Stories
anguish, despair and anger
I’ve been dithering around wanting to write about an exchange I had at a Christmas party with a person I hadn’t seen in probably years who said to me that they never saw me in my social media, in my writing, in my online presence but rather only Sophie and they wanted to see more of me and I didn’t know what to say but I know I smiled weakly and filed the comment away as another thing that people say and it’s not anger that I feel but for a split second it was humiliation because what writer doesn’t fear they’re boring or their story is boring or they’ve been writing the same thing over and over and revealing nothing but that story and it’s not anger that I feel but for a split second it was irritability at the condescension, that my mind really is that tiny little mother mind™ and as much as I try to unsnarl my identity entwined with my daughter’s, it shows up and it’s not anger that I feel but for a split second it was amused in the way that only those of us understand, the amusement born of the absurd, the laugh that coils up and out of the very darkest recesses of one’s body and mind and it’s not anger that I feel but for a split second I felt despair at the possible truth of it but I know that I continued to smile weakly even as my breath lapped at the person’s face, hot, my breath, so hot that the person’s face began to melt and eventually puddled at my feet. Now this, this is me, I replied.
Yesterday, we saw a woman shot in the face three times* by a masked brute of a man with masked men fully militarized around him, a masked agent of the State who was protecting himself from being run over. The State lied about the man who shot the woman in the face. The State murdered a woman and blamed the woman. I think it’s ok to say it, to write it, to read it even if it’s an old story, a story told over and over. Fuck the State. Justice for poet and mother Renee Nicole Good.
Write it. Say it. Over and over.
* I corrected the statement that Good was shot four times. She was actually shot three times.
Elizabeth, I read YOU and in my mind I see YOU when reading your writing, and especially when you write as Sophie's mother. There is no other way.
"...as much as I try to unsnarl my identity entwined with my daughter’s, it shows up". I wonder, sometimes, if the need to insist upon and clearly express one's separateness from another is a North American--or perhaps more accurate--a cultural phenomenon of so-called Western civilization. "Who are you, really?" is kind of a crazy concept, one embedded in stone, not life. Who I am is a participant in the swirl of events large and small that envelop me, a point of view of the Universe at any given moment. When I had my Sophie, we were often as One moving like a dance where the dancers become one with the music, and, as such, are greater than the sum of their parts. That was ME, and HER and US and ONE. And it's beautiful and perfect and no apologies needed.