I’m sitting on the couch, my younger cousin nestled next to me, the lamp lights glowing low and warm, watching as my mother jumps around in a circle of her sisters and mother. Her head is tilted back, her eyes wide with excitement, as she sings the most tone-deaf rendition of a melody anyone has ever heard. I don’t remember the song, but I remember screaming and laughing, the adults with a couple of drinks in their system. My mother, at the center of it all, hasn’t had fun like this in a long time. As she dances, I wish I could be up there with her, but my total lack of confidence keeps me from getting out of my seat. I think for a moment about how different we are–it’s true, she has taught me everything she knows–yet we couldn’t be more opposite. She: loud, bold, confident, carefree. Me: quiet, anxious, and hyper-aware of everyone and everything around me. I watch my mother with my aunts and grandmother; I’m content with observing. In some ways, it’s better, getting to see them light up the room and fill the air with noise. It reminds me who I come from.
To whom do I owe the power behind my voice, what strength I have become, yeasting up like sudden blood from under the bruised skin blister? My father leaves his psychic print upon me, silent, intense, and unforgiving. But his is a distant lightning. Images of women flaming like torches adorn and define the borders of my journey, stand like dykes between me and the chaos. It is the images of women, kind and cruel, that lead me home.”
—Audre Lorde. “Zami: A New Spelling of my Name.”
My mother immigrated to the United States from the Dominican Republic when she was fourteen, after being reunited with my grandmother who had been in the States for some time already. She came to Washington Heights with just my grandmother and a younger sister to watch over and pieced together her English with American soap operas and magazines. She pushed herself to get the highest grades possible, attended college, joined the Marines, and spent her young adult life learning how to support herself in a world that was designed not to support her. In 2001 she got married, and in 2002, she had her first child.
She taught me as best she could how to do all that she did. In the summers, she sat with me at the kitchen table doing workbooks several grade levels above my own so I could always be ahead. With our Fisher-Price chalkboard she taught me cursive. She taught me to always be strong, independent, and responsible, caring for all those around me. She taught me to strive to be the best, something that quickly earned me a reputation at school as the smartest yet bitchiest girl in the grade (that reputation, incredibly misogynistic as it was, could be an entire entry in itself). In turn, my mother taught me not to care about what anyone else said or thought, though I could never quite achieve that confidence.
She taught me everything she knew–everything she was thrust into as a young Dominicana in the States who could barely speak English and was forced to learn how to take care of herself. I think she wanted me to be like her. She didn’t want me to experience the hardships she did (and I didn’t, for the most part). She wanted me to build a life for myself as a powerful, capable person who could do anything I desired, regardless of the marginalization I would face. She didn’t want the world to swallow me whole, not when she would never let it do that to her.
When I think about my female ancestors, those I have a relationship with and those I have not gotten to know because they passed long before I was born, I think of their beauty, their vibrance, their love, and their infinite strength in the face of infinite hardship. I think of my mother moving us into our new home after divorcing my father, opening windows that had been painted shut, lighting candles to blow away the dust coating every surface, telling us stories about all of the things she was going to do now, now that she could do them. I think of my aunts gripping my hand tightly and leading me down Bronx streets, showing me the city on the way to pick up groceries, showing me one of the places my family is from. I think of my grandmother’s perfume floating into my nose as she hugs me tight, her prayers for my health and safety echoing in my ears long after she leaves. I think of my great aunt commanding the room, ordering her children and grandchildren to stir a pot or set the table. I think of the ways in which these women have shaped me with their stories and with their care, how they have led me to where I am now, and where I still can go.
It is the images of women, kind and cruel, that lead me home. My mother didn’t truly know her mother until she was 13. My grandmother had ambition that she couldn’t find on the island. She had to go to the States, leaving everyone behind, leaving her daughters. She had to make a choice. Years later, when my mother tells me about her separation from her mother, her memory is bittersweet. She tells me about the loss, but she also tells me about the comfort once they were reunited, the way they were drawn back together regardless of distance. Kindness and cruelty.
And of course, my mother’s lessons fell short sometimes. She had to do everything on her own, and in turn she didn’t think I needed help with anything. Though her independence gave her so much experience, there were aspects of my life and identity that she had no idea how to understand let alone support me in. Her stubbornness and refusal to be lenient make me see red and my blood hot. We’ve gotten into fights so intense I’ve had to leave the house to calm down. But when I think of my mother, those are not the first things that come to mind. I think of the way she hugs me so tight I can’t breathe and have to tap out. I think of crouching down behind one of our broken appliances, a flashlight in my hand and a Youtube how-to video playing as we fix it ourselves. I think of some of my worst periods in high school and her sitting next to me, massaging the cramps out of my legs, pushing movement and energy into my body. I think of how when I do engage with womanhood, when I do choose to let femininity guide me, I model myself after her, after the immense strength and vibrance that she’s shown me. I want her to know in the future that I do my best to carry her example with me.
And I wonder if my female ancestors, my great grandmother and great great grandmother and further, might think the same. How did they imagine their descendants, the women who would hold their legacy? Am I what they hoped I would be? Am I doing things they never even imagined for me? Am I honoring them in my daily actions, holding them in my heart and letting them guide me? If they’re watching me now, what are they saying? I know these women’s legacies hold me, protect me from the pain I have been confronted with at the hands of men, keep the fire within me burning. It is these women that let me explore further than they had imagined, and it is these women that I know, no matter what, will always welcome me home.