This is my mother.
We call her Ama. Whenever my siblings and I have spoken of her in the third person we referred to her as Mama. But we never, ever called her Mom or Mommy.
She never wanted to be a mom or a mommy. But she has loved us in her own way, in the only way she knew how to show love. And we have loved her.
I still love her. But we stay apart. I have loved her from afar, a gulf of silence between us now for the past seven years.
I promise you there is no need to feel sad or sorry on our behalf. Life is life. We get what we get and we spin our own magic out of it if we so choose.
I am speaking of her today because it’s time. Because of what I know about us as black women. Because of how deeply I love my melanated sisters. Many of us have been lost to each other for too long. At times we have misunderstood each other, made assumptions, and failed to show each other that needed extra grace.
We melanated sisters are all brilliant and each of us is a unique style of gorgeous. Our physical presence is eye-catching.
Not everyone was raised by a mom or mommy. Many of the offsprings of the moms and mommies of the world were blessed to have had wise and loving mothers to guide them carefully into adulthood. Consider yourself fortunate if this was your experience. But those of us with mothers who felt too broken to do much guiding were also fortunate. It simply takes longer to notice how a woman’s traumatizing journey can become the gift of wisdom and glory. A hurt woman usually will have to take an alternate route towards her phenomenal destiny. But I promise you, we all get there, whether with the guiding love of a mommy or with the survivalist mentality of a broken woman. We are all goddesses.
The truth is also this: the patriarchy is the matrix and the matrix is the patriarchy. And no matter how we slice it, the misogyny of the patriarchy governs over all of us. And so, many of the public narratives around motherhood pretend to revere mothers as super-heroes, holding them to impossibly high standards. Meanwhile, the collective hostility towards women is layered into the fabric of our daily existence. And without always meaning to—although sometimes we mean it—women compete against one another with narratives about our close proximity to super-hero-motherdom.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t celebrate wonderful mothers. Yes, absolutely let’s keep doing that. And! For any of us who has suffered at the hands of a woman in so much pain she never found a way to properly show love to her offspring, let’s hear those stories too.
I say this because for most of my life I have existed in a world that made me feel ashamed that I didn’t come from a more nurturing, more self-sacrificing, and more caring matriarchal household. As the plentiful beautiful narratives lauding mothers ricocheted around me for decades, I remained embarrassedly silent. I would smile politely. I would gasp and cheer about all these amazing mothers because I thought fawning was called for. I felt that was the right thing to do. However, a piece of me died a little every single time I gushed over some mommy-ism that had nothing to do with me or my own story.
Just like the way racism made the majority of melanated people feel invisible in entertainment for so many decades, so too have I felt invisible due to my family story compared with the culture’s more elevated and celebrated narratives. Oh yes, sure, there have been stories in society about hard mothers, women who were irrationally mean or heartlessly abusive to their children. But I felt absolutely no connection to such narratives. Those stories always felt like only half of a story. Abusive mothers portrayed one-dimensionally as the perpetual “bad guy” or “crazy woman” in a story.
I’ve always had an extra soft spot in my heart for black women because we are truly the most tender and most big-hearted people on the planet. When we love, we love with the intensity of water rushing forward. When life is good with us, we pour love all over the lucky recipient of our affections. Black women are passionate like that. Even when they’re salty. They can try to dis me, try to come for me, or simply dislike me. My heart will still always belong to such fiercely emoting melanated women. Because the bare-bones fact is this: as black women we are intrinsically connected to each other by our history of pain.
I know a little about our pain. It has felt sometimes like there was just no escaping it for any of us, no matter what kind of life we were born into.
I used to say repeatedly to God: Fuck off. I don’t think you know what you’re doing because all this pain just makes no fucking sense. I was in my twenties. I had grown up going to church every Sunday. And I was over it. I had been sexually abused in our home my entire childhood. My mother seemed to not care at all about what was happening and the pain her children were in. I didn’t yet understand that she was stuck deep inside her own pain and simply didn’t know how to help any of her children.
Unfortunately, my mother became addicted to her pain. She had lived with pain for so long, she had no idea how to live her life without it. Laughing and smiling became something she did on rare occasions when she was bored or whenever she needed something from one of us. Other than that, my mother was of the belief that happy or joyful people were fools to be mocked, manipulated, or hustled.
But my mother is also the most beautiful, most talented, and most generous woman I’ve ever known. Some of her good and bad traits were passed on to me and her grandchildren. It has taken me years, but I’ve come to accept my mother for who she tried to be and who she actually became.
Life was cruel to her as a girl. Her innocence was ripped away from her (like so many black women before and after) before she could see life for its exquisite potential. My mother stayed angry at the unfairness of Life. A fire of rage burned in her heart. She tried to love. She really did. But she caused more hurt because it was the one emotion she knew best, the one emotion that gave her the sense of control she so lacked throughout her life.
This is my story, the story of a beautiful black woman who felt broken by Life, a woman who mothered me as best she could. I am proud of my story, proud to share it so that others with their own brand of motherlove origins might reconsider the importance of their own journey. We need to hear from each other about our stories.
We belong not only to our own respective families, but we belong also to The Human Family. Every one of our stories matter. Despite the fuckery of the patriarchy matrix—racism, misogyny, rape culture, and insatiable capitalistic greed—our lives can still be beautiful. Our pain doesn’t have to define who we are. Like so many melanated women before us, we can spin our painful experiences into wonderous and magical life seasons. We were each born to thrive and live fabulously no matter what kind of beginnings any of us have lived through thus far.
Keep shining your light into the world. We need it now more than ever.
I love you so much.
♥️ Mia
PICTURED ABOVE: left to right- my brother, my mother, and me in Jamaica, West Indies circa 1969-1970