At the age of ten years old my mother told me one day to suck my gut in when I walk. I’m ten years old. I don’t know what a period is. I screamed when my mother left the bathroom door open only a few years earlier thinking that a knife had been stuck in her stomach.
But I forget that my mother came from a cult that relinquished her rights to show off her beauty. I forget that my mother came from a generation that brainwashed her into believing that she couldn’t cut her hair because it wasn’t ‘biblical’. I forget that she came out of a marriage from a man who didn’t love her at all.
I forget these things sometimes.
My mother is fifty one years old. She is wearing jeans and cutting her hair every chance that she gets. When I tell her that I think a dress is cute I can see her soul flinch before she implies,
"I’m tired of dresses."
I forget these things sometimes.
I look at old photographs of her and I think to myself, “She was just like me” in her collared dresses and her frizzy hair and large glasses. She had a beautiful face that was so full of life but oh, so full of death. Her wedding photos are in the lovely backdrop of a brown, dull, town hall.
Mama, why did YOU suck in?
See, sometimes I forget that my mother was bird who was aching to relive herself for something more than a church pew or a cart of groceries that she could barely afford or a shirt bunched up behind my father’s bed that didn’t smell like her because she was aching to be touched by her own husband. Sometimes I forget that her father was abusive with words and that she is marked for trauma because of all of the beautiful, discolored photographs and the history that came along with them.
Sometimes I forget these things.
When my sister came out we forget to think that she came from a generation of hatred and that she is an adopted daughter of an alcoholic who beat her relentlessly with knives made of dictionaries and who didn’t want her as she got older. But she still loves my queer sister and that is because she is a mother. She means business. She raised her children on minimum wage and threatened to file bankruptcy so that we could have dinner each night.
But sometimes I forget these things.
My mother does not know. She does not realize how beautiful she really is.
You see, my father is a great and wonderful man and I love him so. But my mother is still a woman who feels and who thinks and is human and she had no right to be placed in such a marriage as she was because the church felt that it was “necessary”. And that God would have “wanted it”.
But I don’t see how God could have wanted her to be deprived of such beautiful things that glimmer in her eyes. I don’t see how God would have made her a woman if she could not have handled the things that confronted her. God made her a woman because she is DESIGNED AND PLANNED to be STRONG. And how the church could RUIN her to be less than her potential is not GODLY it is GOVERNMENT.
But sometimes I forget these things.
My mother was soft petal in the brink of insanity. She threw shoes and cursed the sky. But she raised daughters who challenge hell every day and when fears confront us we remember our mother and we ask ourselves, “Why should we suck in?” Because my mother did not fight for her life and for her freedom to derive future generations of discrimination and insubordination in case men were “dissatisfied” and “uncomfortable” with the idea of women leaders and strong, independent human beings who happen to be female.
My mother did not escape hell for your “lack of judgment” or your “correct anatomy” that somehow places us lower on “the food chain”. I did not come from a subject of a political experiment. I came from a woman who carried me in the womb for nine months and who extracted me from her stomach into a patriarchal society that she knew was out there. She cut my hair and put me in jeans because she was forcing the culture that SHE was forced into down the drain of MAN-made pipes.
But sometimes I forget these things.