Status Updates From What My Mother and I Don't ...

"How much are you supposed to tell someone who loves you that much, whom you want to protect?"

Re- reading Melissa’s essay is my excuse to including her in my paper

fight for my LIFE (en plus time is a mother and now this?)

im already broken and ik this is gonna beat me tf up

“When she arrived in the hospital after my daughter was born, I sat there on the starched sheets holding my baby, and she held me, and I cried uncontrollably— because I could finally understand how much she loved me, and I could hardly stand the grace of it.”

“To talk about her love for me, or mine for her, would feel almost tautological; she has always defied my notion of what love is.”

“She loved to tell stories. She believed in magic. Nobody stood up for her so she had to stand up for herself, and after a while, she got tired of standing. I wish I had gotten to know her better.”

“It’s strange, really, that to grasp that which has hurt you, you must trust it not to hurt you when you let it inhabit you. Do you know about baptism? How they hold you and lower you into the water? It’s like that. You have to trust they’ll lift you out.”

“What I lacked was empathy for her. I was so interested in my own feelings about her that I couldn’t leave room for her feelings or for what she wanted out of life. I couldn’t leave space for her to be a person. I think, ultimately, other people aren’t real to us until they’re suffering or gone.”

“… slowly I can remember that I have made a different path for myself... I have created myself as someone who, on most days, I like, respect, and love… I have learned that healing is possible. That we can make lives that we couldn’t have even imagined when we were little and that we can carry the little ones who we were into these new and luminous lives.”

“I know my parents love and miss me. I, too, deeply mourn all that we lost. But I have reached the bottom of my own particular well. There is compassion here but not much hope for connection beyond that.”

Her Body / My Body by Nayomi Munaweera

“The burden of the unsaid turns my heart into a balled fist.”

“… the behaviors that let me survive childhood were not serving me anymore…”

“This is how I survived my childhood: I disappeared. As a child I slipped into books, and everything around me, including my own body, faded away. It was a very conscious act.”

“… The thing that keeps me from tackling parenthood with eagerness is not, really, money or ambition or hypochondria or selfishness. Rather, it’s the fear that I’ve learned less from my childhood than I should have, that I am more like her than I want to be.”

“I think my mom wanted to live a selfish existence. I do not think she imagined herself struggling to find her identity in her forties, fifties, sixties. And I don’t blame her. I want to be selfish, too.”

“I believe that her pride in my accomplishments—and her love for me— is actively battling her resentment, but I don’t want to oversee that civil war, and I don’t have to.”

“I believe that she loves me, in the same way that I believe that it’s best that we are not a part of each other’s lives. Because my identity has been shaped by what she is not; she is, for me, an example of how not to conduct a life.”

“When I was a child, my love for my mother was uncomplicated.”

“… How will we allow all of it, all the whiles, any of the whiles, go make us better at loving us backward and forward? That is the only question that matters to me right now. Can you tell me what questions matter to you? Can we spend the rest of our lives talking about those questions? Can we please get better at loving each other in America?”

“I lived in fear, when, perhaps, I should have willed myself to live with more courage, less tough love, and more conviction. I took some of the wrong chances.”

“… The problem in this country is not that we fail to ‘get along’ with people, parties, and politics with which we disagree. The problem is that we are horrific at justly loving the people, places, and politics we purport to love… I wanted us to get better at love.”

“I still desperately want to believe that a haphazard collection or cataloguing of cherry-picked confessions is what makes art last. I know it doesn’t.”

“Last year, I finished a piece of art I started for you at twelve years old. I wanted to artfully explore the shape and consequences to our bodies of not reckoning with so many familial and national secrets. You agreed that I should call that piece of art ‘Heavy’.”

“What I cannot tell my mother is that she hurt me and I’m angry, but it doesn’t matter as much any longer. We all hurt one another. She could not not have hurt me. She could not not have made me angry. What I wish that I could tell her is that I am, finally, okay with that.”

“I have made that phone call and it has failed me too many times. She has not wanted to unpack or parse through our sameness, if only because I always start with wanting to address the ways that we have grown apart. She does not much like to talk about her feelings. She gets anxious when I ask her to consider what there is and it not behind and between us; she almost always feels attacked.”

“‘We have different values’ is a thing I sometimes tell people when they ask about my parents, but that sounds already more subjective, more judgmental than I mean. We are very different, very separate people, who have both accidentally and on purpose heard and loved one another poorly and intensely my whole life.”

“When she needed, wanted, suffered, I had only my best guess: words, hugs, begging, asking, holding. I only had the flawed and abstract way that humans love.”

“There is a gaping hole, perhaps for all of us, where our mother does not match up with ‘mother’ as we believe it’s meant to mean and all it’s meant to give us. What I cannot tell her is all that I would tell her if I could find a way to not still be sad and angry about that.”