Something Like Beautiful (12 page)

I
t's a Sunday night and I'm thinking, this is it, the reason I did it, the reason I do it. The weekend has been perfect. Even with all of the imperfections in our lives—the locked-away father, the shaky finances, my addictions, my depression—this weekend they do not intrude on us. They do not stop us from being ourselves. They do not stop me from being me; Nisa is always herself.

And it's not as though there was some great incredible happening or happenings this weekend I'm telling you of; we spent one day in bed, ordering pizza, snuggling, watching scary movies. The other day, we baked cupcakes and read to each other and organized ourselves for the week and finished homework and spoke of many things. For nearly two hours on a Saturday, Nisa went on about her friends, whom she loves, whom she has always loved even if they are kind of annoying to her in certain ways (which she sometimes confesses to me really secret-like, pulling me aside, a whisper in my ear). She details who she wants to have sleepovers with and why and what they will do when they are together, and also who understands her because they're an Aries like her.

It is weekends like this, of which there are many, that make me weep from not understanding: why was I ever so sad? Why was I ever in so much pain? Not that there haven't been losses, but for whatever else is gone, now, at long last, I see what is not gone, I see who is not gone.

I see who is right here, right here and grinning and making up bad jokes and running back and forth and helping out with housework and hugging me and asking for just one more kiss as she blows bubbles from her bubble bath around herself and onto me.

Another confession: as hard as it is, there are times like this weekend when I do not mind being a single parent. If I am completely honest, after all of these years out here on my own, I just can't say that I would even know how to share decision making with someone else. After so long figuring out how to do this alone, how would I begin to be a fair coparent? Even with Rashid, I would find it hard. I would do it, of course I would do it, but when I think about it, I think about it in the way you approach figuring out how to win a tug-of-war.

Not that I believe that this is either right or perfect. What I am saying is that while it is not perfect, I do like my life. While it is not perfect, it is something like beautiful, the rhythm we have found, my Nisa and I, the rhythm that we make, just the two of us here, alone, together. Despite my dreams about family, about having bunches of children and a loving husband, I looked up one day and had to come to terms with the fact that we were it, me and Nisa. And we may never be more than this, and that is fine.

But this weekend, like on other weekends before it, none of these thoughts intruded. We were just us, as is, and as is, we
traveled. We talked about Halloween, Nisa and I. We talked about Paris and the Mona Lisa and the Louvre. We talked about Malcolm X, the value of good handwriting, the Cheetah Girls, the
Amistad
, the hosing of nonviolent protesters during the civil rights movement, Marie Antoinette and the beginnings of fashion as we know it today. We talked about why one should oppose the death penalty, Mumia Abu-Jamal, what food dye to use to make the cupcakes the right shade of Halloween orange, the difference between granulated and confectioners' sugar, and we talked about medicine; Nisa toys with the idea of becoming a doctor and lately has taken to watching the Discovery Health channel over Disney.

When my baby finally drifts off to sleep and when I finally lie down to do the same, I wonder, with all of this exploration, all of this excitement, all of these big conversations over broad and thick landscapes, landscapes that even seem enchanted in some way, where was there room for depression to creep in?

How did I not see it when it first began, how did I not feel it stretching me open, leaving a canyon of sorrow where there should have been peace? How did I not stop it? Did it happen while I was sleeping, while I was looking the other way, while I was multitasking, punch-drunk with exhaustion, reading the
Times
? Did it happen while I was worried about someone or something else? Did it happen, did I really let it happen on my watch?

And if it did, if all this happened on my watch and if it is not simply my cross to bear, but a cross I allowed and that I willingly offered to carry alone, I want to say I was wrong. I want to say that to Nisa. I want to explain to her that perhaps I have closed
away people because after everything, it has felt safer. I want to say I'm sorry I didn't do better. I want to ask for another chance. I want to admit that I cannot imagine loving again. I cannot imagine being in love again. I can't. But being unwilling to love, being unwilling to love as a grown-up woman, that cannot be the answer. It cannot be the model for my child, not for my loving child, not for my child who loves to love.

My eyes are heavy now and I'm drifting off to sleep. I'm drifting and I'm thinking that I want to do better, I want the world to be better for Nisa, better for me. I may not be able to fix the world, reverse global warming, stop child abuse, or change a man whose rage blankets his heart. But I can fix me. I do not want to give in to my fear, my fear that to love is to open yourself up to pain that cannot ever be resolved. Which is why I know that to have more weekends that are just as incredible, we have to open up the door to it, I have to open the door. And to open up the door in ways I haven't done, I should learn from someone who seems to have always known how.

