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by Rivers Solomon

Maybe my mother is God, and that’s why nothing I do pleases her. Maybe my mother is God, and that’s why even though she’s never once saved me, I keep praying that this time she will.

Despite all the coddling denied me as a child, I never became the independent island of my mother’s dreams. I’m a baby bird, chirping for anyone at all to spit food into my mouth.

You telling me you don’t know by now to expect pain? says Mama. I lived in a house devoted to my breaking apart, but I refused to be wrong in front of Mama. I guess I hope every time it will be different. I wait for Mama to mock my confession. A woman dedicated to relentless self-reliance, she’s built her three children to be invulnerable.

My phone dings, finally, and I slide it out of my torn pocket, ready to receive whatever comfort, whatever regurgitated worm flesh, my sisters have to feed me in this moment of obvious catastrophe. Their words will be derisory and remind me only that I am alone, but they will provide fuel for my self-pity, which is its own comfort.

The kids who grow up fine do so because of us, or despite us.

Mother forgot her own advice. She’d told me that white supremacy operates under a logic in which everything whiteness does can be rationalized as good, and everything Blackness does can be rationalized as preternaturally evil.

How cruel that our parents, unexorcisable, go on inside of us. How cruel that we cannot disimbricate their ghosts from our being.

It made me seethe, hang up the phone, to know her life was going on as normal without her children—like we’d never been born, like the house never touched her the way it touched us.

I’m not a person but a place where bad things happen.

Mama knows she is being cruel, and I know that she knows that she’s being cruel, and she knows that I know, and she wants to stop, but she also wants to not stop because it feels too good to make her point.

It’s stupid to run from pain instead of to it because pain always comes, and if I could just accept that, life would not be a constant fluctuation between numbness and fear.

All three of us live for being chased, desperate for some assurance that if we disappeared, someone might mourn our loss or reach into the walls and grab us if a ghost claimed us.

Okay, but like, what of anyone’s father. Goodness, we can’t be disappointed by men we never once believed in.

I don’t feel sorry for him, not exactly, but I know the pain of realizing what you’re capable of, knowing that if there is a god, you are fucked. Every good thing you’ve done is for show, in the hope that people don’t see through to your core, your rotten, non-sliver core.

Many children, despite what is said of their willfulness, know the order of the world. Adults rule. Our lives are in their hands. Their loving us, liking us, finding us convenient, is absolutely crucial for our survival. We bend and bend until we mold ourselves as closely as we can into their images. Mother is God.

Yeah. Fuck. Yeah. I guess it’s just, she can’t help me. Nobody can. Not her. Not any of my aunties and uncles. Not my mama. Not my pop. Not teachers. Not friends. Not any fucking therapist or psychiatrist. No drug. Not Prozac, not citalopram, not Wellbutrin, not Lexapro, not diazepam, not Latuda. Not my sisters. Not any fucking body or thing. What a terrible, horrid, unsafe feeling.

Conflict makes me feel suicidal, in no uncertain terms. I want to shrink away and die and never have the experience of a negative emotion again.

I should speak of my father. I should speak of him lest he be spared the ire rightly due him. We have a tendency at times to exonerate fathers, seemingly blameless because of their absence or their ambivalence.

I am fighting for my life, dear sister, at this very moment, standing in this kitchen, ready to die so I do not have to be intimate again with suffering.

I am here and it hurts. I am fighting with all I have to be here.

Sometimes, we want only to tell our story and have someone listen. We must know that on this earth, what happens to us matters; otherwise, what tethers us to the living?

Eve has read that book that circulates widely, about the children of emotionally immature parents, and knows that if you’re waiting for some admittance of wrongdoing, of mistake, if you need an apology to move on, it will never come. Never. The realization that validation of the pain will never come from those who inflicted the pain has the power to obliterate. Did it happen? If they’re not apologizing, if they’re not admitting they’ve done it, did they do it? What is real? What is true? Is my life a fantasy? Then let me wake up by dying.

If I cannot forget, what is there? I am always remembering, even when I am not. Me is in itself a remembrance. Me does not exist without the past that shaped my being. And what is there between memory and forgetting?

Emmanuelle looks at me like I’m someone she’ll never understand. So be it. I can’t win anyone’s love or approval, and I no longer want to try.

“I think it’s always better for the world to know. There is no guarantee of change, but without anyone knowing, change can’t happen.”

There are times when I didn’t speak when I wish I had, it’s true. But there are times when I’ve spoken and it was the worst thing I could’ve possibly done.

The world doesn’t make sense, so why should we, as inhabitants of that world, make sense?

She wants to be loved so fully and completely that her heart explodes from the pleasure of it, but knows that she never will.

“I can’t make sense of none of this,” he says. “But I suppose it’s not mine to make sense of. The Lord do what he do, and why? Why?”

Mother is God, I’m her baby Job. She has let a devil ruin me—and for no reason but to remind me, nothing in this world is ours.

She lays her hand on top of mine, and though I want to shove it away, I let it sit there. I take a breath. I make myself be mindful. I notice my anger—how dare she? I notice my shame. I notice the tensing of every muscle in my body, hardening into a shield to fight against anyone who might try to reach me. I say, voice cracking—fuck—“No one saved us.” “I know. It’s not fair,” she says. “It’s not fair at all.” “Not a bit.”

So much of what we speak is our attempt to make our fantasies real.

I don’t know because I was not in that situation. I don’t know because we often talk about what we would do, and then when push comes to shove, we don’t.

I would’ve forgiven Mama everything had she said it, the only thing I ever longed to hear from her: I am sorry for the abundance of pain.