I read The Kitchen God’s Wife, Joy Luck Club (Amy Tan), Color Purple, Possessing the Secret of Joy (Alice Walker), Fried Green Tomatoes (Fannie Flagg), Run with the Horseman (Ferrol Sams), Bluebeard’s Egg (Margaret Atwood), This Bridge Called my Back (Cherrie Moraga and Gloria E Anzaldua), The Yaya Sisterhood (Rebecca Wells). Read all of them and saw examples of fierce mother-love that I didn’t see in my relationship with my mama. I’d spent my childhood trying to get us back to the cocoon of my toddler years. My nirvana in our diad which I now realize were the most poverty-stricken years of my mother’s life. All of my teenaged and early adult years searching for her, searching for us in all the places we were not to be found. Finally giving up and rejecting her in my pretentious self-righteousness.
The damage done, the pain we cause others and ourselves in our determination to have our reality be the one that’s true. How foolish. How selfish. How amazingly unnecessary. Over a decade of on and off therapy to heal my wounded self, fix my brokenness, disappear the little girl in me that needed love and to be seen the way others need air. And it all comes down to this simple truth. I was already loved with all the fierce power of the sun. I had been since the pregnancy test came back positive.
Fierce love has you walk away from your just-in-time-to-save-your-respectability-shotgun wedding to a man who’d get your friend pregnant months after you. Fierce love has you go back and forth between jobs and joblessness because you have to provide for your child and you miss your child. Fierce love has you make a game of listening to the Okefenokee swamp in your belly every night between dinner and bedtime to distract your child from the small, crucial detail that those are the sounds an empty stomach makes. Fierce love is swallowing the dreams of your teenaged self, leaving your child with your family, and building a solid foundation for a home and family where she’ll never be hungry, or live with vermin, or go without medical care, or sit unchallenged in a classroom again. Fierce love is stopping a child molester with one conversation without ever sharing what you said to make it stop. Immediately. Fierce love is watching that one child, your only child, not see you, not KNOW you, reject you, and keeping the door open anyway, hoping she’ll come back to you someday.
I used to say that everything good in me came from my gran. And that is still true with one very real caveat. All of it, every single drop, filtered through mama first. I may not have realized this until the very last months of our relationship, but I’ll gladly take her dying knowing that I finally saw her in her totality, loved her with my whole heart, and knew to the marrow of my bones that her love of and for me was always limitless over being right & righteous. And the broken hurt child me that continues to require that I do the work of excavating, sifting and sorting memory, reality, perspective and duality to be my most authentic healthy self? Funny thing. There is no healing to disappear those parts of myself. None. The person that I am in this moment is the culmination of every instance, every moment, every me that I’ve shape-shifted, contorted or evolved to be prior to this very second. Disappearing any aspect removes every epiphany that’s come through and from the experiences lived in said moments. Instead of silencing my inner child and bag lady, I finally understand that all they ever needed was to know that they were heard, seen and loved.
So that’s the new focus. That’s the paradigm shift. In losing mama, I realize I always already had her. In losing mama, I realize that mirroring her love of me in how I love myself means accepting and owning all of me without shame, guilt, or destruction. Loving my scarred self turns the nay saying inner saboteur into a wizened sage who lovingly guides me as my intuition. Loving my angry self turns my guarded, scared, insecure self into a woman open to love and life while being fully aware of the risks involved in sharing my heart with others. Loving my shadow self gives me full access to all the best of me passed from mother to daughter through the all important mitochondrial DNA.
The simple truth is I am my mother’s mother’s mother. I share our stories for the same reasons I sort mama’s things between mine, my daughter’s, the family and several charities: to see little pieces of mama everywhere. That’s what fierce love does. It spills over the dam and flows everywhere forever…
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