathroom who looked like an older version of my father and wondered if my family tree, were I able to trace it, would find some of our people in Barbados. I concluded that it was possible. Maybe that was why we'd relocated there to begin with. That I might find my way to myself somehow.
The sun was high and bright and the water's undulation hypnotic and the number of rum punches consumed had me outside of my control and into a space more nebulous and open. Breathing in the air, feeling the water lap against my ears, I opened my eyes to consider how this place suddenly felt like home after all of the promises broken and kept, after the punishing loneliness, after I'd called her my heart of darkness. But my heart of darkness still pumps life blood through me, shows me connection, and gives me direction. She has been patient with me and has allowed me to love and be loved, no matter my fear of it.
Part II.
I was as afraid of Barbados as I was of myself. She was dark and hot and humid and fecund and feral, shiny, damp, throbbing, and deep. She wore her colonialism like a necklace or a yoke depending on what circle you traveled and she was beautiful. She was in your face heavenly at times, then seedy and broken. I'd come to Barbados like a white American tourist. I don't say that with pride. But I'd prepared, as did my Euro-centered, patriarchy-card carrying, rigidly gendered French husband, for a life in paradise. A two year break from the grind. We'd dreamt of sun and sea and sand and tropical drinks and "maybe even someone to help you care for the children; it's really cheap there, you know?" I was still pregnant when we began the conversation about the move that would take us from New York City, my home, what I'd thought was my true north, to the Caribbean.
I'd only marginally considered how I'd relate or connect to the people of Barbados and was reassured that I'd meet the "wives of other employees" and would be part of an expatriate community which I presumed correctly would be mostly white. In Barbados I was black but a different black. I'd no Caribbean roots (that I knew of) and moved through space like a New Yorker. I was efficient, abrupt, focused. I acted with precision and purpose. I was frustrated by the slower gaits, imprecise schedules, and indirect responses. Expats marveled at the locals' disinterest in their companies' priorities, called them incapable, demonized their behavior and infantilized them in their minds. My husband regaled me and anyone who would listen about the unsophisticated ways in which they worked, how uncouth, how unprofessional, how inelegant, and I was struck by the overtones.
I'd spent my life, as instructed, proving these beliefs untrue. I knew that whites' impressions of me could determine my opportunities. That being likeable, malleable, complacent, unchallenging would allow me access to spaces forbidden to other black people. Before I could be called lazy, I worked harder and more efficiently than anyone else. Before I could be called messy or sloppy, I was well turned out and presented. Before I could be called unintelligent, uneducated, unprepared for the tasks at hand, I'd worked and considered every angle. There were rewards for this good behavior and the rewards quieted my restlessness for a time. I believed they were what I wanted, gifts, treats. I'd been a dear pet, a cultivated, curated, well-edited example of how to do it right, only revealed to be the sham that it was when the developing nation of Barbados showed me myself.
I know how I looked and I know what I sounded like and it fills me with shame. In trying to right myself when postpartum depression and anxiety turned me upside down, I lashed out. Self-loathing and internalized racism made me angry that Barbados hadn't easily opened herself to me. Wasn't I her kin? I had no friends. Locals looked at me suspiciously, tried to suss me out, make heads or tails of this black American girl and her French husband and multicultural babies. I was indignant for my husband, wished the cooks in his kitchen could make his life easier for him so that he could, in turn, make my life easier. I willed them to be better, to act better, to give a damn about the shitty hotel company that couldn't have given a damn about them, to show up for their low wage in the hot kitchen to work tirelessly and thanklessly for spoiled tourists so my husband could be praised and exalted. I hated what I believed they were doing to my family. The cultural divide between my husband and I broadened and I saw for the first time the weight of his self-importance and privilege and my deference to it.
I said silent prayers to Barbados to get her shit together. (Wasn't I trying to muffle my cries each night as I found my thoughts turn more and more psychotic? Why couldn't she? Why did she always have to show her contempt? Her wounds? Her pain?) I asked her not to be as she was. (I'd been stuffing myself down my throat my entire life! My parents had hung up on my while I wailed in fear at the monkeys coming to the screen-less windows and I tried to act casual about it.) I asked her to make it easier for the tourists visiting our landscape. (Let them feel special and important. Let them focus on your blue waters and have their hair braided and tell you that now they looked just like you. Let them tell you how much they love you and your food and your dress and your style and then return to the air-conditioned luxury hotels and villas whilst you tell them they are pretty and return to your modest dwelling.) I asked her to keep her skeletons in her closet. (It can't be colonialism, racism, class structure, and history preventing your rise and your success. Barbados is not ready for prime time, can't get it right.)
In a class about the Barbadian character, my husband and other white expats were taught to expect a passive-aggressive position from the Bajans/Barbadians. It was explained that because, unlike slave masters and traders on other islands of the Caribbean and in the United States, the slavers of Barbados had allowed families to stay together, had not separated them through sale, and had therefore made its black population more complacent, docile. The terrain, unlike other islands, did not provide much place to escape. There were no mountain ranges or protected landmasses in which to hide. That this modified history was meant to explain to expat workers the resistance they might meet when dealing with locals making pennies to their dollars infuriated me. That they believed it made it worse. When my parents came to visit the island, my father said that Barbados "wasn't ready for prime time" and I knew that she still had more to prove. We both did.
In New York City, I could disappear into the melting pot. I could ride the subway, walk down the sidewalks, go to work, restaurants, parks with people from all walks of life. Sure, there were pockets of complete WASPy whiteness and areas where black and brown communities set up "Little" versions of their homeland, but for the most part I was amongst the world's population every day. The blackness of Barbados hit me like the wall of humidity that sweated my hair, all coiffed and presented for my reunion with my husband, when I walked down the stairs at the back of the plane the evening of our arrival to the island. It curled my hair, glossed my cheekbones, and parted my lips. She gave my swinging hips and the jiggle my ass made when I walked permission. She showed me all the black ladies and men doing all the things. She gave me eye contact and I was at first afraid to meet her gaze.
I got lost in Barbados. Walking through the mansion's ruins deep in the forest of mahogany trees at Farley Hill overlooking the island's Atlantic Coast, I discovered her lush, soft heart, and mine for her. I fell in love with this place and then the east coast. My first foray into the island, going deeper to her core, no longer flitting on her edges where tourists and expats teased her and hedonistically played with her, I discovered another type of paradise. It was morose and melancholy. There was a Victorian sadness to this place. Ghosts, secrets, and whispers. It was here that I made my first friends on a class trip with my oldest girl. They resuscitated me. They shared their secrets and let me tell mine. This included my shame and my pride and my confusion. I was able to admit that the paradise promised had not been what I'd expected. That the sun was too bright and too hot for this exhausted mother, that our house was uncomfortable, that I'd been so lonely, that my husband didn't and couldn't meet my needs, that being a black, African-American expatriate in a country of black Caribbean people was more challenging than I'd expected.