I have to take your lead, Nisa, and not be afraid, not offer only false intimacy, but offer the real thing, real friendships, real love. Like you do.

So when it is late and the dark sky is encompassing and thorough and Nisa is sleeping next to me, I return to the place of peace I once knew. I return with all the humility I can conjure up and call my own, and then I meditate and then I pray for a space to be given, for a space to be opened up to allow in the bringers of light, the dream weavers, the supernovas, the luminous, the pure, the mighty believers in love, the earth angels in our midst, those who do not know how to hate or to reject, who
do not know cruelty as an option, those who choose laughter and joy and kindness—mostly that, kindness—again and again and again and again.

I ask them to come.

In the sweet, soft hours I have learned to call on the seers to shore me up, to call on those who have a particular and clear vision and who are all around us and who come through us, even as we have set them aside. It's the children. It's always been the children.

Without empty sentiment or hyperbole, we know this, we really do. We know what children see. We memorialize it in poems, in stories we exchange in the autumn of our years, about our once-upon-a-time innocence, our long-ago goodness before we made whatever decisions that took us out of our ethics, out of ourselves. This is the subject of novels and nonfiction alike, across cultures and generations. So we know. We know.

And just as much, we know what they, the children, are capable of giving us. We pretend that our exchange with them is a one-way street—us changing the diapers or breast-feeding or helping with homework or paying for college. We have a million reasons why they owe us. But when we tell the whole truth, we have to acknowledge what we owe them, which begins with us embracing the beauty and the character most of our children give right back to us, and they give right back to us freely: their tiny bodies appearing seemingly out of nowhere just to say, I love you, Mommy!

And we say that we understand this, we say that we know how important the babies are. We say it in slogans and we say it on T-shirts. We say it on bumper stickers and politicians say it
on the campaign trail. Parents and educators say it in the PTA. And I know many of us mean it when the words spill out of our mouths. The problem is that we just don't act on it. Not en masse, not as a movement. We have to be a movement even if we start a movement within our own singular hearts.

If we do, if we are, schools across this nation will rise up from the physical and academic shambles. No child will ever die of an impacted tooth because somehow Medicaid's paperwork and an insurance company's paperwork mattered more than a young life, mattered more than life itself, which is why even with a mother on the phone almost daily, begging and begging to please help her baby, still watched that boy die waiting for someone to approve the needed surgery, died because the poison traveled up from his tooth and into his brain and he was twelve, just twelve years old in 2007, when it went down just like that. And it would not have happened if we put power behind the platitudes, muscle behind the musings.

Chemicals would not be dumped into specific neighborhoods so that all the babies wake up one Harlem morning with asthma. Childbirth would not still be—as it was in the thirteenth century—the leading cause of death for women. Rape would not still be pandemic and the majority of rapes would not occur before a child is eighteen, with half of those occurring before a child is twelve. The infant mortality rate in Mississippi would not have doubled almost exclusively because of Clinton's welfare-reform policy, which has made getting prenatal care almost impossible for the poorest of mothers.

We would not hire more police to stem the flow of urban violence. If the police could fix the problem, there wouldn't be
so many jails and prisons, a back-end solution to a problem that is best addressed head-on, in the way of G. Asenath Andrews, principal of the Catherine Ferguson Academy in Detroit, a school for pregnant and parenting girls, children normally left at the bottom of the list when their names are mentioned at all. Under her leadership, ninety percent graduate from high school. And one hundred percent of those are accepted to college. We would turn to her, and we would ask her to help us develop a curriculum that is meaningful in our own children's lives. We would listen to her because she listens and pays attention to young people. We'd listen to her or else we would listen to Mad Dads or Barrios Unidos, the people on the ground who honor our children, put their lives on the line for our future's sake. We would listen to them over the voices of the screaming mad men and women on talk radio shows, on Fox News. We would listen to our own children. I am trying to listen to my own children, the one I made, the ones in my universe.

Which is not to say that children know all, or see or understand all. But the breadth of the integrity most of them embody and are willing to share with the world, until we talk or beat or trick or lie or neglect them out of it, the genuine space of love and truth in their hearts that is so readily and easily accessible, and their real curiosity, and their true push to do better, be better—I know that these are the qualities too often missing from the adult world I inhabit. We would listen to them, our children, and right now we do not.

