Now she was disparaging not only me but choices my husband and I were making for our children, not only my life but the life we were trying to create for them. We yelled at one another. There was no right or wrong or in between. At stake for both of us was whether or not we had been, or were now, loving our kids. Loving them the right way. After months of this fighting back and forth, I need a break, I told her. I wanted not to fight awhile and that had become all we ever did.
At that point my story changed again. I chose then to say that if I were my mother up in Boston that time she came to get me when I was still an adolescent, hardly functional Depressed Person, I would have forced me to tell her what was wrong with me. I would have talked to her, I said. I would have mothered better, I thought then and said out loud to other people, as if better were so clean and clear as imagining what she must have felt like then.
* * *
I am very good at stories. Like my mother, who is a lawyer, a litigator. I am also, like my mother, good at indignation. I’m good at feeling fury toward a thing or person by which or whom I feel I have been wronged. There is a sort of thrill that comes from it just below the surface of my anger or my sadness. It feels athletic, engaging. I gesture broadly and stand up tall.
When I was sixteen, my car got towed and my mother drove me, yelling the whole time about how disgusting I was, how awful, what a worthless piece of shit, to the tow lot to retrieve my car.
She told me in this yelling—which she did then often, which I had come, over months, to refer to as my fuck-up speech—they would not waste their hard-earned money on sending me to college. (This was not true, even she knew; they would never allow themselves to have a child not in college. This was just a thing she said during this talk she gave.) She told me she felt helpless, tired, how could I, why did I. I’d gained weight, I’d stopped showing up to school or track practice. I was drinking all the time and getting caught.
She drove with her red car’s top down as she yelled at me. When we got to the tow yard, there were piles of cars stacked in the lot. The man told my mom she owed him six hundred dollars. She looked at me. I was in cotton pajama pants and a sweatshirt. My eyes were swollen from crying just minutes before. My face was swollen from the weight I’d gained. None of my clothes fit and this was what I wore as often as I could. No matter it was hot out. No matter that my skin pricked all over with little sweat bubbles that then settled back into my pores and gave off a smell that often made me sick.
My mother lit into this man, who was, as far as I could tell, just an employee of this car lot. I will sue you, she said. She explained to him the injustice of this thing he’d done, towing my car, a sixteen-year-old, a child, she said, who couldn’t, didn’t need to know, what she had done. To exploit us, she said, of six hundred dollars. She gestured toward me; to exploit this child, she said. She hung on the last word for emphasis. I cowered, partially out of fear, but also because I knew this was my role. She threatened to call the papers. She would file a civil suit against the lot for all the cars that he had piled up outside. She cited statutes. It’s robbery, holding people’s possessions hostage for these sums, she said.
The man, who was large, half-asleep when we entered, with stubble and a flash of belly sticking out from the bottom of his shirt, let her talk, then said we could take the car and to please just go now. When she handed me the keys, I watched her face change shape as she remembered we were only on the same team for as long as it took to get what we wanted.
* * *
This is supposed to be an essay about what I can’t tell my mother, what I haven’t told her. When I was asked to do this, I had that initial thrill of showing all the ways she makes me mad. But that didn’t feel new or right or like it held inside most of what I feel any longer when I think of her. I have told her most of what I think. I have hurt her. She has hurt me. None of this feels secret.
The other day, I was teaching a gender studies class—nine teenage girls all anxious to say the right thing, their desks in a circle—and my students and I were talking about mothers. We were talking about the impossible positions they are placed in, the ways in which they are our models; we were talking about what little space moms have to also need and also want. My students didn’t notice but I started crying. I teared up, and when the class was over, I went into a bathroom stall and sat until I stopped. I hadn’t spoken to my mother recently. We don’t speak often. I couldn’t locate the specific feeling I’d had the last time we talked. I thought for a few hours after I cried in the bathroom that I would call her and I would tell her I loved her. But I did not trust calling her. I was afraid that if I called her, she would talk and it would be too hard for me to love her after that.
What I cannot tell my mother is whatever I would have told her on that phone call, on all the phone calls in which I take out my phone and scroll to her name, stare at it, and then put the phone away. 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.
* * *
Our younger daughter nursed much longer than I expected, until she was nearly two. I loved the ease of it, giving to her. She’d cry, I’d offer her a boob. She’d settle in, and all was good again. When I stopped nursing, I was afraid all of a sudden. All at once, there was no clear, clean way to give to her, no certain way to ensure that she’d calm down. 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.