I didn't recognize the New Yorker who'd just begun making a career for herself, who'd finally found a real place to call home, who'd confronted assaults and deep old wounds only to see the post traumatic stress pull any sense of safety out from under her. I couldn't believe how bad I was at living abroad. I'd dreamed since I was a girl of being a "woman of the world" and then couldn't hack it. I thought, I can't even hang on this little island with black people and I thought I was going to be a world traveler? I'd been fed and made complacent on the spoils of the first world. I wanted my rules, my food, temperature control, my media, fast internet, VOGUE magazine, sidewalks and clean streets. I wanted businesses and companies that thought I was always right. I wanted antiseptic correctness. I feared real connection and contact and Barbados wanted to touch me. Touch me with her warm fingers, take me into her beating heart, get mango juice and soursop, sugarcane, coconut, lime, breadfruit and flying fish fry in my hands and my hair. I thought I could move there, live there, raise my children there and remain untouched, unchanged but she revealed herself to me and me to myself.
Though I was angry with Barbados and my time spent there, I kept coming back. I kept up with dear friends and the weekly news. I followed different organizations on the island and got excited about the island's successes. I met people living in the United States from Barbados with pride and told them of my time spent there. I tattooed a flying fish, the nation's symbol, on my right forearm underneath the Eye of Horus. I still regaled people with my tales of monkeys and cultural confusion, long days spent at the immigration office, and word for word play by play of conversations I'd had with customer service at varying businesses, but I kept going back. When I told white people I'd met about my years in Barbados they'd say, "See! I knew you were from the islands!" To which I'd always reply, "I'm actually an American born black person. My parents and their parents are from here too. We've no Caribbean roots that I know of." They'd always meet my response with suspicious eyes. They understood why they visit the Caribbean, for the sun and the sea, but couldn't imagine that I'd somehow have been there for the same reasons, suspected that I was keeping my roots a secret. There is no secret.
My father and mother both went in search of their roots using ancestry.com and found what they'd pretty much suspected. Many US narratives begin in West Africa, and theirs was no exception. There are various European attributes that can more than likely be traced to the rape of my slave ancestors. That's no secret. They've also worked diligently with their siblings on their family trees to see how far back they can trace our family. We are at the mercy of the slave masters' records. What I know is that Barbados and the Carolinas have a very deep connection for both white slavers/forefathers and the slaves they transported with them for trade. My people are from the Carolinas and the surrounding areas.
As the daughter of black Southerners, I have made the connection to my slave ancestors, seen the soil where they toiled, been inside the modest homes where they lived. I have been inside the churches and listened at my grandparents' and my great-grandparents' knees of stories that brought dimension and depth and value to the lives of the people who came before me. I loved their character, their strength, and their dignity. I despised that they were made to bend to the whims of white people, that their lives were not fully realized because of what racism and poverty inflicted upon them, and that the crosses they were made to bear were never acknowledged by the good, white people who'd unloaded them onto their backs. These warm brown, beautiful people never believed how glorious they were. That their lush, dark, soft hearts, sweated brows, and sinewed arms, strong hands, and wooly hair deserved to be loved.
It is with that love that I return to Barbados. To tell her that I love her, and myself, in her imperfection. That is she a baby, a young one, and that I am sorry for having been unforgiving. I have been that way for myself. Because I didn't learn that my blackness, my heat, my desire, my need, my gifts, my treasures, my heart, my humanity was enough. That I could allow myself a moment to float aimlessly or rest. That I didn't have to prove that I was other than I was. Than I am. When I next visit Barbados, I am going to spend Foreday Morning with my friends native and adopted. I am going to follow the steps of the man who looks like my father and let myself be painted in mud and colors. I am going to wash myself off in the sea and trace the color stained sweat down my face. I am going to rise and fall with other black people into the night and let Barbados finally, actually fill up the cracks in my story. I may jump at the Grand Kadooment or find other Cropover events in which to participate and I will come to the sea and float on my back, careful not to let the water go up my nose. I will let the water come to my ears and listen for my heartbeat. I will catch the heartbeat of those who came before me and I will let the sun brown my body to a deep mahogany.
Barbados nearly broke me. She did crack me open. And is now filling those cracks with moon dust. What I'd wanted was a picture, a two dimensional postcard of my life. Instead I found that I must put my hands in, dig in deep, pull from myself the lies and deceits embedded in me to make me easier, less than I am. I have learned to love being this black woman. I have loved having a deep, wounded, melancholy heart because she has shown me how to be compassionate. I know the chemtrails of slavery weave themselves across my soul's starry sky and that I have carried that dark secret as it were my own. It isn't only mine to bear. What is my own is the light. What is mine is my heartbeat in my ears as I float in the water. What is mine is the undulating rhythm of the waves. What is mine are the things revealed to me living in Barbados.
(c) Copyright 2017. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
Spring: such beautiful things and dead baby birds. I have spent hours each day walking the puppy child, our new baby, and listening to podcasts. That he has to go out, HAS to, has been a blessing. I'd been slowly descending into a muted-colored and muffled depression, the kind that for me comes in cycles related to the moon and the mood of the last phrase read, music absorbed through the skin, line in a drawing or slight from a family member who either doesn't care or doesn't recognize their callousness when I discovered the podcast, "The Hilarious World of Depression."* While listening to PLACEBO: A Conversation with Ana Maria Cox (5/5) , walking through an open field full of clover patches, dandelions and "wishes" I nearly tripped over one, then two dead babies. They were featherless, with bulging closed eyes that were black and blue. Their skin was 70s-band-aid flesh and their tiny beaks and claws looked like baby finger nails. They were so plastic and so still and so hopeless. The sight of them caused me to gasp and dart in another direction. I didn't want to stand by too long, to stare too long, to come so close that their lost hope might touch me. It was drizzling, preparing for rain, so I put up my hood and stared across the field. And then I walked back.
The day before I'd seen a bird and a squirrel quarreling above my head in my own yard. I'd never seen an interspecies battle like this so was drawn to all the desperate, violent chatter between the two of them. I understood, even from my vantage point, that something wasn't right. The blackbird was beside herself and the squirrel seemed so caustically aloof and reckless. I found myself getting annoyed with that damned squirrel. But the puppy found something more curious and interesting across the yard and I walked with him to find someone else's shit to roll in (yeah, I pulled him up before that could happen.).
Early the next morning, I'd raced behind Ivan as he bolted down the stairs and out the door to relieve himself after a long night of "holding it in." He was playful and fluffy and so early-morning baby sweet so, even though I was in my nightgown with a sweatshirt over it, pulled on haphazardly as I tried to protect myself from the morning's cold, I let him tour me through the open yards that sprawled behind ours and our neighbors' houses. As we left the wall that holds the creek that runs through town, he discovered what all the fuss had been about just the day before. Two babies had taken a long, miserable fall to the ground. Below the nest now lay lifeless a developing bird and the head of its sibling. Ivan licked the head and I pulled him more aggressively than I'd meant to get him away from it. I couldn't bear to look. And then I couldn't stop.