We listen nearly exclusively to those who have the right title, or the right figure in their bank account, sometimes just the right look. But all those things, which admittedly I have coveted
in my life—good looks, money, position—I know now, after everything, that I can live without them, without the kind of money I once strove for and without the stature I once thought essential and Lord knows I can live with not being the prettiest, but I will not survive without what my daughter brings to me each good morning: love, spiritual excellence, integrity. And gratitude.

So yes, in the quiet hours, I say it and I say it and then I say it again: Come, Nisa.

Come, Nina and Naima and Adasa and Jahiya.

Come, Lauren and Spencer and Mark and Aanisah.

Come, Zakiyah and Adisa and Eleni and Monifa, little Asha and Zioni and Truth; come, Eva.

Come, Aja and Butterfly and Petricia and Brianna.

Come, Nico; come, Sule; come, Lucas; come, Charlie and Simone.

Come, Adana and Zuri and Arian and Amina and Amina.

Come, Tuari. Bring your brother. Come, Brooks, bring your sister; come, Aljameer, and come, Aundre.

Come, Karin and Justine, Brittany J. and Diamond.

Come, you all, everyone.

Come, let all of us see you. Let you see yourself, and then let every one of us who needs it be able to finally truly see ourselves and begin to heal.

I
t's Thanksgiving weekend and I am telling Anne the story, the real story, the one I have lived, the one I have denied. For years my sister has stood alongside me steadfast and faithful, waiting and asking, “Sister, when is Rashid coming home? What's happening with his case?” For years I have answered these inquiries sort of
Rashomon
-like, telling pieces of what's happening, small corners of the nightmare, letting her put her own spin on whatever I shared.

But I want to claim my life now, for all that it has been and all that it has not been, and I tell Anne this. This is my one life, I say to her. I want to have it and have it fully, no matter what that means.

We have returned to my Brooklyn apartment from our mother's home, the home we grew up in. And we are, for all the stumbling and stuttering and missteps and mishaps, grown and sexy women now, possessed of all that that means:

We have a past—lost or found loves, bruises that still show and wounds that have healed.

We have a present—families and debt and decisions about schools, irritations on the job.

And we have a future, three children between us—my gorgeous, sometimes sulky, and teenaged niece, Lauren; my nephew, Spencer, a boy's boy, who bounces off walls, falls out of trees. He was born six months before Nisa. And we have Nisa.

She has left me and my sister in the living room, and has taken her cousin Spencer by the hand and led him down my long hallway to where the bedrooms are. Warren, my brother-in-law, jet-lagged and exhausted, is asleep in my bed and I tell the children not to wake him, not to go into my room. They say okay, and they do not break their promise, but later, when my sister and I wander down the hallway to check on our babies, who are dangerously quiet, we discover Spencer and Nisa have pulled out what appears to be every last toy Nisa has ever owned and barricaded them against my bedroom door. We shake our heads, my sister and I, decide there has been no harm done—Warren's slept through the whole thing—and we return to the living room. We return to the comfort and familiarity of our sisterhood.

Watching all of our children expand in and explore the universe of each of their lives is how she gets me to talk, slowly at first but then with urgency. Anne comments simply but emphatically that she doesn't know how I do it, the single-mother thing. “I know it's common,” she says, “so people think it's easy, but honestly, I don't know how you do it.”

It is true, I tell her. It's hard, despite how common it is, it's impossibly hard. I have hated—I guess I still hate—having to be the sole emotional and financial provider for my daughter. The pressure is too great, I explain. The idea that if you slip, no one will be there to catch you and, worse, no one will be there
to catch your baby—it's a responsibility you can neither fully handle nor ever shirk.

So, yes, yes, I say finally to my sister, somewhere between potty training, playdates, speaking engagements, bylines, and balancing the household books, I lost pieces of myself I am only now trying to reclaim.

And no, I told her, no there wasn't a way I could hold together my marriage.

The deportation order meant that for Rashid and me to have a future, not only would I have to reposition my entire life once again, but I would have to do the same for Nisa. What may have been fair for me, a choice I made for myself as a girl of twenty-three who fell in love, is not a choice I can make for my unsuspecting daughter: shock uprooting. But even before the deportation order, I could remember during the first months of Nisa's life how caring for Rashid and Nisa at the same time was far more than I could bear.