I once had a therapist tell me I was just born to the wrong family. The “just” is hers, not mine. 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 hurt and loved one another poorly and intensely my whole life. As I get older, as I mother longer, this feels both just as fresh and white-hot hard as it did when I was fourteen. It also feels like almost every other life.
* * *
The other day, I let my kids watch TV while I cleaned the bathroom. I hardly ever do this. My mother let me watch loads of TV when I was little. After she had spent a full week working, providing for us in ways I have so far failed to provide for my kids, she often spent the weekend cleaning for us in ways I often fail to make our home clean for our kids. Back then I resented a thousand things about this for a thousand reasons, not least of what it said about what I would have to do when I was grown up, not least because I thought there might be other ways to love and to be loved.
* * *
But I did this same thing a couple of weeks ago. I was tired. They need more often than they don’t need. They’re at the age when they can sit in front of the TV for hours. I cleaned the bathroom because I wasn’t up for all the complicated ways I would have to love them and entertain them if we turned off the TV and spent the day together. I hardly ever clean the bathroom and it was gross. Getting the mold out of the grout, scrubbing the soap scum off the bottom of the tub, my hands covered in bleach, my knees sore; it felt like giving to them in a way that was both familiar and substantial; it felt like what they needed, how I wanted to be a mother; it also felt like my mom.
* * *
Like so many days before this, I almost called my mother this day. In the mirror, too-thin arms and lots of freckles on the shoulders, a broad nose, short hair, sweat across my brow, I looked so much like her; I felt so much like her and I wanted to tell her how. But 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 is not behind and between us; she
almost always feels attacked.
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.
While These Things / Feel American to Me
By Kiese Laymon
I’m a nine-year-old day camper at one of Jackson State University’s summer programs. Renata, one of your students, is a twenty-one-year-old camp counselor. She is the only person I know at the camp. The first day of camp, all the campers get physicals. Next to my weight on the form, the camp doctor writes in scattered cursive the word “obis.” I ask some older twins if their physicals say “obis” too.
“That means obese, nigga,” one of them says. “It means you way too fat for your age.”
I look up “obese” when I get home. My babysitter comes over. When she leaves, I feel less obese.
The second day of camp, I tell the twin who said I was obese that I’ve seen Renata, the camp counselor everyone says is finer than Thelma Evans, naked. “You think she look good now?” I remember saying. “She look way better without no shirt on.”
When one of the twins tells me that there’s no way Renata would ever be naked around an “obese lil nigga” like me, I describe a birthmark in the middle of Renata’s chest. The twins suck their teeth but eventually tell some older boys who tell some older boys who tell some older boys. Before the end of the week, a large portion of the camp is calling Renata a “skeezer” behind her back.
And to her face.
Renata and I do not talk at camp. She goes out of her way to avoid me. I go out of my way to be avoided. But two nights of that week, like two nights a week during the previous few months, Renata comes to our house. Renata is technically my babysitter. She adores you. When Renata comes over, we watch wrestling. We read books. We play Atari. We drink Tang. Renata does rough things to my body. Those rough things make me feel chosen, loved. Renata acts like these rough things make her feel like she feels chosen, loved too. One day, I will see and hear Renata doing rougher things with her real boyfriend. I will hear Renata tell him to stop. The things he does to her will not sound like they make Renata feel chosen or loved. I will not care about what he is doing to Renata. I will care that Renata does not want to choose me anymore.
Over thirty years later, 160 miles from where Renata and I met, I remember the taste, temperature, and texture of the Tang I drank right before Renata put her right breast in my mouth the first time. I remember the pressure she used to close my nostrils. I remember what her left palm did to my penis. I remember the way I flexed and clenched my body tightly when she touched my skin, not because I was scared, but because I wanted Renata to think my fat black soft body was harder than it really was.
I don’t think I spread that rumor because of anything Renata did to my body. I spread that rumor because she was an older black girl, and I knew that spreading rumors about black girls, no matter their ages, was how black boys, no matter our ages, told each other I love you.
Over thirty years later, on days when my body and mind are most raggedy, I want to congratulate myself for not being Kavanaugh, Trump, or Cosby. I want to source my harmful behavior and annihilated relationships solely to my childhood experiences of sexual violence, or solely to economic lack, or solely to the ways of white folk, or solely to getting beaten, or solely to Mississippi needing black children to be grateful for the ways we were terrorized. My experience in this nation, in my state, in my city, in all sorts of American rooms, is far too funky, too smudged, too reliant on—and influenced by—concentric circles of violence to say that I harmed anyone in this country simply because of a singular experience of harm. I also can’t say anyone in this country harmed me because of a singular experience of childhood harm.