I studied the lifeless body, saw the articulation in its exposed wing, considered its fall, looked up to see the nests that dotted that tree and wondered from which it had fallen. I thought of the hysteria in the mother's cawing and flapping as the squirrel had teased and taunted. I wondered for how long an animal mourns or if it does at all. These two babies were dead but were there others? Could she love the others more fiercely because they'd survived or was she just meeting the task at hand, the imperative, keeping them alive? I remembered the first time I'd seen little baby birds, they'd been tiny chicks in an incubator, I and thought of their smell and the warmth that surrounded them and the peep-peep-peep of all of them hovering close to one another. I wished for that for this dead bird. Warmth.
Against my better judgment, I took my family to my parents' home in sunny Florida for spring break, the Florida weather promising a break from the bleak, rainy April we'd been having. We'd had to leave Ivan who'd not been with us so long and I considered for a moment staying behind. I have been torn to shreds by how much of a relationship I should allow between my parents and my children. On the one hand, I'd rather just suck it up and not have to explain the intricacies of dysfunctional family dynamics to two little girls who have felt the fullness of my love and protection from the moment we'd promised ourselves to one another, and on the other I am shattered to endure the aggressive, palpable disdain and contempt in which my parents hold me. It's only warm outside in sunny Florida. I'd fallen out of the tree.
While searching through old photo albums, I found my baby book where I learned that I'd not left the hospital until 18 days after I was born. Eighteen days in Vassar Hospital in the cold of a Poughkeepsie winter in January. I knew I'd been born prematurely and that I'd been placed in an incubator for care and protection in my early days but was told very little else. When I first learned as a child that I'd been in an incubator, I thought immediately of myself on a tiny tray, cuddled up trying to get warm and become strong enough to face this thing called life. I also thought about "The Boy in the Plastic Bubble" (a movie starring John Travolta as "the boy" that I'd watched as a girl) because I imagined in my frailty and sickness, I could not and should not have been much handled. I sat in isolation with visits from my mother when she was dropped off at the hospital by my father each morning. And how did I miss her touch? How did I feel in that silence? Those first eighteen days have marked me, imprinted me as a fallen bird.
Nature is not sentimental. The fittest survive and the others perish. Animals and plants and we humans have to adapt and evolve or lose our one shot. The grass beneath the birds was so lush and green after weeks of rain, and pollen from all the beautiful flowers in bloom coated the world chartreuse and yellow. The green of the whole scene swallowed up those tiny bodies until I was right upon them. I felt a responsibility to them, a need to bury and protect their brief moment here. To honor their attempt to live their tiny lives. Perhaps they'd stuck their necks out too long to reach for their food or been knocked over by a squirrel or the wind. Maybe they'd arrived too early, when the spring thaw had not quite happened and it was too cold for them to survive and their mother had long abandoned the nest. Maybe their mother felt the environment too unsafe to risk caring for them where she'd built her nest or knew they were too weak to survive and had flown away.
When humans touch baby animals that have been lost or fallen or hurt they doom them to never be lovable or acceptable to their mothers. It had always terrified me, the thought of the baby animal picked up and returned to its nest or burrow or clearing, saved, only to be rejected by its mother and left in the world to defend itself and surely die. It seemed so cold, so callous, so heartless, and so unfair that a chance moment could change the course of a new life.
As the drizzling developed into a steady rain, I turned away from the birds along the path. The green of the spring dotted with the vibrant colors of the flowering trees and well planted tulips and other blooms gave my walk back an other-worldly haze. I stopped abruptly as the hosts of the podcast quietly uttered the pain around the suicide of one's brother and the failed attempts of one of the hosts. There was silence and grief and palpable pain. The silvered light of this grey day sharpened and I caught my breath. The sound of my gasp in my ears as my headphones shielded me from the noises outside of my personal space echoed and stilled me. I felt so suddenly alone. The emptiness of navigating the world alone shook me. I was vulnerable, unguarded, stealing oxygen for my tiny lungs. Motherless. I'd fallen from the nest.
And once you are out of the nest and find yourself alive you have to make a choice. I took a little longer at first to meet the milestones that are the bullets on any mother's checklist. I was small but met the developmental challenges easily. I don't remember much contact. I suppose one wouldn't but the continued lack of it throughout my life hints that there wasn't very much. It is as crushing to write this as it is to know. I have never had much emotional, psychic, or physical connection with my parents, often feeling indifference or active disdain. I have always believed it was because I arrived as imperfectly as I did, premature, small, fragile, and sensitive, because I fell. It has made me profoundly sad and secretive. I have hurt so deeply and so silently, have faded into life's lushness, felt small and frail and alone. I have listened to countless explanations and excuses from others as though what I feel and experience in my heart could not be truth enough. My heart that beats and mourns the tiny, dead baby birds along my dog walking route couldn't possibly know.
Now the rain was coming at a steady clip and even Ivan was ready to go home. It's warm inside. Our house has pillows and blankets, delicious smells, soft light, private spaces and nooks, communal tables and couches. It is plush like the swelling comfort of spring's garden and every place is safe. I finished out the podcast with my headphones over my ears, sitting on the floor of the kitchen with Ivan and his toys. I stroked his soft white fur and kissed him on his pink nose and let him lick me. The licks to my face and mouth that I swore I'd never allow now covered me. My puppy licked my salty tears and fell over on his back for me to rub and pet the fur on his belly. We'd found him in the shelter, in a viewing room with his sister. Though my husband had seen pictures, we'd never known his parents. They weren't with him anymore. We are his new family and I am his mother.
(c)Copyright 2017. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
*"The Hilarious World of Depression" is a podcast hosted by John Moe that offers frank, funny, smart conversations with well-known comedians and humorists about their battles with depression and other mental health issues.
I didn't let myself fall for him right away but the girls did. I watched him from across the room and saw how much everyone wanted to be near him, how many people wanted to touch him, embrace him, love him. He was indeed lovable. The loveliest thing I'd seen in a long time and I didn't want to get my hopes up. Or theirs. I started looking for the less popular, the wounded, the flawed. I showed these options to them too and they, bless their hearts, gave them as much love as they could give, but they wanted him.
We'd taken so long to fulfill this promise, had stalled, stuttered, and deflected for so long that I could see they were beginning to doubt that we'd ever intended to honor it. And that finally broke me. Because I don't make promises lightly, certainly not to my children, and I knew that if they loved him, really loved him, then I had to give them the chance to take him home.
Ivan is mostly white with one brown ear. He is a poodle/Stafford terrier mix and his eyes are the color of deep water and sea glass. He has a long tail that curls into a circle and he is as soft as a bunny. I always thought, if I were ever to have a dog, he'd be black and strong, representative of my projected strength and power. I thought he'd be sleek and sexy, shiny-coated and muscular, deep dark-eyed with wisdom and calm. My imaginary dog was my image self, the fuck you to a world that didn't want me to express my strength at all. But this dog is not only mine. He's OURS and we all wanted him and we want him to be part of US.
When I was around ten years old, the same age as my oldest daughter now, I saw a puppy in a pet shop window that seemed to love me as instantly as I loved him. I'd gone in with my father and my sister and possibly my brother, I can't quite recall, and asked if I could hold him. When he was put in my arms, he snuggled and squirmed and licked me and loved me just as I'd suspected. I asked for him. Begged and pleaded. I made promises not only about how well I'd look after him but about how I'd do better as a young human being, be a better person, more giving, more loving, would keep my room clean (though it was usually extremely tidy), fight less with my siblings, be amenable to any and all suggestions for my betterment. I'd psychically prostrated myself on the ground before my father and offered my life in exchange for this love. I knew my dad couldn't just give it to me for no reason, this was 1980 and only Richie Rich from the cartoon got what he asked for just like that, so I waited for Christmas.
