What I Shouldn't Say - Jade Monet

Meet Jade Monet who can be find via social media: Twitter: @jadeivymonet , Instagram: @jadeivymonet.png and site: jadeivymonet.com

What I Shouldn't Say

When I sat on the toilet lid with the slim stick with the blank patch in the middle, I held my breath. It felt like it made sense then. There was blood beating the drums of my ears while I watched the line waver from a no into a yes according to the directions.

I didn’t want to be pregnant. I didn’t want to have a child yet, or maybe at all. I didn't know what I wanted, but right then with my eyes thumping from the air I trapped inside my mouth: I didn't want that. It was a childhood dream to find the love of your life and settle down, build together, grow together. Then there would come the sign of it all being complete and whole, a child. In this moment, I wasn’t ready for all of that. The older I got the more I dreamed of years long engagement and adventures. After seeing what the world could offer us, after years of seeing places we only saw in photographs we would then be ready to enter adulthood like all adults do. Instead I was tossed into the pit of despair with a child I didn’t know I wanted. He promised that we would do it, together. Hands held as I wept in uncertainty.

I kept it - or more appropriately her, I would find out exactly five months later.

Before long we were painting a room and assembling a crib, buying tiny clothes and plush animals that would console her. It all felt so disingenuous and foreign. I found joy in being reminded that I was eating for two. I ate twice as much because I was allowed. I ate to comfort emotional wounds. I ate to keep her healthy and alive, not out of love but necessity. I ate because it felt better than constantly crying. I ate because I was afraid. I navigated the world of an expectant mother without the guidance of her own mother, but instead the wise worlds of elder women who weren't as in touch with their emotions. They swallowed those ill feelings. They dug them into holes inside of their own psyche and disowned those things they couldn't say then. "I don't want this," or "I'm not ready," weren't the words of black women. They were admissions of defeat and no black woman could be defeated. But without my mother, the one person I know who had said those words, I felt defeated even when I buried those feelings inside of myself. After a lifetime of having no voice in the way that my life would be, having no voice over the invasions of my body sexually or otherwise. Having no voice in the abandonment of my own mother, I accepted my defeat. I would be a mother, even if I was never ready.

I gave birth with an epidural even after months of Facebook Natural Mothers telling me the importance of natural labor. I didn’t listen. I wasn’t being stubborn. I was scared. The thought of being overwhelmed by the pain worried me that it would only create resentment. When she arrived after two pushes and my dying urge to sleep, I smiled. She was beautiful. Two dimples scooped into her round cheeks unlike mine that only showed face when I smiled just a tad too hard. She cried for only a second before I managed to kiss her head and put on the show that I felt something. I watched her get handed off to nurses and cleaned before my undying urge for sleep returned to me.

I held her for small intervals before I handed her to her dad. It looked right for him; the boy changed into a man the moment he saw his daughter enter the world. We didn’t tell the same tale with her in my arms. For him it was love and beauty, strength he could never imagine. For me it was an obligation. The necessity to hold and kiss her, but not the desire. Growing up without that love, that desire to be given love, it hurt me to wonder if we’d be this way forever.

I watched her smile in her sleep, her round cheeks with a natural soft pink blush. her eyes a blackish blue as they matured into the dark brown as my own. I wanted them to turn grey or green like her father’s. I wanted her skin to stay the soft pink with the small brown undertone. There wasn’t just the riptide of disconnect, but seeing a product of my own self hatred. The anti-blackness I carried was later processed as a right of passage for myself when I matured, but in that moment I didn’t see myself in her - and it pleased me.

When her father worked, I stayed home. We lived half an hour away from the “city” in the lakeside scenic camping spot. Our neighbors were commonly older white couples coming to fish for the weekend or to get away for fires in the backyard with friends. It was where you retired to, and I sat by the window in isolation and irritation that I was trapped in this world with a helpless child that I barely knew. Mothering wasn’t hard. Newborns have three basic needs: eat, sleep, and new diapers. The cries are different, but I routinely checked through the short list to easily find the solution. I barely ate or slept during the day in fear of her small body crashing to the ground in my slumber or that she’d stop breathing. The days of her infancy felt so drawn out when I sat alone with her bundled on the bed with me. I took up silly selfies with her to build something. When she grew capable of holding her head up and laughing from my soft tickles, I felt the spark, the joy.

The joy disappeared when the jealousy resided. I felt my jealousy grow for what she and I didn’t have naturally. Her father stepped into the room and her face would shine. They would both glow with one another and the hate for myself grew stronger in the mix. My depression deepened as I wondered if she and I would repeat the cycle. Would I abandon her? Would I trade the domestication of motherhood for a sense of self?

Her father and I broke up around her second year of life. I moved home and he stayed in his house on the lake. I didn’t miss it. In the move, my daughter came with me. We’d grown closer when she conquered walking and the ability to hold her own bottle so I could eat lunch in peace. She made me laugh, she made herself laugh which still made me laugh. She’d gained a personality through her typical toddler curiosity and sense of adventure. I figured out what we were missing. What went from her brightest smile being when her father came home changed into a teeth huffing grin that appeared when she woke me up in her playset for me to set her free. What was a love for her father's classical rock became a love for my alternative tastes. We hugged more. We kissed more. I tugged her ear for comfort on nights she struggled to sleep. Later, she'd tug mines to soothe herself, and me.

It's been seven years since her birth and I still hold the residual guilt of not loving her right away. I hold my breath for the day she asks me why I couldn't love her straight away. I daydream about the day she asks me about her infant years and I hesitate to answer since I had forgotten so much because my depressive fogs and instinctive habit to suppress parts of my life that sought to hurt me. I imagine I would say something she'd understand, something that wouldn't hurt her spirit or our bond. I imagine that one day she'll understand that I wasn't perfect, and I never will be, but everyday is powerful because I learn something more about myself and how to be better at being her mother.

Black mothers and daughters are left out of the discussion of abuse even though it is our mothers who deal the most damage. It was hard to live in the perpetual fear that I would hurt her the way I was hurt. Being so detached from my mother I constantly suffered from my family throwing comparisons of she and I at me even when I never knew her as a person. I knew my mother as who she presented herself to me as- caring, doting, attentive, loving. In all actuality, she wasn’t any of those things. When I answered school questions wrong in our study sessions, I was met with a hand to my body over a calm explanation of where I kept going wrong. When I wet the bed throughout my adolescent years, and when she and I shared a bed for a year at my grandmother’s, I was met with the same reaction. It was no shock that as a mother I feared that I would fall into the unknown habits of that of my own. I carried her short temper when faced with frustration. I yelled when overwhelmed. I never hit, because it was always easier to just hurt myself than someone else. It terrified me to think of my child fearing me rather than seeing me as a beacon of safety and comfort she needed. No child should fear their mother or God, no matter what the elders said.

It took years of repeating the quiet mantras of how much my life has changed for the better since having my daughter before I finally felt the truth of the statement made my heart flutter. I will never completely believe that she is the answer to all my problems since there are parts of myself that I have and will continue to take accountability for, but she is a blessing I never prayed for. She was and is a gift to not just me, but to everyone. And while our bond continues to deepen, I don’t blame myself too much anymore for that bond never happening in the first place. I stopped blaming her for ruining my body. I stopped blaming my self-hatred on having a child who resembles me but won’t ever fully understand the beauty of being a black woman, even if the cross is a heavy one to bear. I am healing, one day, one two dimpled smile, one block of self-doubt being demolished at a time.