The last time my mother broke my heart, my brother and his college friends had the pleasure of witnessing it. We were all gathered in the common area of his shared apartment in upstate New York. Of course, she had traveled from Africa to celebrate her favorite child’s birthday. As the youngest child of an African mother, his being the most preferred was almost inevitable.
“It’s not that your brother is my favorite. You are just harder to love,” she said in a manner intended to be perceived as coy.
When two or more siblings and at least one parent are among strangers, the question of who the favorite child is almost always arises. Her words are still so fresh in my mind, piercing me once more with every repeat. The silence and expressions of discomfort gave the words an extra sting. In mere seconds, feelings of insecurity, hurt, and vulnerability surged into my chest as it tightened. My instincts were to protect myself from the perceived attack, and I immediately bit back.
“Well, that’s okay. I know who I will care for in their old age,” I retorted, alluding to my father.
It wasn’t that I was shocked at what my mother said, as I had known for a while that she struggled with loving me. It was that she had admitted it in the first place, and in front of strangers at that. It was also how easily the words poured out of her mouth, as though they had been seated at the gates of her tongue waiting for the perfect opportunity to break out.
There is just something about the relationship dynamic between a Black mother and her daughter.
Regret hit me as quickly as that cruel response exited my mouth. Attempting to retrieve lost grounding, I laughed it off and hoped no one else was uncomfortable. My shot at damage control appeared to work and the pleasantries continued. That moment was abruptly shelved deep in the “will visit later” section of my mind. I anesthetized and did my best to turn the parts of myself that seemed to rub my mother the wrong way, off, evading any friction. The rest of the trip went well and when it was time for me to return to my little apartment in Chicago, the rest of myself broke free from where I had hidden her.
I remember telling my husband what my mother had said and doing my best to appear nonchalant. I avoided confronting my feelings, hoping that if I detached myself from them, I would move on from the situation with ease. But a month later, while we were lying in bed, I spontaneously burst into tears. The impact of those words obliterated me so much, I could not contain myself. I sobbed heavily and deeply while my husband held me in his arms. If it weren’t for him, I would have completely broken down. It was during this delayed reaction that I recognized and acknowledged just how much she had hurt me. What settled in my mind was that the mother who chose to have me struggled with loving me. I thought that kind of love was a given. Worse was how she expressed it so carelessly, without consideration of what it would do to me. It was just too easy, and I kept wondering why.
Yet, there was a part of me that understood.
I could see why my mother might find it easier to love my brother. He is significantly more agreeable than I am. Recently, he told me that what he has learned over the years is he shouldn’t ignore people’s red flags just to get along. This makes sense, as my brother is naturally affable and easygoing, which means he is prone to people-pleasing. Everyone he meets takes a liking to him. In instances of confrontation, he manages to make the other person laugh. He might not always have been this way. He might have realized that he needed to become this way to survive our family dynamic. Either way, it is a testament to his flexible nature.
I, on the other hand, am a different story. My openness to confrontation paired with barbed-wire fence boundaries is a recipe for rigidity. I refused to get along for the sake of getting along, and I think that rubbed my mother the wrong way.
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We haven’t always been this way, my mother and I.
There was a time when my sense of self was less defined. When strong-willed, younger me could not escape the malleableness that children tend to have. Obedience and lack of resistance on my end meant we got along just fine for the most part. My world was small, and few things validated me more than making my mother proud. My little self would hover around her dressing room, wide-eyed, paying attention as she put on her dresses and heels and makeup. As a girl with three brothers and a tomboy older sister who was ten years older than me, those moments in my mother’s dressing room offered me unmitigated femininity. The typical goings-on consisted of picking outfits, accessories, and hairpieces. She did this thing where she would place her forehead on mine and slowly tilt her head from side to side. Gazing into her seesawing eyes, there wasn’t a drop of doubt in my mind that she absolutely loved me.
By the time I was twelve years old, things started to get complicated. I was a skinny tomboy with a muscular leanness that meant my body resembled a ruler, two features that coalesced to make me an ideal candidate for teasing. While some of the girls in my class were already well acquainted with B cups and curves, I was barely getting to know an A cup. For an entire year, the boys in my class called me “Caster Semenya” to remind me that while I was a fast runner, I was too boyish. Then in my final year of primary school, they became more literal. They stopped referencing someone who was androgynous and went straight to calling me “Superman.” The incessant blatant misgendering took a toll on me. I remember feeling so anxious at times that the webbing between my fingers would feel uncomfortable; as if it shouldn’t have been there. I began to habitually cut it with a razor so the pain would suppress the sensation of discomfort. I remember the dread settling inside my stomach each morning as I prepared for school.