In the dream sequence, my father recognized my desperate need for love and contact. He saw that I needed to be important to something or someone, that I needed a place to express my love and devotion. Both he and my mother had grown up with pets and I appealed to their memories, mercilessly begged for this thing. He was a tiny Chihuahua and he trembled with fear at the world much the way I did inside though you'd never know that from my outside. I wanted to make him strong, to give him courage, to let him see that with me he'd be safe, and I'd have a friend when none was available. I wanted to be as strong as I'd hoped to make him.
He was on the top of my Christmas list. My parents hadn't said no, but they'd also not said yes. They'd said nothing, so my ten year old self, still believing in dreams coming true, in great surprises, and in their noticing that something was missing in my life, truly expected to see him sitting next to the Christmas tree surrounded by all the colorfully wrapped boxes and candy filled stockings.
I was lonely. I had plenty of friends but no one particularly close and I was sensitive, often living an alternate life completely in my imagination. Our family is funny in that we spend and spent time close together but not together. We don't and didn't share intimacies, hopes, desires, dreams. It was easy to feel alone surrounded by company, so my longing, my burning love for this puppy exposed me in a way that was terrifying. But I was so blinded by love, by my own hunger for affection, I couldn't help it.
He wasn't there on Christmas morning. I never saw him again. I'd even gone back to the store to see if someone else had had the chance to give him the life I'd wanted so desperately to share with him. I have loved like that all my life. Desperately, afraid of losing it, nearly obsessively. I don't claim that it's healthy. It isn't at all but it's what I have known. I struggle with my sense of love and giving my girls another way to see and feel and be loved.
Two years ago, the girls started asking for a dog and as I'd never had a pet before being their mother when goldfish, hamsters, and newts came into my life, I was actually afraid to say yes. Every cell in my body felt that yearning for my pet store Chihuahua and then whispered, "You can't do this. You've never had a pet. You are not supposed to. You'll probably do it wrong." As I've believed all the other bullshit spoon-fed me about who and what I am, I believed that I was not a dog owner, that I couldn't, that it would just never be. And has happened each time I am about to tell my daughters the same no's that I was told, I change the narrative. To be sure, I promised.
We first started looking for a purebred, a Havanese, because they don't shed and I am a neat freak and clean like a maniac even without a dog in the house. But almost immediately that plan was fraught with obstacles--timing, the right season, location, expense. They were surely cute but I didn't quite see myself well-represented in a Havanese. The girls loved the idea of them but not the time it would take us to procure one. A rescue, we all agreed, would suit us fine and a mix even more so.
That Saturday morning at the shelter, Ivan was the most popular little thing going. Everyone wanted to hold him, meet him, touch him, kiss his soft head. In a room with his sister Savannah, Ivan, then Ethan, held court. The two of them rolled all over each other and jumped on our legs, licked the girls in their eager faces, and I watched my ten year old girl's little dimple press hard into her cheek. I saw that look on her face. She had fallen in love for the first time with someone not in our family, something outside of us. I saw her want him and want him so desperately that she giggled and whispered to him silently. As I suggested other dogs for us to meet and greet she said with assurance, "But I want him." And we met three others and she said that they were nice and sweet and good and would be happy with any one that we were able to take home, but that she wanted him. And I was already afraid for her. Didn't want her to love him too much just in case. Just in case I would fail her by not writing the right thing on the form, by not charming the pants off the staff, by not convincing them that we were worthy, by revealing the flaws that I was bringing to the table.
When they called that Tuesday afternoon, they called the house first. I saw the number come up on the Caller ID and did not answer it. Lily was home sick with me that day and I could not bear having to tell her while she lay in bed that we did not get the puppy we wanted. I let it go to voicemail. I waited for the message icon to appear on the phone. My breath was a little shallower than seconds before. And then my cellphone rang. It was my husband. They'd called him next. We could pick him up that week and had the night to discuss it before deciding if and when. It had been decided all those years ago when I saw my hoped for Christmas gift sitting behind the glass at the pet store.
Ivan is our dog. He is white with one brown year. His mother was the color brown of his ear and his father was a white poodle. My youngest daughter says that he is white and brown just like us. He is going to grow up with them and he has made me a dog owner and the mother of a fur baby for the first time. To say that he is loved and cared for beyond measure would be to understate it. How do you not love someone you have been waiting for nearly all your life?
(c) Copyright 2017. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
There is promise and there are promises on the first day.
I'd promised the girls all break long that I would take them roller skating at the rink. Truth is, I love that place and it's not a big deal to go unless I am tired and frankly, a holiday break where I am alone with these two cherubs for the entire time is pretty damn tiring, no matter how cute and sweet they are, so heck yeah, I was tired. Most graciously, my good friend agreed to go with her brood and we wrangled our teams to make it to a 1 o'clock session. I'd left a pot of black eyed peas to soak in cold water on the stove and cut the collard greens the way I like them (in strips and with the large vein at the middle of the leaf removed, too tough for me). I'd prepped just enough for me as no one in the house is going to go to town on them other than me, got everyone's gear in order, and locked us out.
We'd already let the new year's air into the house, saged ourselves and the house, thoroughly cleaned, and put away all of the Christmas. I know my good Catholics and other Western Christians wait until Three Kings Day or Epiphany, the day of the feast that celebrates God's manifestation in human form of his son Jesus Christ, on January 6th, but we ain't doing that. The falling needles and the wilting tree just weren't doing it anymore for me and I had to toss that tree out the window. I awaited Janus, Roman god of dates, doorways, transitions, time, passages, and endings, and new beginnings to greet me and lead us into the new year.
After a good skate, I raced home to get that food on the stove. Black eyed peas were drained and then put back in the pot with a ham hock and some seasoning, while the collard strips were put in a larger pot with some water, a little oil, seasoning, garlic, and a little onion. I know some folks like the hock in that too, but not this year. As everything began to heat up, that familiar fragrance began to rise. I loved that scent. I could hear the laughter of my grandmother and aunties in the kitchen. Or my sister and cousins and friends in her kitchen, the party hovering close to the doorway of the kitchen, and then finally settling right in the center. I vaguely recall our black neighbors coming through on New Year's to get some from my mother's stove or bringing their own to share. Everyone filled with hope and laughter. The year so new and full of promise.
I was always told that the black eyed peas and collards would mean good luck for me in the coming year but also learned from other Southern folks, that they also signified wealth. The black eyed pea journeyed to the Americas with the Africans during slavery and has been connected to my black people and Southern cuisine for centuries. While it hardly looks like a coin, like say, the lentil which is used in Italian good luck cooking, it is meant to signify the coins in the money equation. I always thought they looked like googly eyes or funny cartoon faces.
