Refrain

"That's all it is and all its ever gon' be, Mimi."

I often heard my grandmother say this at the end of one of her very long stories. My grandmother was the youngest of five children. There were more but they passed sometime shortly after birth. When she was born, her family decided she would live with her aunt and uncle, I believe on her father's side, because they couldn't have children. She was their only child and they spoiled her. She lived with them until she was two years old when a family friend saw her mother at a grocery store. This person spoke of my grandmother condescendingly, implying my great-grandmother couldn't afford to take care of her. That was the truth but allowing that confrontation to prove it was incomprehensible and my great-grandmother demanded her baby back. According to my grandmother, she remembers the day she went to go live with her family. It was a solemn handing off because her aunt and uncle wanted to keep her. She said she was immediately put into a high chair and forgotten about for hours. She said she remembers sitting and watching her family go about the house and ignore her. She remembers deciding then that she hated them. She told me all of this as a little girl when I asked why most of our family was in Ohio while we were in California.

Every question I brought to her was answered with a story about her. When my only successful response to my mother, grey rocking, coupled with teenage dieting, morphed into extreme lethargy, I was sent to therapy. My grandmother insisted she be at the first session. There, she explained my great-grandmother's life and how it led to her life, and how she was raised which led to why she left Ohio and came to California, and how that shaped my mother's childhood, leading up to when she had me. At the time, I stared off and pretended not to listen. I did not understand what any of this had to do with me. Afterward, my mother lamented inviting her. I didn't understand how or why then because its not something communicated directly really, ever. Black epistemology is learned by feeling through stories that turn into histories you share and later grow into your own legacy or curse.

Anyone Black in America knows who they are today is correlated to who their grandparents and great grandparents, and even great, great grandparents were, decades ago. It affects us daily as much as the weather, and, similarly, we can't control it. Our bodies hold memories we never verbalize, their articulations exist only within our reactions to stories. Somatic sensations clench our hearts, ice over our minds, whip our backs and choke our throats from within when the stories our bodies know somatically are made conscious.

My mother had OCD. I was her container for everything she should have felt herself. Sometimes it was fun but, most of the time, it was parentifying. She had the same job, same car, same outlook on life the whole time I was growing up. But, somehow, my presence, my very existence, reinforced some deep rooted shame she refused to acknowledge. I became the emblem of why she felt wrong and I often watched her work very hard to make me feel wrong.

It helped that I never found my mother, my closest confidante, to be an authentic adversary. I never saw myself as wrong because I couldn't really fathom how she could be right. We were too close and she was too transparent to function as an authority. Even when her behavior would hurt my feelings, my grandmother would frame the situation with stories about her actions from the past. I was left to conclude for myself what kind of mother I had.

All of the women in my family told stories that conditioned me with fear throughout my entire childhood and adolescence. I don't think it was intentional, just how they experienced life. As an adult, I have learned to feel the fear and do it anyways.

Through stories, I learned every Black woman in my lineage was actively rejected by her mother throughout her entire life and then again after she had a daughter, all the way back to my great-great-grandmother. Similarly, from day one, I have inhabited a space within a similar family structure. To survive, I have been forced, like all Black women in America, to play the long game. Growing up my mother would often comment: “You look like Angelina Jolie if she were Black." A compliment but also an admonishment; my mother's whole life revolved around being light skin, tall and pretty, until she had me. In my head, I would silently respond: “I act like her, too." I could feel bad but I don't. It's so convoluted, sometimes I laugh. My life is a testament to my protection and guidance. The Long Game.

My great-grandmother passed when I was a toddler. My mother made herself available to me only through obfuscated codes redlining her abuse. My grandmother would frame my tears with her own life experiences that materialized decades ago, sharing curated stories in her Leimert Park living room like art to be exhibited and scrutinized for meaning. Instead of being told how to feel, or how to think, I was told what happened. To me, to her, to my mother, to my great-grandmother, to my aunt, to my great-aunts, to my cousins, to my second cousins. These stories act as anchors but also signals.

“That's all it is and all its ever gon' be, Mimi."