My mother in bed at fifty-two. My mother in bed at sixty-eight. When I lay the two images of her side by side, looking for the differences, at first there seem to be few. She was older, thinner, more wrinkled. Her hair, late to gray, was now sprouting a few silver strands here and there. These differences were subtle but present. Harder to spot: me at eleven - out of my depth; me at twenty-eight - still so.
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The space between the family in the photograph on my dresser and what became of it is gaping and largely unknowable. My parents rarely spoke of each other. They rarely acknowledged that the family in the photograph ever existed. My father died before I was old enough or brave enough to ask him all my questions about the end of our family. Once or twice, we stumbled onto the topic, but those conversations were terse and awkward. I worried that he would take my curiosity for ingratitude, that he would think the life he had given me was not enough. My mother, when we were still speaking, would reveal only scant details. I did not push her. Our relationship was too fragile. And, always, below us, vibrations moved through solid rock.
āI wondered, years later, if my mother knew what would happen, in the way that only mothers know about their children. I donāt mean that she knew what would happen, exactly. My parents, such as they were, what knowledge they had about the world, could never imagine it. How the world would consume me, how perfect strangers would treat my body like a science experiment. They had no idea that whatever was going on with me was a āmedical issueā to the outside world, or that what should have been my private business would be used to continue a public conversation about gender and biological sex that the world had been having for thousands of years.
āI traveled the next morning to my see my maternal grandmother. This is the grandmother I am named after. It is our custom that when we are to embark on a long journey, we must seek the blessing of our living elders as well as our ancestors. My grandmother and I prayed together. I could feel the joy, anticipation, anxiety, and hopes of my family. I was carrying the dreams of our people.
I remember talking with another Tibetan lama, years later, about how difficult it is for some Westerners to engage with this idea because of how conflicted they are about their own
mothers. āFor those people,ā the lama said, smiling, āI always say think about your grandmother instead.ā He would have approved of my new friend Zekiās ayahuasca memories!
When she [my mother] spoke Fante on the phone with her friends, she became like a girl again, giggling and gossiping. When she spoke Tiwi to me, she was her mother-self, stern and scary, warm. In English, she was meek. She stumbled and was embarrassed, and so to hide it she demurred. Hereās a journal entry from around that time:
Dear God,
The Black Mamba took me and Buzz out to eat today. The waitress came over and asked what we wanted to drink and TBM said water, but the waitress couldnāt hear her and asked her to repeat herself but she didnāt and so Buzz answered for her. Maybe she thought the waitress didnāt understand her? But she was talking so quietly it was like she was talking to herself.
There were other moments like this, where the woman whom I thought of in my head as fearsome shrank down to someone I could hardly recognize. And I donāt think she did this because she wanted to. I think, rather, that she just never figured out how to translate who she really was into this new language.