It's All Love

by Marita Golden

  Motherhood is many things: a job, certainly, and a tough one, perhaps the toughest one you'll ever love. Motherhood is a challenge, an expansion, and a responsibility. It is a blessing, a burden, and most certainly a gift, but it is not a profession. There is no education required, no advanced degrees, no training or testing or licensing. There are no standards one must meet, no peer review, only minor regulation, which varies across culture and society. There's no way to tell, really, how good or bad of a job one is doing in the role, not for a long, long time anyway and maybe not even then—though Lord knows, we hate to acknowledge that possibility. Kids turned out well? Maybe it was you or maybe you just got lucky. Kids turned out like crap? Maybe the same.

  It may seem churlish to make so much of a piece of paper slapped on the back of someone's car. In all likelihood the woman behind the wheel was a stay-at-home mother seeking acknowledgment and respect for her choice in a society that does not always grant as much. We're schizophrenic in this way: We propagate a Cult of the Child, arranging our lives around the little ones, abandoning all adult sense and interaction, denigrating any mother who dares skip out on a soccer game now and then, while at the same time turning our noses just slightly upward at the women who choose to make house and home the center of their lives. No wonder that woman wants to equate her day job with medicine or architecture or law.

  Still, it feels important to question this idea of motherhood as a state of being and as somehow more noble than anything else. Because this idea still permeates our culture, though we pretend otherwise. And those who don't experience motherhood in this way can end up feeling strange, broken, wrecked.

  SOME DAYS my daughter comes up to where I'm standing and bumps me like a colt.

  I know what this means: She wants to be hugged. She wants to feel, without having to ask, her mother's arms around her for a few minutes, wants to be embraced and made to feel safe. Which I do, and as I do, it occurs to me that my mother rarely hugged us when we were young. There were too many of us, and she was too busy trying to feed and clothe and shelter the lot, trying to keep us warm in the wintertime and get us off to a decent school and protect us from predators and teach us about God and not lose her mind in the interim.

  My mother too was of that generation that did not believe in petting up a child, in stroking her like a horse about to balk. That generation did not believe in playing or petting or praising children, believed more in rearing than in raising kids.

  So we grew up without much touching, and I never thought about it much until my own first child was on the way. Early in the pregnancy I decided I would force myself to breast-feed—-force being the operative word. Breast-feeding was largely foreign to me, despite the La Leche exuberance of my sisters-in-law. As far as I knew, my mother had not breast-fed us, my oldest sister had not breast-fed her children, and neither had any other woman in my family. When I was younger and watching over baby siblings and cousins and other such, it was bottle, bottle, bottle all the way. We never really talked about it, but somehow I absorbed the notion that breast-feeding was no longer necessary and slightly disgusting. Nasty, almost, in the Black southern sense of that versatile word.

  Watching women breast-feed on the video in my child-birthing class made me queasy. Watching women do it in public made my stomach curl. When my turn came, I knew enough about the health benefits of breast-feeding to the baby involved to bite the bullet, but I did not expect to like it much. I would endure for the sake of my child and her future IQ.

  So I was surprised to discover—once the first few hard and painful weeks were over—how much I liked this oldest way possible of feeding my child. All the stuff women gush about was true: the bonding warmth of it, the closeness, the feeling of accomplishment (and, yes, power) that comes from being able to nourish a human being with only one's body, oneself. I loved it all.

  Still, by nine months, when my daughter started to lose interest and the hormone high began to wane, I was ready to let it go. I was ready to take my body back, to not be touched so much.

  Things only intensified when my son came along. Suddenly there were two little people, both voraciously clamoring to be held, to be hugged, to be changed and diapered and picked-up and put-down and brushed-off and bathed and washed. Some days, walking to the park or to the car or to the store, my daughter, three years old and sensing displacement by the baby, would grasp automatically for my hand, and I would have to force myself to let her take it. If it was a question of safety, of crossing the street or navigating a busy parking lot or a cavernous store, that was one thing—I grabbed those little fingers and I held on tight and that was simply that.

  But sometimes, just walking along the smooth and open path at the park, she would want to hold hands and I'd let her, but only for a minute. I'd do that squeeze-and-let-go routine that people do. Then she grabs again, talking all the while, on autopilot, and I let her hold a little longer this time. I find something to distract her and let go. She grabs again. The pattern repeats.

  I know my mother loved us. I know my mother loved us because she sacrificed every hope and dream she ever held for herself that we might live and even prosper. I know this now, and it breaks my heart with sadness and gratitude.

  Still, I cannot say—cannot honestly say—that I ever felt loved when I was little. Holding my daughter in my arms, I wonder: Is it the being loved or the feeling loved that matters most?

  So, let's start again.

  Yesterday, I got pissed at my daughter. I got pissed and I acted like a child myself. I was having a bad day for lots of nonsense reasons, unimportant, and then I was supposed to just shift all that to the side and focus on the needs of my children, and I couldn't do it. Not seamlessly. Or maybe I didn't want to do it, not at that moment, not on call, which is what motherhood demands. In that moment, I didn't want to be the mother, didn't want to have to walk with my daughter through the slings and arrows of adolescent girlhood (again!), didn't want to have to care about her emotional needs.