One day, I decided to ask my mother for advice. I waited until she returned home from work and met her by the front door with tears running down my cheeks and a detailed retelling of the vicious name-calling. She responded with a chuckle, which my pubescent self, translated as, “You are being too sensitive.”
“You know you are a girl, so why do you care? Don’t mind them,” she said, dismissing me to continue peeling the workday off her body. She always found a way to give me the impression that I was too sensitive, too much for her to handle.
That was one of the first times my mother broke my heart and, soon after, a barrier of unspoken words and unmet expectations began to form between us. Invisible, yet solid. Thankfully, my father was more receptive. He gave me advice that I have since used when I encounter bullies.
“The best way to get to a bully is to laugh at them. If you do not give them the satisfaction, those boys will get bored and eventually stop,” he said, with a wisdom that came to him naturally.
I took his advice and stopped responding to the insults of my classmates with visible offense. Instead, I dissimulated it with a simple yet patronizing laugh. At first, this retort had no effect, but because I refused to concede; in such situations, I didn’t relent. The perpetrators eventually got bored. They could no longer find delight in my perceived pain because I cunningly hid it under fabricated condescension. I had finally found a tactic that worked, but by that time, it was already too late. A piece of my heart had calcified, and I vowed that I would never let anyone bully me again. I began pairing my faux snickers with comebacks that morphed into venomous bite backs. I was becoming an expert in the art of self-defense, and even though I did my best not to provoke anyone, I became a disagreeable and rigid mean girl.
She did not protect me when I needed her; my father did, and I never forgot that.
#
The world, and African societies especially, has always perceived men as heroes to women who are in dire need of saving. The way my father so easily gave solutions to my problems, while my mother could not, reinforced this perception. A woman is not a woman until she is married; until a man sees her as a viable option to reproduce with. To an extent, my mother and most women of her time are victims of their environment. Although I am sure they would never want to be labeled as victims, as women in our Southern African cultures have been dubbed “imbokodo.” They are rocks. Referring to them as “imbokodo” arose as part of a freedom cry in apartheid South Africa. Even after all the horrors of apartheid, Black women somehow still managed to be seen as strong, determined, and undeniable. Today, South Africa’s femicide rate is almost six times higher than the global average.
Perhaps it was other women, having been battered by life and a high tolerance for much, that hardened my mother. There was a time when she was sent away to live with a family friend because her parents were poor. This friend, an elderly woman, would strike her each time the radio lost connection and switched to the wrong station. She tells the story of a time before or after she lived with this woman when she got so thirsty that she had to drink her own urine. She and I may have relational complexities, but I still marvel at how my mother has managed to maintain even a semblance of softness after such a hardening childhood.
I think my mother recognizes a hardness in me that she was all too familiar with. Maybe there are moments when she sees parts of herself that she doesn’t like, reflected through me. In my brother, she sees the parts she wishes she were made up of. That’s the thing about the relationship dynamic between a Black mother and her daughter. It must be painful to see the defensive mechanisms she develops out of necessity spring up out of a child she has done her best to shield from the things that broke her.
Life is funny that way, isn’t it? We do our best to break cycles and generational curses, yet somehow, we find ourselves reinforcing them. We find ourselves mimicking the wounding tones that our mothers used when they hurt us. That bitterness, formed over years of pain from mother figures and the hardships of life, has nowhere to go. So, it travels from one generation to the next, each time reappearing as a form of requital. Because I mirror my mother so much and she sees so much of herself in me, she speaks to me the way she speaks to herself. This is that anger passed on from one woman to another, struggling to find an appropriate place to go. I look back and see that it is all just misdirected vengeance.
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I have realized that while my mother might find it hard to love me, it doesn’t mean I am inherently hard to love. I know this because there are people who love me effortlessly. Still, there are moments when I feel indignant because I will probably never get an apology or any form of validation from her.
After all, no one ever apologized to her. Nobody protected her. I cannot expect her to give me what she has never had. I must forgive her, so the anger doesn’t get passed on to my daughter when I have one.
I must forgive her, so I don’t break another woman’s heart.
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