As with most if not all of traditional Southern cooking, this dish started in the kitchens where slaves and then domestic servants prepped food turning ordinary basics into delicious cuisine. Black eyed peas were a cheap crop that held up well in winter. Originally fed to farm animals, the black eyed pea became a staple for the Southern slaves who were often given cheap, scrap, and less desirable parts for their sustenance. When General Sherman's Union army raided the Confederate food stores, they turned their noses at the black eyed peas and the Confederate troops were able to survive the harsh winter. The peas became a symbol of luck and good fortune.
It is also said that in January, 1863, the newly freed slaves celebrating the Emancipation Proclamation ate black eyed peas, thus making the food a staple at any celebration of luck and prosperity for generations of Black Americans to follow. Adding the collard greens to signify wealth or paper money and a side of pork, a rich, fatty cut of meat, promised blessings to come. You had to eat them all together for the spell to work. These Southern recipes are steeped in both tradition and superstition and I always loved starting off the year with a little magic. There are plenty of Black folks who don't follow this tradition because of its connection to slavery and the images and metaphors of promises unkept from a cruel and blatantly racist, punishing system. I ain't mad at that.
But I personally feel nostalgia for my childhood spent in and out of the kitchen of my Grandma, behind the house, on the farm, out front on the porch, making promises and plans for a future just generations out of slavery. There was, for me, a real connection to my family tree and my ancestors, the pain and hope that coursed through their veins and now my mine, and blushed my cheeks when I was angry or excited or overjoyed. This was connection to them. To us. So I made them for just me after roller skating and gave the girls each one pea and one strip of the greens just to taste. The little bit of luck, the spells from before they knew themselves or me myself. Tradition and superstition. New beginnings.
(c) Copyright 2017. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
I am crying for someone I've never met, that I have never known truly, someone known by everyone, and still feel crushed and lost and hurt and angry like I knew them. It doesn't mean I've lost touch with reality or that I do not care in general for the suffering of the unnamed or that I love in a way that is unrealistic and fantastic. Sometimes we are just forced to confront our feelings of fear and loss in an immediate and direct way. Sometimes watching a supernova burn out reminds us that we are just hurtling through space on a rock warmed by the sun. Sometimes the comet that we tied our hearts to is disintegrating into the blackness and it stops our breath.
My house is eerily quiet, missing someone who was never there. The girls are asleep, snuggled up together across the hall from me. The night light plugged in for the seven year old, is slowly changing colors and throwing candy shadows against the wall. She'll be in my bed soon. I hear myself breathing. Not a good strong breath. I can't fill my lungs and exhale through my nose because only these shallow, choppy breaths keep me from bursting into tears again. I can feel my heart beating deeply in my chest. I cannot stop that. I listen to it and begin to count. The counting takes my mind away from the loss. It gives me something to do so that my idle mind does not visit what's missing. I've cried for every one of them, have been struck to the core.
News of the passing of someone that inspired me or showed me myself before I'd even considered myself sucked the air from my lungs and stilled everything. It seemed to never stop. My heart would go deep into my chest and my chest to my knees. Before I could stop them, there would be tears. I'd feel the planet's atmospheric pressure change. I'd know it to be true that they were gone and I'd sit. Sit with the silence and the truth of the inevitable. I'd go to the tape or the film or the music or the words or the pictures and will their presence on this earth just a little longer. I'd recall a time, a place, a moment, a gesture. I'd hear the first note and feel my teenaged, awkward self rise from the couch in awe and disbelief.
I'd remember the first time. I'd remember myself from that moment, from that time. I'd feel the layers of myself, the ones at the bottom, the ones that built me, and I'd remember the voice or the music or the sound or the image. I'd sit in the darkness. I'd trace my racing thoughts through my brain. I'd feel loss. I'd mourn. I'd grieve. I'd miss them, desperately miss them, their presence, their shared place on this earth and I'd reach out to others who shared the same sense of loss and longing. We'd ask why. We'd wonder if anything could have been done. Could anything have saved them? Can anything save us?
I'm in my bed with just one light on. There is a saved side but I know that only my littlest will share the bed with me tonight. Eventually. The rest of the room is dark and still and I am alone. I cannot bear to watch TV or videos. Cannot bear to listen to the news. With each retelling of a life in past tense, I shrink smaller in my own in the present. We are living apart essentially no matter that I have saved a place for him here at his insistence. It hurts. This loss. This missing what I never had, what I never knew because he remained aloof and untouchable all this time. All my promises to live fuller, to follow my own path, to walk through darkness, to trailblaze are whispers in the face of this overwhelming malaise. I am in shock, scared, and startlingly aware of my own presence. I feel myself watching me and wondering what I intend to do with my life. I listen to my shallow breathing and wonder if I intend to pour the fullness of me into my children because I don't dare live the life I promised myself I'd try to seek, but insist they try to reach. I wonder if I even have it in me to dream anymore. I rub my eyes. Stardust. In my eyes.
This last time the girls catch me, see my face in the rear view mirror as I adjust it to back out. "Are you crying, Mommy?" And I am. I'd let myself believe that the fates would spare these people. Might spare us this grief. That they would not all be taken. I joked with others about the Rapture and end days and then in the silence asked aloud if there was something I was missing. It's like standing in the middle of the storm, at its eye where it seems calm, yet all around there is madness. And I am both the calm and the madness. There are so many tears that I tell the girls that the stardust swirling in the air has gotten into my eyes. I am aching to my core because everything I thought I knew is no more. With each passing, a part of my foundation crumbles. As my girls witness me crack and glue myself together. They attend my Spotify listening parties and watch YouTube videos. They hold hands with me while I read to them thinking of my youthful heroes fading. It is the three of us. They have no choice but to allow me my space to heal.
As a girl, I'd fixed myself to the stars even though I knew that if I could see them, they'd probably already burned out. I saw them in the sky twinkling, sparkling, showing me infinite possibility and waited for them, longed for them in that weightless forever. I was transported. So many who have passed this year were those stars for me. They gave me voice, spoke my pain and heartache, longing and desire, wit and humor. They were everywhere, some so much that I assumed I'd have them longer than they'd been promised to the world. After first denying that they were gone, my heart settled on the realization, on the truth, and the tears could not stop. A short, shallow breath can hold in the despair only so long and then you are whimpering on your knees.
And I am here again. Another loss. They came so fast this year that I could hardly catch my breath before the heartache came again. And yet, I almost welcomed the distraction. I am already grieving. Each day a new assault on my heart. Each day a crack to be reglued. I keep holding up the stars for my girls, offering them magic to believe in. I have tried to show them the very best of these people, the very best they've given. They are already supernovas, hardly seen as human in our eyes. Beyond. Magic. Heroic but also human. We all need our heroes. Theirs is their father. And when I met him, he was sprinkled in stardust. By the time I was looking directly at him, he was already gone. I knew it. But I couldn't believe it. The giant universe that shared with us all these wonderful people now seems oppressive and scary and cold. But I keep holding up the stars for my children though I mourn the loss of the magic and the stardust.
I cannot name them all, but they each left this world and exploded like supernovas into another without warning. The sense of being left behind by their meteor trail of magic, unable to catch the tail of that comet, triggered me in so many ways. Before I could get my bearings, it would happen again. And when he finally comes home, I'll have no choice but to look into that trail of stardust and confront the sadness.
