Something Like Beautiful

by asha bandele

  In 2000, the year my daughter was born, the nightly news reported that the only presidential campaign that was deeply rooted in the reclamation of family values was the one that was also headed up by a man who had signed 153 death warrants during his turn as governor.

  I wanted to run, go live off the grid, have my child, tell no one, or keep her forever in my womb.

  But the more round my tummy became, the more my breasts swelled, the more these fears either fell away or shrank into something I could manage. I gave myself over to reason, faith, hope, and Dr. Spock. I left the shaky financial world of freelance and accepted a job as an editor at a women’s magazine. I made it through labor, according to many, quite easily; although Nisa came two weeks late, when my water did break at exactly 12:01 AM on April 14, 2000, less than eleven hours later my daughter was in my arms, having already learned to latch on. Seven hours after that, we were home entertaining people, eating gourmet take-out pizza.

  And it all seemed so possible, right then, that night, surrounded by friends and food, the love of my husband, my daughter’s father, palpable, however distant; we felt him there and said it, everyone did.

  Rashid called and checked in on us daily, and I updated him with breast-feeding reports, how many diaper changes, who’d come by to see the baby, how much she’d slept—or in Nisa’s case, did not sleep. I begrudgingly admitted that she did look a bit like him, though I tempered that with an admonishment. “Why should you get any credit? You just showed up for the party. I did all the work,” I said and laughed and Rashid laughed too.

  We laughed so much in those first days. We laughed and we spoke bravely about Rashid’s parole date, which was just under three years away. Given all the people we’d seen the parole board turn loose, even as everyone knew they were still dangerous, we felt a sense of confidence. Again and again, we would go over all of Rashid’s accomplishments in prison, the master’s in theology, his superclean record, the people, including some cops, who supported his release, and we declared that there was no way they wouldn’t let him out, especially now with this beautiful girl in the picture. We planned it all out, from Rashid’s first day home to all the days after, the days, he would say, with a threatening grin, when he would “put a whole bunch more babies in you, girl.”

  We saw a future, our future, defined more by the mundane than the misfortuned.

  We talked about backyards, family vacations, running errands together, about Rashid driving me to work, picking me up. We talked and we planned and it was not particularly fancy and it was not particularly nuanced nor was it particularly sparkling. But it was simple and it was clear and it was ours, and from the day Nisa was born, I offered it up, that vision of the future, to my daughter, as though it were true, as though our dreams were prophecy.

  Long before spoken language was the most effective method of communication between us, I whispered to Nisa about the man I loved, my husband, her father, how now he was away from us but it would not always be so. I issued out return-of-the-father dates to Nisa, to myself, and called these dates hard dates, called these dates facts.

  I did not foresee that all the facts were lies.

  The stories in my head, the ones I had written about a great love that grew in the dark, the stories I was writing, just then, abundant with new life, about the homecoming, the love finally allowed into the light—these stories did not allow me the gift of foresight or even objective reasoning. They only allowed me hope and when hope is all you have to feed your great hunger, you can chew on it and chew on it, but hope alone cannot sustain a body or create a new day.

  It’s only now, eight years on, eight years a mother, eight years spiraling, and eight years removed from the story I always thought I would tell—the one with the neatly packaged happy ending and the one Rashid and I will never be able to write—that I can begin to tell the story as it really was. It can take a lifetime to face the truth or it can take eight years. But no matter how long, it’s still going to be there, the truth, even if at its frayed center is you and your baby. And even if the fraying, the fractures, the flaws, are as much your fault as they are anyone or anything else’s. You have to face it, the truth, quietly or loud, publicly or privately, or some measure in between. It’s not going anywhere.

  Because as much as I could love a good, long lie about my life and my choices, I know the back draft. We’ve all seen it in families, maybe even our own, where lies ruled the day. Secrets and lies give way to everything from broken relationships to cancer to alcoholism.

  So now the stories I tell are different than the ones I once did. I’ve learned to be much more careful in what I say and how I say it. All those whispers in her ear promising when her daddy would be home and what life would be—and then what life became—taught me the fallibility of my once-upon-a-time quixotic stories. I know better now the difference between those stories that save and those that just sit there, pretty perhaps, but ultimately useless. And I know this too: between those two kinds of stories is the immeasurable space that exists between romance and love, nostalgia and history. Fiction and nonfiction.

  Thankfully, Nisa and I also know the power of the real stories, the power of the truth—that particular honesty, that particular truth that mothers owe their daughters. Told correctly, those stories give the teller and listener both the power to reinvent what is in front of them and the inspiration and audacity to remix the elements until they’re something that can nourish, something that is real. That is the muscle, the sinew of real stories, hard as they may sometimes very well be.

  Every story of every life has its own beginning. That we are ever able to properly locate it is, for me, the enduring question. But as best as I can locate it, what I’ve shared with you is our beginning, Nisa’s and my own. And our beginning—the one that, yes, harks back to the meanest of places—is, in the face of it all, still brimming with a love and with a vision so grand we believe in it. More than anything else, we believe in us.