  We drove home in silence, and she ran up to her room. I went into the kitchen, poured myself a cup of orange juice, drank it down for fortification.

  Had I been my mother, that would have been the end of it. If her generation did not believe in petting children, it also did not much believe in sitting down to discuss things, especially emotional moments. Giving the children a good talking-to—absolutely. But listening to what they had to say or how they were feeling? Considering it? Maybe even apologizing in the end?

  Right.

  Someone said to me once, “You're a good mother,” and I just laughed because I know good and damn well that I am not. A good mother is so far out of my reach it's not even amusing. A good mother is like Jupiter.

  What I hope to be is a good enough mother. Good enough to keep them away from Burger King and to teach them why, though I let them eat the super-sugary yogurt most of the time. Good enough to stay in a city I dislike because it is better for them, though I do not always keep my disenchantment to myself. I gripe. What I hope to be is just a better mother than my mother, not because my mother was a terrible mother—she was not. But because that's what we're supposed to do, isn't it? Make things better for our children. Do better for them. Every generation improves. We usually take this to mean materially, but that's not even important, not really, the material stuff. Not by comparison.

  My mother was not loved as a child. Or maybe she was loved—everybody gets some love—just not nearly enough; not enough and not from the people from whom she wanted it most. I know this now though I didn't growing up myself. My mother was left behind by her own mother, and so later, when it came time for her to do the mothering herself, she made sure she stayed. She refused to abandon us, though staying would, in the end, cost her a great deal.

  Still, she stayed, and that was huge, though we didn't understand it then. She did not leave—not when things got bad, when the marriage to my father fell apart and she lost her job and poverty settled in. Not when the days and
weeks and years became mostly about clawing and scraping to survive with five hungry children. She stayed. She stayed, and that was huge.

  But lovelessness always leaves its mark. In the neighborhood of our lives lovelessness is the first broken window, the first strip of graffiti, the first shattered glass. The worse the neighborhood looks, the more people stay away; the more people stay away, the worse the neighborhood becomes. Love-lessness leaves a mark that makes it harder to get love and to receive it, which leaves a mark, which makes it harder, and round and round. The people who most need love, the ones with the biggest holes in their hearts from childhood wounds, are the ones least likely to get it, because those same wounds create in them attributes and personalities that frighten or drive love away. How fair is that? But this is life, isn't it? Life don't care from fair. The song says, “Them that's got shall get. Them that's not shall lose.”

  I was thinking: What a different person my mother would have been had just one person in her life truly loved her at some critical moment, some formative time. And what different people my sisters and brother and I would have been, because our mother would have been different in raising us. And what a different mother my children would have—someone who did not get so angry sometimes, so resentful, so less of this and more of that and maybe they too would be different and their kids and so on and so on. Lovelessness rolls downhill, gathering momentum, breaking roots and splintering branches, wiping out everything in its path.

  So my daughter pissed me off, but after I came home and regrouped, I took a breath and went upstairs to her room.

  I had to make myself do it. In truth, I wasn't feeling loved, not at that moment, just acting it.

  I went up to my daughter's room and knocked on her door and went inside and sat down on the bed next to her and put my arm around her shoulders and apologized. Said I was sorry I had yelled. Explained that I was tired and frustrated and that she needed to understand that. Said I understood she was just disappointed. She was worried about how her friends would react, and friends, at that age, are everything, every single frickin’ thing. Made some suggestions for handling the situation. Hugged her again and made her smile. Got up and left the room.

  Lovelessness rolls downhill, gathering momentum, breaking roots and splintering branches, wiping out everything in its path, but one person can stop it. One person can raise his foot and stop the rolling. One person can bend and catch it in her heart.

  Missing You

  PEARL CLEAGE

  FEBRUARY is A MONTH that looms large in my life. Not because it is the month when the country we're marooned in celebrates the birth of two White male presidents we weren't allowed to vote for since we hadn't been declared people yet. And not because it is the month when we demand that attention be paid to our history (as if we could even begin to understand our history in 28 days out of 365!).

  Not even because the most cursory look at the events that have happened in February might lead us to check the position of the stars, study the configurations of the planets, and believe in black magic, good and bad, although I am the first to admit that February has something special about it.

  Consider the possibilities of a month in which we celebrate the births of Frederick Douglass, Eubie Blake, Leontyne Price, Langston Hughes, and Marian Anderson and the founding of Morehouse College. What can we surmise about a month where we witnessed the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965 and Nelson Mandela's release from prison after twenty-seven years in 1990? What kind of energy is contained in a month that saw the first organized emigration of African-Americans back to Africa from New York to Sierra Leone in 1820 and the beginning of the Sit-in Movement in Greensboro, North Carolina, in I960?

