Somebody Momma

He and I sat on a rustic, brown futon in Austin, Kentucky, while he lightweight proselytized about the significance of Jesus in Christianity. This was not a new conversation for us. Still my anxiety flared up. She was on my mind.

My teeth sank deep into my bottom lip, but I didn’t want to cry in front of this man who had not yet been turned off by my intensity. The cabin was small. There was no signal. Nothing distracted us from each other, so I worried that he would finally notice my flaws. My fear was palpable and dry. He was adamant that, without full surrender to the blood of Jesus, there was no path to heaven. I felt the impending flood just behind my eyelids, but I couldn’t tell if he could tell I was struggling to stay afloat. I frantically paddled, crashing into the waves of his words, until he finally noticed me drowning.

“How are you feeling right now?” The tenderness in his voice calmed the monsoon that threatened to erupt.

I swallowed. Hard.

“Really sad” was all I could mumble with my head down before the tide came ashore. As the slender streams of tears poured, he became a life vest and wrapped himself around me. I leaned into his chest hoping he could save me, but I was afraid that the weight would be too much and we’d both go under. The space between my eyebrows hurt. I broke down like rusted levees in a Southern Black town. 

It was a miserable, heaving, stuttered cry. I refused to lift my head because I could tell that it was an ugly cry. I didn’t want him to think I was crazy and ugly. My palms were like broken windshield wipers in a hurricane. Even though I was upset with this man and upset with God, I held on to them both because I was capsizing.

When I could finally speak without whimpering, it felt like my heart was breaking. Here I was spending time with a man who thought my mother was burning in the eternal flames of hell. Could I believe in a God whose judgement sent my mother to suffer over spiritual semantics? And I didn’t know if I should let myself be pursued by a man who could follow that God.

But it wasn’t just that. 

I never called my mother ‘mom’ or ‘mommy’. When she was born, there was a cricket stuck between the walls, so that's what we called her. I can hear crickets right now, and the sound brings me peace. Cricket's mother (Grandma Peaches) and my great-grandmother (Momma) are gone too. 

When we lived in the projects, before we got Section 8, we would have these massive water fights. Imagine a multi-generational obstacle course where you filled buckets, bowls, pots, and cups with water to run through the house with and dump on each other. Somebody would bust open the fire hydrant, then as my little brother said, “it was on.” Cricket gifted me with joy amidst addiction and poverty and police terrorism.

*

My mother told me she had lung cancer over the phone. I was in Baltimore at a protest. This was about eleven years ago, before she lost her eyebrows. Before she started giving away her furniture. Before I laid with her in the bed as she passed away on Easter in 2010. 

In that cabin, on that rustic brown futon, he enveloped me in his protection. That made me feel worse. I was disgusted with myself. Here I was being comforted by this caramel-skinned, green-eyed, broad-bodied Black man on a vacation that my mother probably could have never afforded. He held me closer, as if he could hear my self-deprecation, and I felt exposed. Being with a man like him was antithetical to the blueprint I followed my whole life. Most of the men I pursued were broken children attempting to break me so they wouldn’t be alone. And I let myself be torn apart or discarded. Until being tossed away seemed normal. My mother was abused too. And in that way, I could be closer to her. 

I missed my chance to care for her when she needed it, so I decided to defend her honor by renouncing his God. I couldn’t worship a God who would condemn my mother to damnation. I removed my hand from his leg as a subtle gesture of solidarity to her memory.

*

Cricket never got to see me become Somebody Momma. I can’t call her when my feelings are hurt. She can’t remind me not to let them see me cry. I’m mad at her for smoking. I’m angrier with myself for not taking care of her. I sometimes wonder if my little sister resents me because she was the one who stayed home to do everything I should have done. 

I was laying in the bed with Cricket when she died. Her lips were dry and cracked from dehydration. She was there. Then she wasn’t. I had a mother. Then I didn’t.

And I don’t want to write about this. I definitely didn’t want to talk about this on our bae-cation. What I really couldn’t do, though, was admit that I didn’t ask my mother enough questions while she was alive. How do I love a man without drowning out my own needs? Am I ever supposed to let them see me cry? Did my mother believe in Jesus as the sole access point for heaven? She mothered without judgement. Based on her example, I stood up for people in need. It sounds altruistic, but it was selfish. I was trying to be my mother. I tried so hard to be her that I chose men like my father.

I wonder what she would say about this man who was so different from the others.

The world felt like an avalanche, but I didn’t suffocate. She might appreciate that someone held me without force. In the last decade, I never talked about her out loud long enough to get sad. I wrote about her, but speaking her death back into reality was horrifying. I was drained after the conversation, but I felt stronger. Or at least lighter. The heaviness evaporated. I am learning how to swim without the assistance of a flotation device.