(c) Copyright 2016. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
I've voted for candidates who've not won before. I have accepted defeat with a few tears and resolve. I have felt ready to face it all again four years later because I have believed that even if everyone did not think as I did (and I have never been myopic enough to think they did so) that we, Americans, THAT WE, had agreed upon everyone's right to at least live in their own space in their own peace even if we (or I) longed for us to reach a greater love and understanding of one another. I'd taken comfort that though I suspected/knew that behind closed doors there was a good deal of racist and sexist banter going on in the White House and cabinet of presidents in which I held little faith, I expected they'd at least try to hide their shameful behavior and policies with rhetoric and not come right out and assault us with hate. And I wasn't afraid of them.
I can't lie. I have always anticipated some level of racism from my fellow Americans, white Americans, and am always pleasantly surprised when someone shows me otherwise. I listen to the stories they choose to tell, choose to share with me and the rest of the world and cull tiny messages, read the pinpoints on their maps to know if deep down or perhaps on the surface, they don't or can't fully respect me and my experience. Somehow the shame was mine, that I suspected that I should do more, be more or less, convince them by contorting myself, my beliefs, my strong voice, my thick legs, my alarming sexuality, my very blackness, that I should be smaller in the world so that they might be able to live in a world that had me in it. Even I allowed that the world, that America, did not belong to me and was thankful for every small mercy that showed me differently.
For every friend who told me of their racist auntie, of their schools where no people of color attended, of their churches, towns, teams, and other organizations in which they participated without ever seeing a black person, I winced and then offered some level of comfort to them. Well, you are here now. You are part of this diverse community. That counts. And sure. It does. It does.
When I was a girl, I saw the world through the low-res footage of the Polaroid camera and loved looking at the world in the black and white of my parents' and grandparents' "olden days." Their pictures fascinated me because everyone looked so young and beautiful but the tales they told of the time, the parts of the tales that had to do with white people, were violent and bleak and terrifying. The Civil Rights Era was not just part of history, tales made flat and two-dimensional by the textbook, but the stories told by my family, the young, beautiful family of a time that the United States of America was truly black and white and all shadows. I lived among white people in a nearly completely white community and lived my life every day with a pinch of fear. I knew that even in the face of good, kind, supportive white people, I'd better be sure that someone of color, someone who "knew" would have my back up front.
I was ashamed of this, ashamed that I distrusted, that I was not letting love in my heart, that I was not turning the other cheek. I'd always felt that the burden was on me to prove myself open, easy-going, and cool. I tried to let microaggressions and judgments roll off me, not let the blood rush to my cheeks. Defused offenses with laughter, assault with excuses, ignorance with forgiveness -- "they know not what they do."
But I still held my breath. I held my breath because I knew that it was just a matter of time before someone revealed that they weren't as down for my cause as they'd hoped. Held my breath because I knew I might meet their mother/father/grandmother/auntie/cousin/friend/neighbor who said shit like, "that neighborhood is full of n****s not good black people like you," and I wouldn't know how to respond. Because I was twelve. Held my breath because someone would tell me that they didn't understand why all the other black kids were in different classes and not in the advanced classes with me. Held my breath because someone wanted me to know that they just didn't find black girls attractive or black people attentive or able to swim or couldn't get lice or whatever it was they'd heard. Held my breath when, though in the top ten percent of my class, lesser students dared tell me that I'd surely get into the college of my choice because of affirmative action and wanted me to agree to as much. Held my breath because the cute boy told me that he really liked me but that his grandmother would roll over if he came home with a black girl and I felt badly for HIM. Held my breath because sometimes it was all too much and the short breaths were all I could take in without letting my emotions seep out.
First there are tears and then there is rage! And I learned that it was the rage, the rage that scared everyone off. Even your allies couldn't stand for your rage. Your family, your friends, the people who were trying to love you in their own way, to study you, understand you, who longed for whatever it was that being a black girl meant to them, turned from your rage. It revealed too much. Too much of the pain behind your forgiveness, behind your memories, behind your hope. So you channeled it. Made the world. Held it up. Shone the lights. Held your breath. Sucked it in with your head high, eyes focused, became a pillar, face tight with smiles but the heart pumping blood, veins and vessels pounding, eyes blinking, lashes fluttering, cool breaths sucked in and out through your lips.
Simmering, a slow boil and each assault or insult, each death called us from against the wall and whispered, "you'd better let it out or it'll blow." Heat flushed our ears and our cheeks and we were at first embarrassed, humiliated, scared, and then the rage. The rage came and poured like lava melting the glossy papered image of what we were expected to be into something harder to identify. Our beautiful black friends staring past us, the invitation standing to join but no more asking or pleading. Get on or get off. And we wanted everyone on board. We all did. WE did--the blacks, non-whites, immigrant, Muslim, LGBTQ, disabled, the intersected of all these groups--we want you on board. Without you, your racist/sexist/bigoted/homophobic/cruel/apathetic mother/father/auntie/uncle/friend/cousin/neighbor will never hear another side to their fear-mongering, hateful rhetoric or their privileged denials and apathy. They have already chosen not to believe me, not to believe us. While I "may not be like the others," I still can't shake my otherness. You must go in for me.
Listening at the foot of my grandmother in her front sitting room to the tales of a defiant great-granddad and seeing him in his black and white, youthful glory, seeing the uncles in their overalls who stood across the street from the little soda shop/cafeteria that was segregated while their nephews and sons attempted a sit in in white, short-sleeved button downs, and slacks. Pouring over photos of our parents in large Afros and sideburns, wide collars, and short skirts. Seeing our photos become clean and Kodakchromed and colored as our friendship barrettes and hoop earrings, lightening bolted enamel pins and designer jeans came into fashion. Seeing the events of our nation unfold in real time in moving pictures in social media. We are here. You must go for us.
When I was a girl I was afraid of stray dogs because I didn't believe they'd listen to my command to stop. I was afraid of quicksand because it looked like regular ground until you were deep in it and then it just might be too late. I was afraid of someone disrespecting or challenging my family because I believed they'd already been through enough and didn't want to see them wounded or have them face me having been. And I was terrified of someone calling me "nigger," "blackie," "brown sugar" in mixed company not only because it would burn my heart and rise up in my cheeks and my ears and force my tears, but because I was afraid to know just who would and would not stand for me.
Those Kodak pictures from that time show me in my youth already navigating the world's mines and expecting that I might blow up first. That little girl had hope but low expectations for others for whom supporting and loving her might be a burden, might even put them in harm's way. That little girl learned to accept defeats that were altogether unfair, more than likely biased, and influenced by a society that valued her less than all the white children that surrounded her. It is with shock but not complete surprise that a raging, narcissistic, racist, sexist, bigoted, misogynistic blowhard has been elected president. It is the culmination of all my fears. It is the ground made quick sand. It is a stray dog jumping up and putting its paws on my shoulders looking like he might bite my face. It is embarrassing the legacy of my hard-working, well-educated, dedicated, God-fearing, loving family and all the sacrifices they made to get me to my basic rights. It is being called "nigger" or watching my friends cursed and assaulted because they are gay or Muslim or Hindi or Sikh (because please don't know the difference) or in a mixed relationship or disabled or a woman, strong or meek, or poor or uneducated or not quite what America had in mind when they narrowed their definition of "American."
