by asha bandele
Watching all of our children expand in and explore the universe of each of their lives is how she gets me to talk, slowly at first but then with urgency. Anne comments simply but emphatically that she doesn’t know how I do it, the single-mother thing. “I know it’s common,” she says, “so people think it’s easy, but honestly, I don’t know how you do it.”
It is true, I tell her. It’s hard, despite how common it is, it’s impossibly hard. I have hated—I guess I still hate—having to be the sole emotional and financial provider for my daughter. The pressure is too great, I explain. The idea that if you slip, no one will be there to catch you and, worse, no one will be there to catch your baby—it’s a responsibility you can neither fully handle nor ever shirk.
So, yes, yes, I say finally to my sister, somewhere between potty training, playdates, speaking engagements, bylines, and balancing the household books, I lost pieces of myself I am only now trying to reclaim.
And no, I told her, no there wasn’t a way I could hold together my marriage.
The deportation order meant that for Rashid and me to have a future, not only would I have to reposition my entire life once again, but I would have to do the same for Nisa. What may have been fair for me, a choice I made for myself as a girl of twenty-three who fell in love, is not a choice I can make for my unsuspecting daughter: shock uprooting. But even before the deportation order, I could remember during the first months of Nisa’s life how caring for Rashid and Nisa at the same time was far more than I could bear.
I told her about the weekly treks through metal detectors and bars, the parts of your spirit that always seemed to get snagged by the razor-wire that’s just everywhere—I couldn’t keep doing it. I will never keep Nisa from knowing her father, but for me to be romantically entangled with him now, when I need him most and yet most feel his absence, is just too painful. But every second I see Nisa grow, change, fall down, stand up again, is a second I am reminded that the only other person who loves her as I do, is not there to be a witness.
When I became a mother, I thought Rashid’s absence would be all about needing someone to help carry the groceries into the house or cover the utilities bill. But the worst part of it all, the part that chokes in my throat, is that I have no one with whom to share the everyday beauty and wonder of my child. No one who will ever lose an hour of time, as I still regularly do, just watching her sleep.
We want the world to see and share in all that we are proud of, our beautiful homes, hairstyles, jewelry, cars. How could I live with the fact that my husband embodied the idea that there was both someone and no one to witness her with me, raise a hand and testify, speak in tongues about the most beautiful thing we could ever have, ever hope to have?
I couldn’t play at house or marriage anymore. I confessed to my sister that that’s what I said to Rashid finally. I think I said, “I need the real thing or I need to woman up and just do this on my own.”
But that breakup left me with a grief so profound, it has no name I can call. It felt akin to losing my husband, best friend, father, and brother on the very same day. Not losing them so much as sending them away, banishing them. They vanished by my own hand. And for that, I may never be able to forgive myself. But I had to choose my child. Again.
Anne asks if I think he will ever come home, come home to me and to Nisa, and would I be willing to try with him again? I hesitate, searching for the honest answer to the question that stalks behind me. “I can’t see it,” I tell her. “But I have a hard time seeing any relationship right now beyond the one with myself and the one with Nisa,” I say, and then quickly add, “She loves her dad very much, though. They’re on the phone all the time.” I explain as tears begin to form in my eyes. But before they have a chance to go ahead and push for real, my sister and I have dissolved into laughter, dissolved into our lives, as Warren discovers the barricade, bellows out from the bedroom in complete confusion, Hey, what’s going on?! And two small children stand triumphant and grinning alongside us, their mothers.
MY HEAD IS IN my sister’s lap and the toys have been put away. Nisa and Spencer are quiet in her room and Warren is still lying down in mine. Who knew we would get here, Anne and I, born of different wombs, different gene pools, yet sisters all the same, close as any two sisters ever were. We always said we wanted to be pregnant together. We were. We always said I should be there when Spencer was born. Her original due date—in January of 2000—was not one on which I could arrange travel. On my last visit before the baby was born, we fretted about this but made the best of it, and early in the morning on November 25, 1999, while I was cleaning and chopping greens for the holiday meal, my sister’s water broke. She was five weeks early. As things turned out, I was right there for Spencer’s birth, the first to feed him as he lay, tiny at 4.8 pounds, in NICU.
And when I look at him now, this rough, big old boy, and I remember those hours in the hospital and the fears that gripped all of us before Spencer was born and safe. I thought I would always remember everything, every moment of pregnancy, every moment with my child, with our children. I was so sure that each kick, each change in my body, would permanently implant itself in the most accessible part of my memory.
Childbirth cured me of that fallacy, but only briefly.
Once Nisa was born it seemed impossible that I would be unable to record and repeat, years and years on, well into my old age, each second of her life. She was developing brilliantly and everything she did touched my heart so! How could these memories, defining as they were, ever, ever fade?
Each phase was miraculous to me and I never wanted us to leave it. I wanted to watch her discover her hands and toes again and again. Or the day she pushed herself up onto all fours and began to rock back and forth, a two-day precursor to the afternoon she began to crawl. Her first solid food (a strawberry at my friend and agent Victoria’s dinner party—Nisa snatched it out of my plate and worked on it and worked on it, an hour it seemed, until she conquered that thing. She still loves strawberries). Her first step ever, when she was eight months old, in my office’s conference room.
