My teenage daughter, the middle child of three, is curled up at the edge of my bed, complaining about today’s theater rehearsals. Apparently, students are getting yelled at because it is two weeks until showtime, and too many of them are struggling with their choreography and lines. My kid, a brilliant mind cursed with perfectionism and anxiety, is not happy about this and is unloading all their frustrations. And I am snuggled in bed, getting all of the tea. The lead hasn’t shown up to practice in weeks and is half-assing the performance. Nobody knows how to sing and dance at the same time, so there are questions about why they are doing a musical in the first place. My kid questions how much rhythm they have. I question it, too, but I let that one go. My kid has always lived in a predominantly white neighborhood, and I didn’t do my due diligence because I forgot that our rhythm is a communal inheritance.
I spend the next twenty minutes trying to find the perfect balance between offering parental advice and being a trusted venting space.
“Kiddo, you got this.”
“They don’t know their lines?! Y’all only have two weeks! What does the director think?”
“How is a lead actor allowed to do that? What if they have a job after school? Oh, they don’t? THEY SHOWED UP LATE WITH THEIR GIRLFRIEND?! They outta pocket.”
“Hopefully, the school is learning what not to do next year.”
I am crushing it, I think. I know my kid will still push themself harder than necessary, but at least, for a moment, they have another gentle reminder from me that the pressure is unnecessary. After a few more minutes of conversation, my kid walks out of my room with a lighter energy. As she leaves, I reflect on the lack of these moments in my own childhood: that noticeable lack of emotional security, uplifting support, and unconditional love.
And I wonder what my mother is doing.
My mother is a larger-than-life person. She’s not the warm personality that the masses gravitate toward. She keeps her inner self heavily guarded, but she commands any space she occupies. Her closet is a parade of custom and eclectic Black American and Italian fashion houses that she wears for any and every reason. Every second spent outside the house is a chance to make a fashion statement. Her brand of humor borders on vile and is not for everyone, yet I find her hilarious. Swedish fish have been the kryptonite for every diet started. She volunteers for every cause: disability, environmental issues, children’s rights, sexual assault victims—you name it, she is involved. She travels all over the world and has the artifacts to prove it. An honorary PhD recipient and a patron of the arts, my mother is a woman singularly driven to create a legacy that echoes through time.
But I don’t think she’s ever considered that echo of legacy through my children and me.
Maybe we are incapable or unworthy of shouting her name loud enough through the void of time. Make no mistake, I am proud of my mother. Her accolades are just a small part of her story. The daughter of a mother with developmental disabilities and an illiterate, absent father, my mother overcame great adversity. She’s the sixth generation of free women in our family. A second generation New York City resident by way of two South Carolinians who joined the Great Migration north in hopes for better opportunities in the factories. My mother is a latchkey kid who cat-walked the streets of East New York as if the city was an offering for her divine beauty. I’ve seen men bow to her and spent my younger years flipping them off every time she denied them her favor. She’s more intelligent than she’ll ever claim and far more sensitive than she’ll ever admit. I am in awe of her. I just wanted a warmer version of my mother than the mask she gave everyone else.
In my younger years, I dreamed of us having matrilineal generational magic. True, palpable Black girl magic running through our veins. She was a goddess, and I was her offspring, set to inherit the same badass power. With my brains and her everything, we would be unstoppable. Sure, I had a penchant for staring at the refrigerator for hours, crying when things were too loud, not really talking, and panicking around new people and environments, but I was brilliant. She could, and would, always boast about that. I had hoped that I would become a magical, new, but different version of her.
Over time, I realized that I received other inheritances from my mother. Her critiques that ring louder in my head than my own voice, her anxiety, her anger. Those are the inheritances that seemed to stay longer than I would like and I’ve spent many nights and therapy sessions trying to understand why I wasn’t worthy of all of her praise. Maybe I wasn’t pretty enough to inherit everything of hers. She called me “ugly” and “stupid” countless times, and in my later teen years a “whore,” never beautiful like my goddess. Maybe she tried to conjure a gentle feminine spirit and instead got a kid who hid all their dresses and open-toed sandals at the bottom of their closet and cried anytime ruffles touched her skin but loved baseball and played hard with reckless freedom. It’s also entirely plausible that she was frustrated I didn’t have enough memory to contain the vastness of her inheritance. For all of my intelligence, I would forget something that was said to me the second I walked into a new room or followed a train of thought that had me daydreaming about different worlds, different people.