  But those aren't the reasons this month means a lot to me. I like February because it's the month my mother was born: February 12, 1922. It was always easy to remember her birthday because she shared it with Abraham Lincoln and we got a day off from school. She always said the holiday was really a celebration of her birthday, not his, and while we knew she was kidding, we really weren't. We figured she deserved it at least as much as he did.

  The odd thing is that I can't remember the date she died. I used to feel guilty when people would ask me and I'd have to mumble something inconclusive. I could see how surprised they were that I clearly didn't remember such a painfully important date. But the date refuses to stay in my mind, no matter how many times I call my sister or check my journals.

  After a while I realized that my inability to remember it was not the result of carelessness or callousness. I realized that how and when she died was not the most important thing to me. The thing that matters to me was that she lived. That's what I want to remember, not the false hope of medical miracles and the feigned concern of distracted specialists.

  What I want to remember are all the things that were the essence of her. The things that shaped my own ideas of what a Black woman could and should be, to herself and to her family and to her people. The things that made me love her. The things that make me miss her more, not less, as the years go. The things that still make me wake up wanting to tell her something, show her something, ask for her advice or her affection.

  So February is mostly a personal celebration for me, although I always set aside enough time to say a prayer for Malcolm and thank the Goddess for Leontyne Price and W.E.B. DuBois. Mostly what I try to do is spend enough time by myself to conjure up her spirit to sustain me during these difficult days.

  Mostly what I try to do is remember brushing and braiding her hair, or her brushing and braiding mine.

  Mostly what I try to do is recall the warm ripeness of those impossibly red tomatoes she used to grow in her garden every summer.

  Mostly what I try to do is play my Madame Butterfly records because she always liked to play Puccini, even when everybody else in our neighborhood (including me!) was worshipping Motown.

  Mostly what I try to do is remember how mad she was at me the one time I lied to her and how seriously I took the promise I made to myself never to do it again.

  Mostly what I try to remember is her pleasure in sitting around the kitchen talking and eating fried fish she'd caught and frozen the summer before.

  Mostly I remember her delight in her grandchildren and the sound of her laughter that day we made a lopsided snow-woman by the edge of the lake and tied her apron on it.

  Mostly I try to remember the cold floor under my feet that wonderful late-night moment when she woke me to come look at the deer nibbling delicately through the moonlit snow of the frozen front yard grass.

  Because in the face of my memories, the date she died loses some of its power, even if it doesn't totally surrender. And I'm old enough now to understand that it's important to take what comfort you can in the fact of the Big Questions about life and love and what happens after.

  So I'll settle for remembering her laughter and sending her a happy birthday wish from her wild child, still struggling down here. And missing you …

  From

  Finding Martha's Vineyard

  JILL NELSON

  WHO WANTS to run me over to Tony's?” my mother asks most nights from the time she arrives on the Vineyard in May until she leaves in September.

  Tony's is Tony's Market on Dukes County Avenue, right down the street from the baseball field and in back of Circuit Avenue. Founded in 1877 and family owned, Tony's is Martha's Vineyard's equivalent of a New York bodega, the small, cramped store that thrives in cities and towns across the country. Wherever they are situated, these stores open early, close late, and sell a little bit of everything. They are where you go for a cup of coffee and doughnut at the crack of dawn, diapers, aspirin, or ice cream at night, and everything else in between. Here you can get just about everything you want: hairpins, butter, syrup, a sandwich, eggs, wine and beer, film or a disposable camera, produce, newspapers local and national, batteries of all sizes, condoms, toothpaste.

  What Tony's Market and, in my experience, most other stores like it also
have are the machines necessary to play the state lottery and rolls of one-, two-, and five-dollar scratch tickets. It is these that my mother is interested in.

  “Leil wants to go to Tony's. Can you drive her?”

  “I'll take her, but I'm running a bath. Can you watch my water?”

  ‘Whoever's going, can you bring me some garlic for the fish?”

  “We're out of juice too.”

  “If they have any double-A batteries, would you get me some?”

  “And some coffee ice cream,” someone calls out.

  The round robin of voices, requests, and desires that a trip to Tony's evokes on a summer evening at the Vineyard ebbs and flows. My mother's request passes from person to person, room to room, an unannounced game of intergenerational telephone in which the initial request is embroidered and changed as it moves among those of us living in my mother's house.

  As likely as not she sits on the porch in a bathing suit or shorts, a pair of randomly selected enormous shades covering a third of her face, filling out her number slips. Her wallet lies on the table beside her, or almost obscured by a pile of slips from losing and winning numbers previously played. Rising above the debris of bad combinations and successful hunches, there is usually a glass of champagne or Jack Daniel's and water.

  After fifty years, my mother is familiar with the chaos of that time in the evening when everyone returns home at once after long days spent at the beach. One grandchild whose bathing suit is not quite dry is tired and shivering; another, hungry and tired, is slightly fussy. Low tubs of water are run for the children as adults rush to the showers, vying to be able to rinse the salt from hair and skin before the bathtub overflows or the child left with a relative erupts in a fit of cranky exhaustion.