Some years before, my mother had been diagnosed with fibroids and had to undergo a hysterectomy. For her, the surgery and its recovery were a throbbing revelation. Whomever she thought she was in the world, and whatever that woman’s purpose, was suddenly gone. She laughed like a songbird when she called me to tell me she had cut her dreadlocks. “Something just switched off,” she told me. She returned home without her womb, then realized that my father no longer had any hold over her. There would be no more children by him or any man. There was nothing else to bind her to him.
