Who Is My Mother's Legacy?
history.
My mother’s womb carried me the spring of ’95. Her amniotic fluids caressing my flesh – the pink secret dot of break-ups bound up by my parents’ bodies closing distance. She, my mother, held me and knew me, but not what was to come. She couldn’t. She had no history.
...
My mother’s mother also knows the weight of seasonal secrets. At 21 she had sex. Unprotected, out of wedlock sex. And excommunicated herself from ‘good girls’ everywhere in 1967. Her own mother sent her across state lines, shame her only companion. Words held in by the matriarchal tongue silencing sins. My grandmother carried my mother’s own pink flesh nine months long. Then pushed my mother’s unnamed body beyond the boundary of her own. Swift nurses in good girl virgin …show more content…
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Grown into her own form, my mother decided mysteries weren’t enough. At 28 she met me face to face for the first time. “I cried when I looked into your eyes, yours was the first face that had ever looked like me.” Three babies after that left her with reflections all around, but by 39 she was wise enough to know mothering does not fill the void of one’s own. fantasy. The mothers of me are not the only ones to whom I attribute birth. Men have taken their turns at playing daddy, playing father, always playing – they think themselves playful. Their wisdom words writhe atop my skin:
“You’re a frat boy’s dream, so many daddy issues.” And.
“You a good girl, I can tell.” Or.
“But how bad you really, what you gon’ let me do to you tonight?”
And then slip in the words of a woman not hers to give: “You’re a black man’s dream.”
Come …show more content…
It was the first composition written beneath mystery’s hand. My grandmother, my nana. It was springtime, the season of my conception. Now also the conception of a future tearing back inaccurate perceptions, retrieving a mother’s memories, my mother’s history. We met that summer, my 11 years guiding my newly acquainted great aunt, Nana’s sister, through our small Midwestern neighborhood grid. She complimented the honey in my hair. I wondered at her expansive freedom, single, without children, always traveling. But what I really wondered at was my nana’s wearing my own mother’s face. The dark eyes and hair, the narrowed nose, structure of bones. We, her reflections. It was then that my mother released herself as unseen and I witnessed her affirmed and becoming.
…
I had asked a boy about sexuality’s double standards. A woman deemed the very pinnacle of shame if she deviates from expectation, commands her own power and pleasure. I asked what he would think of a girl who slept around, even slept with multiple men in one night. “That’s a dirty hoe. Disrespecting herself. I wouldn’t fuck with that.” Except. I asked him if he would sleep with her. “Yeah.” Would you think of her differently? “Yeah.” I also asked if it was okay for him to hook up with multiple women at one time and whether that made him dirty, disrespectful. “Nah, there’s nothin’ wrong gettin’ bitches.”
My mother’s womb carried me the spring of ’95. Her amniotic fluids caressing my flesh – the pink secret dot of break-ups bound up by my parents’ bodies closing distance. She, my mother, held me and knew me, but not what was to come. She couldn’t. She had no history.
...
My mother’s mother also knows the weight of seasonal secrets. At 21 she had sex. Unprotected, out of wedlock sex. And excommunicated herself from ‘good girls’ everywhere in 1967. Her own mother sent her across state lines, shame her only companion. Words held in by the matriarchal tongue silencing sins. My grandmother carried my mother’s own pink flesh nine months long. Then pushed my mother’s unnamed body beyond the boundary of her own. Swift nurses in good girl virgin …show more content…
…
Grown into her own form, my mother decided mysteries weren’t enough. At 28 she met me face to face for the first time. “I cried when I looked into your eyes, yours was the first face that had ever looked like me.” Three babies after that left her with reflections all around, but by 39 she was wise enough to know mothering does not fill the void of one’s own. fantasy. The mothers of me are not the only ones to whom I attribute birth. Men have taken their turns at playing daddy, playing father, always playing – they think themselves playful. Their wisdom words writhe atop my skin:
“You’re a frat boy’s dream, so many daddy issues.” And.
“You a good girl, I can tell.” Or.
“But how bad you really, what you gon’ let me do to you tonight?”
And then slip in the words of a woman not hers to give: “You’re a black man’s dream.”
Come …show more content…
It was the first composition written beneath mystery’s hand. My grandmother, my nana. It was springtime, the season of my conception. Now also the conception of a future tearing back inaccurate perceptions, retrieving a mother’s memories, my mother’s history. We met that summer, my 11 years guiding my newly acquainted great aunt, Nana’s sister, through our small Midwestern neighborhood grid. She complimented the honey in my hair. I wondered at her expansive freedom, single, without children, always traveling. But what I really wondered at was my nana’s wearing my own mother’s face. The dark eyes and hair, the narrowed nose, structure of bones. We, her reflections. It was then that my mother released herself as unseen and I witnessed her affirmed and becoming.
…
I had asked a boy about sexuality’s double standards. A woman deemed the very pinnacle of shame if she deviates from expectation, commands her own power and pleasure. I asked what he would think of a girl who slept around, even slept with multiple men in one night. “That’s a dirty hoe. Disrespecting herself. I wouldn’t fuck with that.” Except. I asked him if he would sleep with her. “Yeah.” Would you think of her differently? “Yeah.” I also asked if it was okay for him to hook up with multiple women at one time and whether that made him dirty, disrespectful. “Nah, there’s nothin’ wrong gettin’ bitches.”