an essay currently titled, “loving myself means I have to love my mom better.”
Tonight, I watched my mother save the day at her own expense, like she always does. She worked and sweat to be an amazing chef even though she had specifically requested rest and relaxation. She did not get to wear the beautiful dress she had spent time forming to her shape (even though she spent hours sewing mine so it would be perfect. Hours on mine and Grandma’s. Mine, Grandma’s and Auntie Sylvia’s). She stood and sweat in the kitchen and she was an amazing chef and it broke my heart. Apparently, addiction to excellence is hereditary. The food was one of the most complimented portions of the night because of my mother. So many sentiments of mine can be ended with that same prepositional phrase: because of my mother.
She did try to refuse, to her credit. They asked her to do the food over and over again and over and over again and she said “No! I want to relax. I want to enjoy the day.” And they kept asking, because they knew they would fail without her. They asked relentlessly because they knew eventually she would say yes. And eventually, she did say yes. Because she knew they would fail without her and she refuses to let her loved ones fail. Even if it means that the dress she worked so hard to sew hangs unworn in her closet all day.
She served well over 250 people three courses as the sole chef with not enough helping hands. She did it and she knew what it would cost her: pain in her back. Bits of sanity. Being unable to attend her own brother’s wedding ceremony because she had to prepare the food for the reception. She did it because she knew that no one else… really would. Certainly not like she would. My mother wore a chef suit with someone else’s name on it. She, who has worked for herself her entire life. She who scraped together money for the internet bill from what she made and sold with her own hands. They knew she would say yes. They were banking on it.
My mother Gwendoline is gracious. She may as well be grace itself. It irritates me endlessly, which is how I know she will not need to save me a spot in line in heaven when all is said and done. When we debriefed about the wedding after the fact, she said simply, “it’s not how I wanted to spend the day, but I could not let them fail. And we had many compliments.”
I, Gwendolyn, a significantly less gracious person despite what my internet presence might elude to, noted that she was heavily complimented for the quality of the food and of her work ethic. She was. Despite someone else’s name on the apron.
On Saturday, instead of being here with my online family like I usually am, I marched into the kitchen every five minutes demanding she sit down and eat something and she kept looking at me like I had decided to grow a head out my ass just to spite her. Eventually, she just started to avoid me. I remember trudging through finals in high school with the same contempt. I think she allowed me to feel for her all the anger that would get in the way of her productivity. When she lamented that a pan of (perfectly cooked) salmon was far too dry, I said, “Mummy, you sound like me. All the times I made an art piece and complained about how it looked, at you said that you liked it, and I said, ‘pheh!’ That’s how you sound.” And we laughed and laughed.
This is how I know that my mother walks shrouded in a grace I will never, never wield. Maybe it is a grace that comes with bringing up someone that is exactly like you on your worst days and exactly like you on your best days too.
My mother Gwendoline has a beautiful golden dress that she did not wear because she wanted to show up for her family, even at her own expense; it breaks my heart because I want her to glitter and glow at ease; it breaks my heart because I can tell you the number of times I’ve done the same, the times I would do it again. I will put myself down to pick someone else up and never think twice about which parts of myself I am leaving behind, and I wish I wouldn’t. I watch myself in her and I break my own heart, wishing that both of us were different when I know that we never will be.
Enter: The Garden Space— the internal landscape where I house all of my human connection. By the time I pieced together just how many mountains my mother had moved for me, she had finished clearing a valley for my next season of sowing. Her little space inside myself is teeming with garden roses; they grow like weeds. Cold hearty and bursting at the bud. Many red, many pink. Lots of white roses, which were the pride of the neighborhood growing up in Colorado. Occasionally, when I discover a new way she redefined love to make sure I was alright, a little sherbet orange rose springs forth out of the stillness. I remember being six, seven, eight years old, and not knowing how roses this color were even possible. My mother grew them with the breath of her sighs. She worked at loving me well until it became easy for her. Even today, where it is not easy, she sighs. She works. I have every reason to have faith in her because she has never given up on me.
In loving myself radically and in real time, I have begun to call my mother more. I moved out of her house at seventeen unceremoniously and with the exhaustion of a full grown adult. I have returned to this place the same way, and she has kept me all this time. I am now enough of an adult where she hears me say, “ouch.” and she listens to me without caveat or interruption. The process of building a friendship with her, a true and lasting friendship where I can tell her things and she can tell me things and we can hold each other without judgment— it is a bitch. There are many days where I would like to hang up. And then! And then. She looks like me and I go, oh. I have to love you— not because I am obligated to, but because you and I are synonymous. Everything that irritates me to my bones about my mother can be seen in my own reflection. Loving myself means I must love my mother with the same furious, unyielding relentlessness that I love myself with. To love her is to love myself, especially because I wake up with more of her person on and around and inside of my own every day.
The night she finished sewing it— the dress she never wore— she knocked on my door to show it to me. I was being such a moody teenager. I told her that I was going to be on live, and she knocked anyways, and when I tried to ignore her she knocked again, and then a third time, and I opened the door to say, “Mommy I’m busy!” right as she said “—well fine then.” and then we both looked at each other and lit up. My word, the dress. I could not believe it. I mean, like. I could. Every ounce of primadonna prissy miss I am, I am because of my mother. To think I was about to not open the door! She looked like I did when I was trying on dresses for prom (which she insisted that I go to, even when I tried to be too cool for it). I saw myself in her and delighted.
May we both have the freedom to glitter in peace and in public.
to Gwendoline Christiana, from Gwendolyn Ismatu:
summer, and the years collapsed,
broke down in the eyes of her grown girl.
curled on a bed together
and long braids
and heavy bags.
Gwen had a short name that
never quite fit in her baby’s mouth
no matter how hard they tried and now suddenly
here were years and bags. Gone, way past the mountains in a few hours.
their own garden hearts curled together, sweet and uniform–
classic, the pink and white petals of backyard roses.
She left her mother blooming a soft kind of orange,
pocketing summer and every last year.
—on my mother, the night I left
9| Loving myself means loving my mother.