When Al Gore and John Kerry conceded I felt deflated. I'd had faith in their abilities to lead, to govern, to be fair and inclusive. I felt that even if they could not ever meet or even understand the needs of my community and the communities of those I love, but I thought they might try. I thought they wanted to understand, that they wanted to unify. I was afraid of the machine that Ronald Reagan and the Bushes drove over communities I loved. But what I feel now is terror. Absolute fear. I stare at my old class pictures, run my fingers over the old faces of friends, classmates, people who have said how much they love me, care for me, enjoyed our friendships who have voted against my very right to live as they'd like to live. We are sinking. That quicksand catches you and takes down slowly. What happens is that we suffocate and drown and don't even know we've gone down. And we all go down.
(c) Copyright 2016. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
As the story goes, when my father was born, his grandmother wanted him to be named Stephen after her father. Though he'd already been named Jesse, he was called Steve or Stevie by everyone growing up. I know a childhood friend by whether they call him Steve or Jesse. I am called Stephanie after his secret name, a tiny, little seed planted at his roots in an alternative, dream landscape. He is a hearty and strong succulent perennial, only an occasional flower, low growing, sometimes called the liveforever or sempervivum. I am the flower.
We are so alike, my father and I. There is depth, order, control. We are protective, strong, and quick to anger. I love him. I always have. I respect the man he became and all that he has accomplished in this life. I know that if I am in danger he will come. If I am hurt he will come. If I need he will give. But in order to protect himself from the slings and arrows, knives in the back and punches to the gut, he has had to encase his heart in thorns and booby traps.
I woke up this morning at 5:30. That's too early for me. Though I tried to go back to sleep, as soon as my eyes are opened I find that nearly impossible. My racing mind started tracing lines to all the people I know who were probably awake. Many living abroad where the day was already in full swing, friends on the West Coast who may be having a bout of insomnia or a late night of excess, and my dad. Now that he is in his seventies, 5:30 is pretty early for him too, but the early mornings are a space where I always see my father. Walking the house in quiet, breathing in life in a space where no people means no mask, rising with the sun as he did as a boy when he had work to do. You can take the boy out of the country, but not the country out of the boy. My dad is still a country boy.
A country boy whose parents told him and his four siblings how to survive, and gave them everything they had, which was not much materially but was full to bursting with love, guidance, and support. They told those beautiful, black children how to get out of the poverty they'd been born into and to keep marching forward despite the expectation of the America that they were born into, that they were 'less than.' Education, character, drive, ambition, and familial love and support would help each lift the others. Racism and segregation shaped my father's sense of himself and no matter his successes, he has remained haunted. I can only imagine how he endured the assaults on his character, his intelligence, and his basic rights. Like me, he is sensitive, easily wounded, and anxious. Like me, he hides and protects his heart. Unlike me, he has not found too many to share it with. And that includes me.
The love was tough, survivalist. It wasn't precious or adorable. It wasn't indulgent or demonstrative. There were few hugs and smothers of kisses and compliments and praise. There were high expectations. When one fears failure, when failure in a system set up for you to fail means life or death, there is little time for pleasantries. The hurt of his youth nourished ours and our blooms were sprinkled with his pain. But mine is a fragile bloom. My roots are strong, but the flower is so desperate for the light, desperate for the watering and the nutrients, seeking warmth from real and artificial light sources. I cannot always tell the difference.
My father is the first man for whom I was ever too much. I could tell by the way he looked at me since the beginning of time and shook his head. I wasn't easy because I'm not. I'm all of the things one has to work on, work towards. Work. I was compared to other girls who achieved better and far more than I. Girls who were poised and demure and knew the code and followed it. They were good girls. They weren't wild and didn't talk back or fight or question or practice magic. They were practical and organized and good. There is a part of me that is like that too. Remnants of my attempts to please.
My father is the first man whose love I could feel dangling in front of me but could never reach. My father loves me, but it sparks like an electrical short and cannot sustain itself long enough to provide light. I chase the falling embers, hope it will help me find my way through the tunnel but I I do a lot of feeling around in the dark.
My father is the first man I tried to impress by dancing all around him, literally dancing all around him, who was distracted and saw only a flash and felt a slight breeze from all my efforts, and wondered to himself, 'What was that?' as I whirled past. I still don't think he has ever seen me.
But I am not done with him. I am nothing if not persistent. I am the flower. And I continue to bloom in his face. I remind him that without our roots neither of us would thrive. That it does no good for the succulent to resist its flower. The plants are so gorgeous, have always been some of my favorites, whether they have a bloom or not. But the blossom is such a sweet surprise sometimes taking years to finally bloom. It is more. It is the hand to God, the reaching, the longing, the magic expressed. It is working through the fear and the shame of wanting and needing to be loved. It just is. And we both need it, the light and the love.
As the story goes, I was born so prematurely that I was so tiny you could hold me in one hand. There was a fear that I might not survive, that the cold winter and early arrival might be too much for my tiny body. But my roots dug in deep and I called on everything I knew. The sempervivum, I was going to live and he knew it. So he gave me his name, the one he should have had. I fulfilled the promise of this family name and we are tied. Liveforever.
Happy Father's Day to my dad.
(c) Copyright 2016. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
I sent this picture to a friend this afternoon to show her the new curtain we'd put on the girls' closet. Her response was, "Nice. Too bad you can't' get a print in there." I joked back in response, "Not a single one. Beige City."
We bantered for a bit when I pointed out that my whole house actually was full of pattern. Animal prints and florals, stripes, color, polka dots, prints of all kinds. To my mind, it all comes together, linked by traces of color, texture, size, and dimension. I like this crazy world at home and am comforted by its controlled chaos. It's not haphazard or random. This madness is perfectly curated. Nothing gets in here by accident. There is a level of whimsy and sophistication and lots of energy and fun, with lots of room to lounge, move, create, eat, and live. It suits us.
When I go out into the world my spacesuit is usually grey, black, or navy, or some combination of these three. But when I am home, I want to see tiny explosions, mismatched pattern, contrasting colors, light and dark, hard lines and snuggly pillows and blankets. Our space is full of the creative life force that each of us brings. There is art made by all four of us hung and displayed. There are favorite motifs--crowns, cats, hearts, mandalas, mothers and children, flowers and trees, abstract paintings, woven tapestries, and my favorite, black and white something-or-others everywhere.
I have read articles about the "daily uniforms" that many professional women have adopted so that they can focus on the work in front of them. A white button down and black pants. A black tank and grey yoga leggings. Black blazer. I lean more towards a sporty comfort, dance clothes with scarves and oversized everything. Long ago, before the elegant French husband and the children who have to be picked up at school and not humiliated by their mother's eccentric tastes, I would have worn my love of color and pattern and texture all over my body. No Beige City for me. There were faux fur leaning towards teddy bear coats, big shoes, colorful eye shadows, fringe, jewelry, monocles, canes, and glasses of all sorts. Bare bellies, naked shoulders, tiny skirts in plastic or leather or mesh.
