look forward to those classes.”
“Right. You chose men who weren’t good enough, too, and friends who didn’t deserve to lick your boot, let alone call you a pal. You taught me not by your words, but by your encouragement, your pain that you were cursed, and somebody had to break this shit once and for all. In this way, you showed me that you needed me to be different, Mom. So, I was!”
She could hear her mother breathing harder; her eyes looked moist and sad.
“No matter what I’ve said about you and to you, Suri, sometimes not the nicest things, I always, always, always wanted what was best for you.”
“I know you did, Mom. I’m your only child. A daughter. I’m a product of a man and a woman who made mistakes, but good choices, too. It’s not your fault when I make a blunder or practice bad judgment. I have to take responsibility for my present and future. I am an adult.” She patted her chest. “I can no longer blame a lack of this, or how my mom said that, or my dad didn’t do enough for how I maintain and run my life. Those are excuses because it’s easier to not deal than to heal.
“Healing requires hard truths. I make myself upset sometimes. I still do stupid shit. I’m going to keep on doing stupid shit because I’m human, and sometimes doing stupid shit is fun. Let’s just be real.” Mom smiled sadly and nodded. “But please believe me, Mom, I am healing each and every day. I have to, because if I don’t, I will be helping to create another generation in our family, through me, that will think it’s okay to pass trauma off as culture.”
A tear ran down Mom’s cheek. She turned away and shook her head.
“It’s not okay to abuse others with our art. That’s what this is all about. Our life is art. Our existence is art and science combined. We are a labor of love.”
“I wish Black people in this country would see our worth, baby. What you’re talking about hits on so many things.” Mom didn’t get to talk like this often. The woman was a bit guarded. She didn’t let people get close to her, sometimes not even her. Today, Mom had opened her window for her and she’d be damned if she didn’t crawl in that son of a bitch and make herself comfortable.
“That is what we do though, Mom—the Black community. We say the abuse we suffer and inflict on other people who look just like us is justified. It’s not. We say it’s a part of our culture. We’re conditioned to hate ourselves. It wasn’t just the White man, but someone who looks just like us taught us, too. Until I stopped blaming, passing the buck, and feeling sorry for myself, accepting my role in my own destruction, nothing changed. Yes, I blamed Daddy when I was younger for a lot of things that had gone wrong in my life. I blamed you, too. Some of it, I still blame y’all for, but how is that helping me right here, right now?” She shrugged. “Healing starts with honesty. Without it, nothing will change.”
“But how did you go about it realizing that? How did you make that change? Honestly, Suri, it was like one day, you were one way, hopeless and bitter in your teenage years, and then, another day, you woke up and threw away a bunch of things, then slowly replaced them with stuff you liked. You started saving up money, going on vacations, and learning new things. You weren’t the same angry person I once knew. It was like a light switch had been flicked. I didn’t realize until years later though: you were in a metamorphosis, and those changes were not just a phase. This was permanent.”
“I can’t tell you I had an epiphany necessarily, but I made a concerted choice. Enough was enough. Either I was going to shine and glow, love myself for who I am, embrace all of this melanin, or I was going to see myself as trash. When we treat each other and ourselves bad, we see us as garbage. I’m not trash, Mom, and you taught me that! I’m not an artist, but I am art. We’re rare paintings, Mom… There is no duplicate. No exact rendition. We’re one of a kind. What kind of creativity must God have to create all of these people all over