  We believe in our own two hands and our own two hearts. We believe in our minds and our spirits and our muscle and our breath. We believe in the strength that we can call on together, one mother, one daughter, standing and pushing and dreaming and creating with the determination and force of laborers, those wizards whose magical and hard, hard work can turn sand and stone into pyramids and prisons into particles.

  Chapter 2

  statistics don’t tell the story.

  the story tells the story.

  I have to make an admission, one that may put so much that comes later—my terrible sadness, I mean—into context. But it is also the one that also sounds completely insane, given the specifics of my life, my situation, my own lived experiences. Anyway though, here it is, the truth, the thing that I believed down to the core of me: I never imagined I would be a single mother.

  When I say never, I mean never. I mean not once during my pregnancy. Not once during all those times I was huge and pregnant and I wanted someone to make my tea and no one was there, or even when I worried about how people saw me at doctors’ offices, waddling and alone. I did not see myself as a single mom then or even when I was the only one waking up at 2:30 am, at 5:30, to feed my baby.

  Various reports tell us that there are a growing number of women who choose to single-handedly have a child, a coparent being either unavailable or else not of interest. If these reports are true, I certainly respect their choice. But it was not mine, nor was it the decision of scores of other sisters who wake up one day suddenly alone, their partners having been put out or else having slipped out, to be with another person, to be alone, or to be, for whatever reasons, just someplace else. For most of us, I suspect, single parenting is less a choice than a place we end up.

  A few months into Nisa’s life, when things came undone for me, for our family, I spent a great deal of time being jealous of this woman I knew. Despite the outward courtesy I extended to her, I don’t believe I harbored even one kind thought about her then. And when I could, I lobbed any
petty remark at her. I was really trifling.

  I would look at her and think how she seemed to have it all: a great job; what appeared to be extraordinary respect from her peers; a gorgeous husband and beautiful baby; a stunning house—a home she owned, unlike me, still a renter in a city fast closing out those of us unable to scrounge up the money to make a six-figure deposit on a seven-figure home, because that’s what homes can cost here in New York, even in some of the most dilapidated of neighborhoods.

  But the point is, I wanted her life to be my life. I thought that each time I saw her. I wanted what appeared to be the neatness of her life, the prettiness of it. I wanted the fancy borders and silk curtains of her life. I wanted the no prisons of it. I wanted anything, anything, anything that would move me away from being considered by anyone as strange or pathological, off-center or incapable as a parent.

  And then one day—or this is how it seemed from the outside looking in—one day it all ended for her, just like that. The husband was gone, the house was gone, the job was gone. What had been so beautiful before, if it really was beautiful before, now seemed especially cruel.

  She had known the top of the mountain, so to speak. She had known a place I had never even seen and so had no true idea of what I was missing. But to know it, to have touched it, and then to have it taken, snatched up and away! And it was a while before she said it, before she claimed her space, this new space. In the beginning, just after the sudden split, she saw in the husband she was now separated from, a coparent and said so.

  Specifically she said, “asha, I understand the details of your life, but mine are very different. I am not a single mother like you are.”

  And I realized that I used to believe things like this, even if not say them, to all the sisters I knew from the prisons. I started considering again all those mothers I would see each week waiting for a bus or van or on a line in the rain waiting to get into a correctional facility, child in hand. When I first became a mother, I believed arrogantly that those among the group who identified themselves as single parents claimed that term because their man wasn’t as good as mine. Their man must not have supported them the way Rashid supported me. I was a married woman and felt every part of being married. I was not a single mother. Not like them. That’s what I thought. I thought it just as that sister with the disappearing man thought it about me. Both of us were wrong.

  Inevitably, she would come to know what I would come to know. She would, of necessity, modify herself as I modified myself. It happened a few months on, when the responsibility of child rearing had firmly planted itself in the corner of her checkbook, her social life, her sex life and work life, in her corner but not her ex-husband’s corner. Then she would say something else. But at first, there was disbelief, rejection.

  I completely understood.

  I do not care that it is prevalent. Raising a child alone should not be asked of any one person. Even two parents is far too small a number, far fewer than what it really takes to nudge or nurture or sometimes shove a child up through to maturity. We do it, of course, on our own. And many do it exceedingly well. But that’s not the point.

  Parenting is all about replaying David and Goliath. It’s about having to go toe-to-toe against entities immeasurably larger than you are or ever will be: from the fast-food chains to the soft-porn music videos pumped out newer and nastier each passing minute, from Christmas and Halloween and all the other holidays that celebrate nothing but how much money one mom, one dad, one family, can spend.

  You fight the health-care system, the educational system, everything out there that would make a one-size-fits-all solution for your very individual child and his or her very individual needs. If you don’t have the wherewithal to gangsta up when the time comes, Goliath will win.

  He will win and then head off to fight his next David, and your loss, your baby’s loss, will be forgotten just that quick. I don’t know if it is by instinct, but I do know that at some point, most mothers get this, which is why it happens, why a woman might go into shock and denial when she wakes up one day and realizes, wow, this is all on me. I think that this is what happened to the woman I knew. This is what happened, at least in part, to me.