But for every memory embedded, for every memory that is there, sitting in my hands for me to hold close, there are scads more I have forgotten. With each phase I thought I could not get past, that I wanted to live in with Nisa forever, the truth was that the next one that came proved just as enchanting.
Parenting is not one moment or ten moments. It’s not one year or five years. It’s the whole thing, all the moments and years added up together. It’s a lifetime. It’s a lifetime of perfection, a lifetime of error. It’s a lifetime of starting and stopping, getting it wrong, then getting it right, then getting it wrong again, but never once thinking that quitting is an option. It’s about doing what so many of us never learn to do in any other relationship—what I had not learned how to do—to keep coming back, keep showing up, keep trying harder. Keep doing it and doing it.
When I finally got that about my own parenting, when I finally stopped trapping myself in one or ten bad decisions, and realized that Nisa and I would be a lifetime of decisions, a relationship that was going to keep unfolding, I finally understood my own parents, who are doing this lifetime with me. They are the ones who kept coming back and back. They are the ones who chose the relationship and then stayed with it, no matter how hard. And it’s what I realize about the mother I never knew, the one who didn’t do a moment with me. She didn’t choose me. She didn’t choose the work of a relationship with me. I may never fully recover from that. I may never fully move on. But now, all these years in, when I look into my daughter’s face and see myself staring back and feel this great love, this great connective tissue, the DNA of it, but more the soul of it, the lifetime we are sharing, I know that when I look into my parents’ faces, my sister’s, the same connection is there.
We are not blood of the same blood, flesh of the same flesh. And necessarily Spencer and Nisa are not either. But even with three thousand miles between them, you will not meet two
cousins more close. You will not meet two people more family, through and through.
The instruction that I, me the woman without a bloodline, have received simply watching these two small children born as a century turned over along with nations and belief systems and much of what we thought we knew for sure, has been more healing for me than even the therapy.
I tell my sister this on that night when we are all together and she is asking me questions that only my little sister could ask me. I tell her about going through labor—I had natural childbirth outside a hospital setting. For me labor was less about pain than it was discomfort and it was the most incredible experience of my life. It was the one time that I was so focused on something that my mind never wandered. It stayed right there, on what I had to do: bring that baby forward safely.
Every other experience in my life, no matter how intense, always caused me to lose focus at some point. Great sex, great conversations, a great movie, working out, or writing—at some point my mind drifts. The twelve hours I spent in labor, and in particular the five I spent in hard labor, allowed nothing else into the space.
That’s sort of how I want to be as a mother: fully engaged. Fully present. Not every second, of course. Of course I want and need time for myself and I take it, at the gym, with a small circle of close friends. But when it is time for me to be with Nisa, I don’t want to do it looking the other way. I don’t want to do it texting on my BlackBerry or chatting about nothing on a cell phone.
I spent so much of my life flying to different cities, being with different people, and all the while only half-present, all the while just wanting to be back at home. If I add up all the years I didn’t pay attention to what I was experiencing, what I was living, I may have handed away a decade, maybe more. I don’t want to hand over another second.
So when it is just us, more often than not my phones are turned off now, and even when the day is a little gray, so we have to stay inside and read books or play cards and watch movies and snuggle, it’s fine. It’s fine and we can do this all day, playing cards and dancing to Santana, Destiny’s Child, and Hannah Montana. We can do it and feel it to be as much of an adventure as climbing mountains in distant lands. But for all those adventures, where we live is a place we can pull the sun toward our center and fashion color out of dark, possibility out of despair, and then shine, we do, a mother and daughter, together but also separately, the two us, a team, alchemists stirring a pot of secret ingredients and turning out gold.
And as I lurch toward the end of this crippling period of depression, it occurs to me that the one thing I will not rush through is motherhood. With all that has hurt and with all that has been hard, I would take every second one more time over, two more times over, if it meant I would do it with my Nisa again.
I review once more the last several years. This is when it washes over me, the sense of hope, the immensity of the great beauty that graced my life, my life as a mother. I think about how with each and every sunrise we begin the process of recreation, recasting, reordering, and reinventing. We begin our days on our knees, with our fingers in the dirt. We are planting, Nisa and I, ideas and possibilities. And trees. We are planting trees because in parts of Africa they say when something dies you plant a tree and something did die, a certain and particular vision of tomorrow, and so we plant a tree, our family tree and all that it means.
Because in between everything, the breakups, the letdowns, the entire days I suspected I might have fallen over the cliff into complete mental illness, in between those moments and the deadlines, Nisa and I find ways to travel, as we do to this day, to places far and wide, in New York City, in small towns and big cities across the country, in big cities and small towns outside of the country. Poetry readings, conferences, family gatherings, and sometimes even vacations, we find ways to make this world our own.