I took off my earrings once the first baby arrived because it was her life goal, it seemed, to slice my earlobe with her pulling. When we returned to the States from Barbados, I cut my hair ever shorter and felt too art-teachery, Eileen Fisher in earrings. I started the lean towards a more androgynous, exaggerated proportion after a super-sexy period in Barbados where our house was not our own and the decor most definitely was not. As my uniform went back to black, our space exploded with color and personality, expression shared in our private sanctuary and not out in the world. Like our purest feelings, our life force was tucked away into the safety of our home.
When we come in and kick off our shoes, steal away to a favorite corner or spot, the place pulsates and radiates our energy. It's for us. Our space. We peel off our masks and space suits and settle into its patterned, dynamic peace. It's warm, welcoming, comfortable, and safe. And it's just as much fun as I used to be on the outside, I told my kids.
And their reply, "You are still the most fun, mommy."
(c) 2016. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
I cut my hair down to the quick because it was getting on my nerves. This week. A few weeks ago I cut it down to the skull because some new product that promised to strengthen the short hair I did have on my head not only did not strengthen it but caused it to become brittle and dry. I sheared it off to start over. I'd been threatening this all summer, a massive cut, because I just could not find myself in the style that my slow-growing coif was presenting, and I wanted edgy, androgynous, strong and felt more like Dorothy Hamill mushroom or short-haired newscaster safety helmet.
I've given up on long hair. For me. When we lived in Barbados, my hair grew like a wacky weed due to the climate, moisture, water, and raging hormones I produced due to the recent arrival of my second babe. I wore it long and loose, top-knotted, with braids, shells, twists and left in the sand, conditioner, salt water (rinsing only the chlorine), and let the sun bleach it out. This was a me I never imaged. Super feminine, sexy, and girly. Only now can I admit that I was gorgeous--sun-kissed, toned, long-haired. I had headbands and rubber bands, barrettes and buns. I put flowers behind my ears and looked so demure and precious that I felt like a character. It was fun, truly. But when we got back to the States, all that hair threatened my time management and the style (mostly a bun or a ponytail) made me feel undefined and misdirected.
Since I was in seventh grade and a beauty school fuck-up destroyed my hair, my confidence, and my life in one afternoon's attempt at the ill-thought but insanely popular Jheri Curl, my hair has been short. I want to say that I took to it effortlessly, but that would be a flat out lie. I cried my face off for months as my pimply, awkward, pre-teen chubby face was forced to take center stage at just the moment that I wanted to wait in the wings. I wore a headband for years, afraid to let the hair just be, hopeful that it would grow long and full and I'd be able to poof it to heaven like all the other 80's vixens (black and white). It never dawned on me to wear a weave or a wig, they'd never have suited me, but I endured my wide open face on display with a tortured, simmering hurt.
My girls have hair down to their shoulders. The oldest has the most beautiful mane of auburn, blond, and chestnut hair that coils and twists and extends from her skull out into the world. When she wears it down, which is not often, she stuns. She has no idea of the power that head holds, and not just because of the hair. She struggles with the kinks and the knots and the fullness, but I have promised her that she will come to love it. She's a Leo and I've told her that she will walk the world like a lion one day and will love her unruly curls. For now, she wears it pulled back in a ponytail or bun. My youngest has dark brown hair with auburn highlights. Hers is wavier, thinner, and she loves it in side ponytails and topknots. Her cascading locks makes her look older than her six years. She's glamorous and girly and sweet. She often wonders aloud if I want longer hair, if I want to wear ponytails, or if I "like" my hair short "like a boy."
I do. Like it short like a boy. This is my familiar style. But it gives me no protection. There is nowhere to hide and nothing to make me beautiful on days that I am not. When my hair is short, super short like it is now, I have doubts and cannot slink under my bangs or wipe my hair back behind my ears. When it is short like this I have to hope that a wriggle of my nose or a twitching of the corners of my mouth or a flutter of my eyelashes doesn't give me away. With my hair short like this, anything and everything can be betrayed. It was once just my feelings but now it's my wrinkles, my changing hormones, my sprinkling of greys which seem to show up better when my hair is worn close to the skull.
As soon as my hair is cut, I begin the process of starting to grow it back. More as an exercise in its ability to still do that, grow, than in hoping I get locks flowing to my shoulders. The truth is that it just doesn't grow like that. There are people whose hair grows like weeds, a little water and light and the garden flourishes. Not mine. This is a black girl's story, and one that I will not tell with any fresher perspective than it has been previously told. My hair, because of the way it grows, because it is coarse and kinky, does not grown like silken threads, returning in months to pre-cut lengths. Mine can take years and breaks with frequency. The growing out sometimes leaves me frustrated and I run to the scissors. I can't wait. I have no judgment or loathing of myself because of this truth; I have resigned myself to it. The struggle is real.
The girls' hair, both some combination of my kinky, scrappy, nappy curls and my husband's fine, sweeping curls (of yesterday as he is now suffering from some level of hair loss that only occasionally strikes him as a horror) grows just fine. Mine has always needed coaxing. Oils and creams and potions. Wraps, conditioners, and special combs or brushes. It takes its time. And I wait. Until I can't.
Little girls with short pixie or asymmetricals, tight Afros or blunted bobs make me smile. The gender specific styles really influence the littles and anything that runs counter to that makes me beam. A friend has a daughter who brings her short cut, gold earrings, Star Wars, long shorts game every day and I call her my avatar. To bring it like that, as a baby boo, is so epic. The amount of judgment and projection that goes onto the shorn head of a woman or girl is pretty massive. Sometimes even I can't bear the weight. Yet she's all the way in and wondering what's wrong the folks who don't get her vibe, her style, not the other way around.
My crowning glory has to be my aura and not my hair. My halo is in the ether and not on my head. And though I sometimes have to shore myself up for each morning, each moment I pass the mirror, each time I reach to push my hair out of my face, and while I like my hair short, and have grown to love it over the past 30 years, I have never felt so seen and so naked. I imagine that people can see through my skin into my heart, can read behind my eyes, can see my thoughts, so I run my hand over my head...but it's still gone. I know it's not the hair. The hair doesn't really supply the power. It doesn't really protect or shield and it doesn't really make me more beautiful or more feminine. I don't even really look like a boy. But I have wanted to hide, to disappear, to go away, be invisible and unseen. I've seen my youth and my wide-eyed wonder recede under that skull cap of a style. I've seen my face loom larger, my eyes keener, my lines and wrinkles lightly tracing where I laughed and smiled and cried and picked. I've seen my face lurch forward with something I'd not realized was there before. Experience and wisdom.
I know things and I will not hide it. I can't. Because my hair is cut short to the quick and the truth is written all over my face.
(c) Copyright 2015. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
Addendum: This is my journey with my hair. There is no judgment-stated or implied-for how others choose to wear their hair. It has been a lifelong process for me, dealing with this hair, and what the styles say to society at large, but I am at peace with it. Except for when I'm not.
