my paternal grandmother gives me my namesakes earrings. Her adoptive mother whom I wrote to last week.
Returning to our roots, truthfully, with intention beyond comfort. We live in a world that is seeking, constantly, for the next next next, a different way to do what we have always done. Not a better way, just a different, unnatural approach to the God-work of our Mother Earth. This is a crucial distinction, for as they mutilate beautiful young bodies, as they grow children in tubes for the sake of doing so, they make easy for us knowing ones not to keep silent.
I will not stand idle and let the grandeur of my female body be placated or used. I will not turn blind when asked banal questions of truth, nor will I be complicit in the erasure of all that is good mirrored to us in the mountains and streams. Echoing, you will hear the tremors of the land as we demand justice for all the children and all the mothers being cast aside. The families being reaped upon, Men never to know true strength. I will see to it to heal my mother through my own kin.
I will not venture to the edge and slacken my grip, for holding my grandmothers hand, and hers beyond that, we create an impasse that shall not be thwarted. The spirit of what is true is not up for debate or reconstruction. It is the very blood that beats us all alive, the movement of wind under each young birds’ wing. Indisputable as the pleasure of a mothers sweet first kiss. We live in a world now of babes who did not receive the tending they ought, and these cast their suffering onto the next. I see proof around me this is a cut deep and begging to be mended.
For some time growing up, my sister was cold and strange to me. Her hard and deep blue eyes, her sharpness and grief. As a child, she embodied what I envied and later what I would chase. Her coolness and apparent suffering like a mirror of the human experience. This ought to be the way. Beyond me and a few others, she did not know how to be close to people. ‘I love you’ is only now a common phrase.
As a babe she was shoved off and put on her own, in a room far off from our folks. The house was large with tall ceilings and spirited drafts. Three months old and alone in the dark, self-soothing, as they call it.
Our mother too, there is a hollowness. She took strides in parenting and gave my sister and I so much of what her and her own mother lacked. Still, when my sister and her sit in a room together, it is most obvious, like a giant pit with no light emerging. Across my life, I have begged to be the bridge. This is my own cross to bear in suffering.
She is a wonderful mother in so many ways, but lived in a world that told her mothering was a useless orientation. A husband who lacked strength and commitment, a first daughter who pleaded for nothing but her undivided love. I was only around in spirit by this point, but can sense the coldness in that empty house today.
The birth between the two of them was putrid and brought about a lengthy distrust. My mother no longer one with her own body, her capacity and innate nature stripped and folded as a broken flower before her. When people recollect, my sister was silent and slept often. A ‘good baby’ she was remarked as the slightest sense of danger sent her into a twilight sleep. “Not much personality” they too would say, hard to imagine in the face of my sister today. Where did she go, all that time?
My sister bore a child with integrity a year and some months ago. In her kitchen of the home they rented before the current, she squatted and huffed and stared up into me and beyond my eyes. I was silent the whole 14 hours, her lover paced with worry and excitement. He climbed into the pool with all his close just before her babe arrived earthside. They have slept together every night since.
Her daughter, the light of all our lives, says “wow” in the way it is meant to be said. She listens aptly and hollers for her mother when spooked. She pushes buttons and demands what she needs. My sister breastfeeds, and the times I share a room I am near overcome, for as her babe meets her eyes and pats her face all the hurt leaves her. My mother and my mother’s mother, up the line through unbelievable brokenness, they embrace one another and weep with this tender moment. My sister and her daughter have struck something so deep, well beyond a single lifetime. They sleep warm and in love, and I have never known my sister so soft.
She believes her pain, the separation from what is good and true in her childhood had to be this potent. Otherwise she would not have known. She might have stood idle by and listened to the echo chamber of sufferers, she might have let her baby be taken away for testing and listened to the lies that breastfeeding is nothing but grief.
“I have never seen a baby with such secure attachment,” they chuckle off, as if a child’s temperament is so random. My sister smiles and nods, for even if they were to applaud her commitment and trust to what is right (rarely they do), such bounty compares little to the looks her daughter and her share. I see my sister holding, hugging, kissing herself in the arms of that baby. And my mother, and my mother’s mother. I too, one day, will ease the sobs of my babe and she will be alright. She will calm and ease and soften too. She will sit in a car and gaze out the window, not overcome with grief and pain and cries.
To say I am proud of my sister does very little. I thank her for her wisdom and her willingness, I thank her daughter for holding me when I am weak. I thank all the mothers I am and hug them in myself.
These years have brought forth this confronting gift. I will not be idle in the pursuit of what is plain and good. It is louder than gunshots or fame or understanding or malice. It is as simple as holding and loving a babe when it cries.
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