Tag: Childhood

My mother and I share the same blood.

B Rh-negative.

The same rare inheritance.

The same river moving through us.

The same red history traveling from one body into another.

She carried me beneath her heart for nine months.

An entire season of becoming.

Blood teaching blood how to assemble itself.

Bone finding bone.

A spine.

A mouth.

Ten fingers opening toward a life neither of us had seen.

She made my body.

This is no small thing.

The original shelter.

The dark and sacred room where I began.

But the older I become the more I understand that being born from someone does not guarantee being understood by them.

The womb creates a body.

It does not necessarily create recognition.

My mother and I share the same blood.

B Rh-negative.

The same rare inheritance.

And still, we spent years trying to find a language large enough to hold us both.

My mother spoke.

God, how she spoke.

Stories.

Worries.

Grievances.

Disappointments.

The thousand daily abrasions of being alive.

She sat me down and handed me pieces of adulthood long before I was large enough to carry them.

And because I loved her

I did.

I listened.

I absorbed.

I learned the weather patterns of another person’s sorrow before I had learned my own.

I became her witness.

Her companion.

Her sounding board.

The child at the other end of conversations meant for grown women.

Perhaps that is why language became my native country.

Why I reach for words the way other people reach for prayer.

Why I cannot leave a question unanswered.

A feeling unnamed.

A loose thread hanging from the hem of a perfectly good life.

I learned early that everything must be examined.

Everything discussed.

Everything understood.

And I am tired.

Not of my mother.

Never of my mother.

I love her.

Love has never been the problem.

The problem is that love and understanding are often mistaken for twins when they are merely neighbors.

So we spent years waving to one another across a distance neither of us knew how to cross.

Then there was my father.

A man who seemed perpetually occupied by some private cosmic adventure.

A man of so few words that silence gathered around him like a second skin.

Yet I could sit beside him for an entire afternoon and feel more understood than I did in conversations that lasted years.

He never asked me to carry his grief.

Never handed me the weight of his interior life.

He simply made room for mine.

And when he died everyone assumed I was grieving a father.

What I was grieving was recognition.

The rare miracle of being witnessed without explanation.

Without performance.

Without the exhausting labor of translating myself into a language someone else might finally understand.

Perhaps that is why unfinished things haunt me.

Why I pull every thread.

Why I interrogate every silence.

Why I stand before mysteries demanding they surrender their meaning.

I spent my childhood holding one end of conversations that never seemed to end.

Of course I grew into a woman who wants answers.

Of course I became someone who believes every story deserves a conclusion.

But lately

I am beginning to suspect

that not everything unfinished

is broken.

That not every silence is withholding something.

That some people love us through language.

And others through presence.

That understanding sometimes arrives speaking.

And sometimes arrives and simply sits beside you.

The same blood does not guarantee recognition.

The same house does not guarantee understanding.

And yet—

love persists.

My mother and I

still waving across the distance.

My father gone and somehow still answering me.

The child I was

standing between them

learning two different dialects of devotion.

One made of words.

One made of silence.

And all these years later

I am still trying to become fluent in both.