None of us living in this nation are that lucky.
I’ve been thinking a lot this year about the importance of the word “while” when thinking about cause and effect in America. “While” is a word you use a lot. Black feminists and Black Political Scientists have been trying to teach us to embrace “while” for decades. While Renata was harming me in a way I could not harm her, I was harming her in a way she could not harm me. Meanwhile, sexual violence in our communities was happening while domestic violence was happening, while economic inequality was happening, while mass evictions and mass incarceration were happening, while states were failing and abusing teachers, while teachers were failing and abusing students, while abused students were abusing themselves and their younger siblings.
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.
After the ninth draft of Heavy, with some urging, I understood that it is beyond maniacal to harm someone who loved me privately, and then publicly atone for that harm I’ve done to that person in a publication for cheap male-feminist points and corporate money. While I have been harmed and abused as a kid, I have never had to experience watching someone publicly narratively confess to abusing me because they too were abused for money.
This might change tomorrow, but today the most important question in my world is: What do I really want to lie about? Am I willing to not simply answer that question, but reckon with the interpersonal and structural consequences of the question and our lies? Why do I really want to lie? Why did we lie to each other so much, for so long? And how will I react when called on those lies? I still desperately want to lie about the harm and abuse I’ve inflicted on people who loved me. I still desperately want to believe that I don’t initiate romantic relationships because I’ve always been a decent guy, not because I’ve always been a fat black boy terrified of rejection, terrified of not being chosen. I still want to believe that breathtaking literary work necessitates American men sentimentally naming the hurt we’ve done, sourcing that hurt to one trauma, and getting congratulated, often by women, for “our honesty” at reckoning with that trauma while neglecting the suffering we cause. 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.
But, I still want to lie.
I finished revising the memoir I started writing to you on my grandmama’s porch at twelve years old, not because I wanted to chronicle the journey of becoming, but because I couldn’t lie anymore about what I’d become. I’d become a cowardly, lonely, unhealthy, emotionally abusive, addicted, successful black writer. In writing the book, I discovered that I’d never been honest with anyone on earth. I discovered that while structural abuses dictate much of our lives, the folks I’ve been most harmful to in this country are people I thought I loved. I discovered that there are lovers in this country who honestly, rigorously, and generously love while being targeted, harmed, and manipulated by people, by institutions, by policy.
There are teachers who do all they can to understand the style and context of their students’ lives while ethically educating them without harming them. There are members of boards of trustees and regents who risk their jobs by placing the health of vulnerable people ahead of an institution’s bottom line. There are parents who make every decision in life with a concern about how it impacts not just their child, but all vulnerable children on earth while not having enough money to pay for health care, bus passes, and food for themselves.
But the truth is, in America, there are few of these folks.
Or maybe we choose to believe we are these kind of Americans far too often. I know I do. And if, as I believe, this choice is really the bedrock of American terror, then reckoning with this choice must be at the root of any semblance of liberation in this country. I know, after finishing this project, 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 wrote Heavy to you because I wanted us to get better at love.
After reading Heavy, you wrote back to me:
In my remembrance, I hear our laughter, our arguments, my incessant worry about your safety, your good grades through fifth grade; all your basketball games in rural outposts, your choices in girlfriends, the New Orleans and Memphis trips, the underdogs, and yes, the fear that I’d lose you too early, either because you would turn your back on me or be shot from the sky. 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.
When Renata ran out of my house nearly naked with her boyfriend over thirty years ago, my heart broke. I felt like I’d lost the love of the second grown woman who chose me. I now know that I did not love Renata. I loved how Renata made me feel. I’m not sure I loved you. I know I loved how you sometimes made me feel. Even if Renata was choosing to harm me, at least she wanted to touch me. For reasons completely American, that rough touch felt like love to me because she could have been roughly touching any other black child in our neighborhood. For reasons completely American, I did not think about the abuse Renata was experiencing, not just from her boyfriend or her parents or her teachers, but from all boys in our world and me. Now that I have thought about all of it, and shared it with you, how will we allow all of it, all the whiles, any of the whiles, to 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?
What My Mother and I Don't Talk About Page 11