I told her about the weekly treks through metal detectors and bars, the parts of your spirit that always seemed to get snagged by the razor-wire that's just everywhere—I couldn't keep doing it. I will never keep Nisa from knowing her father, but for me to be romantically entangled with him now, when I need him most and yet most feel his absence, is just too painful. But every second I see Nisa grow, change, fall down, stand up again, is a second I am reminded that the only other person who loves her as I do, is not there to be a witness.

When I became a mother, I thought Rashid's absence would be all about needing someone to help carry the groceries into the house or cover the utilities bill. But the worst part of it all, the
part that chokes in my throat, is that I have no one with whom to share the everyday beauty and wonder of my child. No one who will ever lose an hour of time, as I still regularly do, just watching her sleep.

We want the world to see and share in all that we are proud of, our beautiful homes, hairstyles, jewelry, cars. How could I live with the fact that my husband embodied the idea that there was both someone and no one to witness her with me, raise a hand and testify, speak in tongues about the most beautiful thing we could ever have, ever hope to have?

I couldn't play at house or marriage anymore. I confessed to my sister that that's what I said to Rashid finally. I think I said, “I need the real thing or I need to woman up and just do this on my own.”

But that breakup left me with a grief so profound, it has no name I can call. It felt akin to losing my husband, best friend, father, and brother on the very same day. Not losing them so much as sending them away, banishing them. They vanished by my own hand. And for that, I may never be able to forgive myself. But I had to choose my child. Again.

Anne asks if I think he will ever come home, come home to me and to Nisa, and would I be willing to try with him again? I hesitate, searching for the honest answer to the question that stalks behind me. “I can't see it,” I tell her. “But I have a hard time seeing any relationship right now beyond the one with myself and the one with Nisa,” I say, and then quickly add, “She loves her dad very much, though. They're on the phone all the time.” I explain as tears begin to form in my eyes. But before they have a chance to go ahead and push for real, my sister and
I have dissolved into laughter, dissolved into our lives, as Warren discovers the barricade, bellows out from the bedroom in complete confusion,
Hey, what's going on?!
And two small children stand triumphant and grinning alongside us, their mothers.

 

M
Y HEAD IS IN
my sister's lap and the toys have been put away. Nisa and Spencer are quiet in her room and Warren is still lying down in mine. Who knew we would get here, Anne and I, born of different wombs, different gene pools, yet sisters all the same, close as any two sisters ever were. We always said we wanted to be pregnant together. We were. We always said I should be there when Spencer was born. Her original due date—in January of 2000—was not one on which I could arrange travel. On my last visit before the baby was born, we fretted about this but made the best of it, and early in the morning on November 25, 1999, while I was cleaning and chopping greens for the holiday meal, my sister's water broke. She was five weeks early. As things turned out, I was right there for Spencer's birth, the first to feed him as he lay, tiny at 4.8 pounds, in NICU.

And when I look at him now, this rough, big old boy, and I remember those hours in the hospital and the fears that gripped all of us before Spencer was born and safe. I thought I would always remember everything, every moment of pregnancy, every moment with my child, with our children. I was so sure that each kick, each change in my body, would permanently implant itself in the most accessible part of my memory.

Childbirth cured me of that fallacy, but only briefly.

Once Nisa was born it seemed impossible that I would be
unable to record and repeat, years and years on, well into my old age, each second of her life. She was developing brilliantly and everything she did touched my heart so! How could these memories, defining as they were, ever, ever fade?

Each phase was miraculous to me and I never wanted us to leave it. I wanted to watch her discover her hands and toes again and again. Or the day she pushed herself up onto all fours and began to rock back and forth, a two-day precursor to the afternoon she began to crawl. Her first solid food (a strawberry at my friend and agent Victoria's dinner party—Nisa snatched it out of my plate and worked on it and worked on it, an hour it seemed, until she conquered that thing. She still loves strawberries). Her first step ever, when she was eight months old, in my office's conference room.

But for every memory embedded, for every memory that is there, sitting in my hands for me to hold close, there are scads more I have forgotten. With each phase I thought I could not get past, that I wanted to live in with Nisa forever, the truth was that the next one that came proved just as enchanting.