  Initially, though, I thought of Rashid as away, but not gone. Rashid was a coparent, albeit a parent forced to live far away, like a man whose work kept him in a distant city. But I never thought of my husband as an absentee father; the first year of Nisa’s life, Rashid sent me money every month for our daughter. He sent money until his funds were depleted. And while cash cannot replace real human presence, I felt supported. I thought I could hold out across the hard first years, the lonely ones. I thought that was all I would have to do.

  Rashid was going to come up for parole for the first time before Nisa turned three. That was a given. All of the appeals had been exhausted and we no longer crossed our fingers and toes, hoping for a movielike ending: Rashid, triumphing over the courts and sweeping into our lives at just the critical moment. We let that fantasy go. But if all went well, and neither of us had any reason to believe things would not go well, the less dramatic outcome would surely come to pass: Rashid would make parole and be home to help me plan and then to celebrate Nisa’s third year of life.

  As my body swelled, Rashid and I had swooned over sonogram photos in the prison visiting room, and weekly we discussed our future in what appeared to be rational rather than fantastical terms, which, if we are honest, is what we had done for all those years when we believed a court reversal would free Rashid and send him home to me—now me and Nisa—before he had served out every day of his twenty-year sentence.

  We were different now, things were different now. Now there was a baby in the mix. And now we had an obligation to face reality. Which is not to say that before Nisa we were completely lost in fantasy. But now there were diapers to change, clothes to be bought, doctors to be seen, child care to find. There was a real live and tiny person who could not speak for herself. We had to speak and think for her in ways we never did for ourselves, because there is nothing more real than a hungry or sleepy or wet child crying.

  Rashid and I spoke then in very confident and definite terms about his preparation for parole. Unlike the appeals process, which can be capricious—judges do not like to overturn the decisions of other judges—parole and who is eligible for it has clear guidelines that govern who can and should be considered for release. Are you remorseful? Have you done good time? Have you taken advantage of what the state deemed rehabilitative? Do you have a post-release plan and a post-release support system? Is there anything that indicates that you might be a future danger to society? If it was a test, Rashid would have achieved a perfect score.

  “There are a lot of people, asha,” Rashid told me one afternoon, “who have agreed to consider supporting my release. But I know they need time to weigh things over, get letters written. All that. That’s why I want to start early. So I have a whole real package together by the time I go before the parole board. By then I should be finished with my master’s too. So they’ve got to see I’m not the same kid I was then. I mean, you know?”

  “Yup. I know,” I agreed. But really, did I? Did he?

  He went on to emphasize how important his studies were, the master’s program he had just been accepted into at Sing Sing Correctional Facility. “You know brothers who do that program don’t come back?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean the rate of recidivism is so low among those brothers it doesn’t even rate. It’s like less than one percent.”

  I shook my head in disbelief and felt assured. How could I not? How could I, how could Rashid, ever have imagined that anything would stand in the way of his release? He’d done what the system had demanded he do. He’d become a person who let the time serve him, as we say, rather than simply just serving the time. This is why I knew he would be granted parole and why I did not think of myself as single. Rather, I thought of myself as I was: married, partnered, and claimed. I w
as not a woman who had been fucked one hot night and then discarded. I was claimed, me, asha. I was claimed and I was loved. So too was my baby. I felt this with everything that breathed inside of me, felt that with her breathing inside of me.

  Even when I went up to the prison, taking Nisa for the first time when she was fifteen days old, and the guards, with their angry, their suspicious eyes, looked over me and looked over my baby and told me the number of bottles and diapers I could bring in—three was the limit on both—I did not think of myself as alone. Or when I argued with the guards, explaining to them that my daughter sometimes drank more than three bottles of milk over the course of six hours, which was the length of the visit, and I knew I was the only person in the whole world who knew just how much milk my hungry little baby drank, what her sleep habits were, what she needed—because no one else was there with us, so no one else knew—but even then I thought of myself as somebody’s wife. I never thought of myself as a woman sort of swashbuckling it alone out there against monsters and general ne’er-do-wells, all to secure the life of her child.

  Nor did I think it later, when we had been processed into the prison and my hand had been stamped with the invisible ink that identifies me as a visitor rather than a prisoner, and I then had to fight with the guard about how he could not, absolutely not, stamp my daughter’s fifteen-day-old hand. Even then, I felt connected.

  And I felt it when my breasts filled with milk and Rashid, watching me shift and frown from discomfort, leaned over and whispered in my ear how he longed for the ability to make me comfortable. But I needed to nurse or pump, two realities of motherhood not available on that six-hour visit—it’s no surprise that you can’t just pull out your breast and let your baby latch on in a prison visiting room. I mean, people frown on that in liberal areas of New York and San Francisco, but as a new mother I wondered how hard would it have been to have a chair in the ladies’ room where we could sit with our babies and feed them? But these are issues you don’t raise in a prison when your goal is most of all to fly below the radar, thereby avoiding the wrath of guards. Really, you do in prisons what we do in so many other places. Face whatever the situation is, no matter how much you want to shift, no matter how uncomfortable you are.