And wherever we are, we gaze with amazement at the differences each place has offered: the wide deserts just below the snowcapped mountains of Southern California; the forever redwoods in the north; the mighty mountains in the Berkshires; the ready dance, blues and hues of Chi-Town; the swaying palms and rainbow fish of Sanibel Island; the alligators and swamp-lands of South Carolina and the hot, wet, greener than green of Mississippi; the unimaginable width of the Texas sky; the see-through waters of the Caribbean Sea; the mighty beauty of the Sierra Madres, where mountaintops touch the clouds and where we stood beneath waterfalls; the great sperm whales moving through the waters that hold the Grenadines, with the grace of a creature far smaller.
And all that color and life everywhere, including in the parks and gardens of urban landscapes like our own—we lose ourselves in it, Nisa and I do. We lose ourselves there and in art galleries and museums, in Marsalis’s jazz and 50’s rhymes, in movies and on Broadway, at the ice-cream stand in the summertime and our sushi spot all year long. We make intricate plans for the trips we have not yet taken together to see the endless lights of Paris; the Eastern Cape of South Africa where Mandela played as a child and Biko struggled as a man; Santorini on her next birthday so we can discover whether the azalea plants are as impossibly pink as and taller than the ones on Kos; and Bora-Bora, so different from all we know, so far away, that we can only imagine it as a land of dragons, unicorns, mermaids, and stardust.
Nisa wants to climb the volcano I climbed in Costa Rica four months before I became pregnant with her. I promise her we will do that trip, and also one to Baja some January during the migration of the pregnant gray whales. If I have to tell the truth, the whole of it, then yes, yes, there were times of utter despair, but even on those days, even then, we embraced it, this life; we have bathed ourselves in it, and we have retained our memories in stories we whisper to each other when it’s late and dark but we want, still, to hang on.
When I have thought I was losing everything, every part of my mind, what has brought me back to truth is Nisa, the force of her life. That and learning to rediscover the beauty of living itself by watching my daughter seek out life everywhere and claim it. It is too much responsibility to put on a child, I know, and I swear I didn’t do it on purpose, but it is how it went down, me witnessing her, watching her, it carried me through moments when I thought I had lost all my endurance.
Most mornings I am awakened by her laughter and then the inevitable messy kisses planted on my cheek. Her eyes ablaze with mischief, wonder, excitement, and hope, Nisa’s query to me each sunrise is the same: “What’s our big adventure today, Mommy?”
I grin back at my beloved, my child, and my mind begins to work. But before I come up with a plan, this is what I think each time she asks: Yes, Beloved. Our big adventure, indeed. Ours.
acknowledgments
When you finally sit, assume the position, and start doing it, writing the life can sometimes seem actually more challenging than living the life. I can argue either point of view in equal measure, depending on the demands of the day. But whichever sentiment is true, what I know is that neither the living nor writing occurs in its best form without the love, wisdom, and camaraderie of the people who’ve chosen to stand beside us.
In my own life, particular acknowledgment must be made to the women who, in varying ways, taught me invaluable lessons about being a mother: first, my own mom, Dolores Bullard, and my sister, Anne Coleman. But also the women closest to me: Autumn Amberbridge, Kimberly Elise, Qamara Clark, Susan Taylor, Myrian Tooma, Robin Templeton, dream hampton, Monifa Bandele and her mom, Marie Murray.
There are many men who’ve shared their hearts with my daughter and me as well. Two who’ve especially done so will always have my love, Nisa’s love, and unending appreciation: George Caros and Stanley Crouch.
Nora (Stewart) Alexis has helped me care for my daughter so fully for so long and with so much love, I was able not only to write but to grow these last hard years. Thank you.
Audrey Edwards and Robin Stone read early versions of what finally became this book. I am deeply grateful for their editing, counsel, friendship, and lesso
ns in parenting.
Former colleagues at Essence magazine and current ones at the Drug Policy Alliance have continually circled my daughter with love the countless times I have needed to file a story or a report with her at my side. We cannot thank you enough.
I don’t know an author who can navigate any part of the journey without a fine editor. I am lucky enough to be, eleven years on, still working with the best among us, Gillian Blake. For both the push and the patience, I am forever grateful.
Finally, and for more than I will ever, ever be able to list, my great, great gratitude—and still love after all these years—is reserved for Zayd Rashid, who I hope will one day walk a Brooklyn neighborhood, hand in hand, with our daughter.
For him, for Nisa, for the now millions of children and parents who are divided by bars and barbed wire, your day—unrestricted and unrestrained—will come.
About the Author
asha bandele is the author of four books, including the award-winning memoir The Prisoner’s Wife. A Columbia University Revson Fellow (2004–2005) and former Essence magazine features editor, asha’s work has been published in numerous outlets, including the New York Times, Vibe, The Source, Family Circle, and Huffington Post. Aside from writing, asha also directs a grants program for the Drug Policy Alliance, the nation’s leading organization fighting the war on drugs. She holds degrees from the New School for Social Research and Bennington College and lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she is raising her daughter, Nisa.
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