The dismissals, the misunderstandings, the guilt, the backhanded comments phrased as questions of her competency as a mother: “Is your work ethic like this because of me?” “Why aren’t you more like *insert neighborhood girl or friend’s name here*? Aren’t I a good mother?” Each question and accusation flung with an effortless flick of the wrist, tearing cannonball-sized holes through me.
But I needed to hold on to my dream because who gives up on their own mother? On their inheritance? She is beloved by everyone! She’s the people’s champion. And so I kept dreaming, finding stories that told of supernatural mothers and daughters in conflict. I built my own corner of the world to explore my hurt, reading and talking about Black speculative fiction online in the hopes of healing through stories and with community. I found, read, and watched endless tales of mothers and daughters having their own complicated histories and traumas that lead to big knock-down, drag-out fights. They would destroy cities, wreak havoc on perpetrators, and claim their freedom. Those final fights would create clarity and break generational cycles. Each woman finding their way back to each other, not totally changed, but just a bit better than before. More understanding. More willing. More powerful now that they move together, Black girl magic becoming a balm for life’s pains.
After letting things sit and fester for years, I tried to carefully emulate what I read. I figured things would come together somewhat neatly, like any good story, with honesty laying bare our commonalities, our humanity, our womanhood and motherhood, and it would bring us closer. My naivety underestimated the reality of an argument that exposed all the rot and the haphazardly placed landmines we carefully avoided throughout my adult life. A pain appears deep in my chest when I think back to our last conversation, that final attempt at reconciling. Does she remember me begging her to acknowledge the latest harmful thing done to our relationship and her fury and despair, crying and asking me over and over and over again why she wasn’t a good mother?
Surprisingly enough, I still want my mother in my life. Whether it’s because mothers should always be there and sure, my mother isn’t perfect but family is family and you turn your back on family? Or because I truly idolize her and love her and hope that one day, she’ll see all of me the way I see all of my children. I couldn’t tell you which fuels the desire more to keep my mother close, but for my sanity, I keep my distance. I have to. I’m finally surrounded by healthy forms of communication, love, and community in ways my mother struggles/refuses to reciprocate. I know and want more from my goddess even though this severance has been more difficult than I imagined. Whenever things have gotten rough this past year, I’ve fought the instinctual need to reach out to my mother, reforming that brittle tether to make things as they once were. I have to remind myself that dreams and hopes don’t sustain change-action does the heavy lifting there. For the moment, time and space are needed to silence the goddess’s voice that reverberates in my head telling me all the ways I’ve failed her.
My children silence her voice. It’s powerful and terrifying to witness children render gods to muffled rumblings in the background. They aren’t responsible for my peace. My pain should never be their burden to bear. My responsibility is to guide them and to be a safe space as they test the limits of their own powers. To remind them that their imagination is limitless and they can manifest whatever their mind creates. Their responsibility is to their growth alone. Yet here I am, finding my peace in their evolution. It’s a somber wonder to look at my children during our random conversations about their dreams, their insecurities, life, politics, dating, and anime and see both my and my mother’s inheritances at work: young people who are bold, intelligent, beautiful, creative, caring, and inquisitive.
So, what is my mother doing?
I imagine she’s traveling to another country or spending her weekends and winters at her vacation home in the American South as respite from a fast-paced life in the city that never sleeps. She’s probably studying as she works towards her second PhD. She’s framing a new article that references her legacy and power. She’s buying a vintage purse from a high-end fashion house or a statement hat from one of the vendors outside of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, smiling that quiet, vindicated smile she gets when she curates her closet. She’s placing her mask on just so, donning her armor of fashion, status, and influence as she preps for battle with the world. She’s waiting for the masses to chant her name over and over, louder and louder.
She doesn’t know who I am or who my children are. And that’s okay, I guess. Others will carry her name through time with the necessary tone and reverence she requires. We’ll forge our own path forward with our inheritance, creating a new song to carry on. I return to the warmth and coziness of my bed and wait for inevitable signs of the next kid making their way to me to detail the day’s events and I smile.
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