Parenting is not one moment or ten moments. It's not one year or five years. It's the whole thing, all the moments and years added up together. It's a lifetime. It's a lifetime of perfection, a lifetime of error. It's a lifetime of starting and stopping, getting it wrong, then getting it right, then getting it wrong again, but never once thinking that quitting is an option. It's about doing what so many of us never learn to do in any other relationship—what I had not learned how to do—to keep coming back, keep showing up, keep trying harder. Keep doing it and doing it.

When I finally got that about my own parenting, when I fi
nally stopped trapping myself in one or ten bad decisions, and realized that Nisa and I would be a lifetime of decisions, a relationship that was going to keep unfolding, I finally understood my own parents, who are doing this lifetime with me. They are the ones who kept coming back and back. They are the ones who chose the relationship and then stayed with it, no matter how hard. And it's what I realize about the mother I never knew, the one who didn't do a moment with me. She didn't choose me. She didn't choose the work of a relationship with me. I may never fully recover from that. I may never fully
move on.
But now, all these years in, when I look into my daughter's face and see myself staring back and feel this great love, this great connective tissue, the DNA of it, but more the soul of it, the lifetime we are sharing, I know that when I look into my parents' faces, my sister's, the same connection is there.

We are not blood of the same blood, flesh of the same flesh. And necessarily Spencer and Nisa are not either. But even with three thousand miles between them, you will not meet two cousins more close. You will not meet two people more family, through and through.

The instruction that I, me the woman without a bloodline, have received simply watching these two small children born as a century turned over along with nations and belief systems and much of what we thought we knew for sure, has been more healing for me than even the therapy.

I tell my sister this on that night when we are all together and she is asking me questions that only my little sister could ask me. I tell her about going through labor—I had natural childbirth outside a hospital setting. For me labor was less about pain than
it was discomfort and it was the most incredible experience of my life. It was the one time that I was so focused on something that my mind never wandered. It stayed right there, on what I had to do: bring that baby forward safely.

Every other experience in my life, no matter how intense, always caused me to lose focus at some point. Great sex, great conversations, a great movie, working out, or writing—at some point my mind drifts. The twelve hours I spent in labor, and in particular the five I spent in hard labor, allowed nothing else into the space.

That's sort of how I want to be as a mother: fully engaged. Fully present. Not every second, of course. Of course I want and need time for myself and I take it, at the gym, with a small circle of close friends. But when it is time for me to be with Nisa, I don't want to do it looking the other way. I don't want to do it texting on my BlackBerry or chatting about nothing on a cell phone.

I spent so much of my life flying to different cities, being with different people, and all the while only half-present, all the while just wanting to be back at home. If I add up all the years I didn't pay attention to what I was experiencing, what I was living, I may have handed away a decade, maybe more. I don't want to hand over another second.

So when it is just us, more often than not my phones are turned off now, and even when the day is a little gray, so we have to stay inside and read books or play cards and watch movies and snuggle, it's fine. It's fine and we can do this all day, playing cards and dancing to Santana, Destiny's Child, and Hannah Montana. We can do it and feel it to be as much of an adventure
as climbing mountains in distant lands. But for all those adventures, where we live is a place we can pull the sun toward our center and fashion color out of dark, possibility out of despair, and then shine, we do, a mother and daughter, together but also separately, the two us, a team, alchemists stirring a pot of secret ingredients and turning out gold.

And as I lurch toward the end of this crippling period of depression, it occurs to me that the one thing I will not rush through is motherhood. With all that has hurt and with all that has been hard, I would take every second one more time over, two more times over, if it meant I would do it with my Nisa again.

I review once more the last several years. This is when it washes over me, the sense of hope, the immensity of the great beauty that graced my life, my life as a mother. I think about how with each and every sunrise we begin the process of recreation, recasting, reordering, and reinventing. We begin our days on our knees, with our fingers in the dirt. We are planting, Nisa and I, ideas and possibilities. And trees. We are planting trees because in parts of Africa they say when something dies you plant a tree and something did die, a certain and particular vision of tomorrow, and so we plant a tree, our family tree and all that it means.

Because in between everything, the breakups, the letdowns, the entire days I suspected I might have fallen over the cliff into complete mental illness, in between those moments and the deadlines, Nisa and I find ways to travel, as we do to this day, to places far and wide, in New York City, in small towns and big cities across the country, in big cities and small towns outside of the country. Poetry readings, conferences, family gatherings,
and sometimes even vacations, we find ways to make this world our own.