Know The Mother

There’s a line in the title story of my collection of flash fiction, Know the Mother. It’s uttered by a daughter sitting beside her mother’s deathbed:  “She’s leaving me so easily,” the daughter says, “ I wonder if her love ever rose above duty.”

People always ask writers whether their stories are autobiographical. If someone had asked me about that line when I boarded a plane to do a reading in Atlanta in April, I would have scoffed—even though I was leaving behind my very pregnant daughter, Rae. Rae’d had a troubled pregnancy in the past, one that ended in an emergency C-section. One that delivered up my 5-pound grandson, safe, but traumatized, and my daughter, her blood pressure sky-rocketing.

The nerve of me prancing around the country on a book tour while Rae neared the end of another gestational nail-biter. “Go ahead,” she’d smiled when I left. They were just the words I’d wanted to hear—permission to do what I wanted to do. I’d be back in less than 48 hours, I rationalized,  ready to be by her side for the scheduled delivery.

But something wasn’t right. I landed in Atlanta exhausted and uneasy, a fever coming on. When I took my phone off of airplane mode, the messages were popping. Rae was feeling contractions. She was scared. Beneath her assurances that she was OK, I heard the painful accusation, “Why did you leave me now? Did your love for me ever rise above duty?”

I was devastated that I wasn’t there to hold her hand, reassure her, just BE. Instead, I was on my first out-of-town reading, for my book that explores the horrible, incessant, stressful, beautiful, tender, tumultuous tug-of-war between women and their wombs. The irony.

Of course, it was my girlfriends who got me through it. My daughter was in good hands, they said. Maybe the baby would wait. I’d be there at the latest, on the morning my granddaughter came into the world. Everything would be fine.

And it was. I went to the reading full of tears and conflict, and poured that emotion into the words, the dialogue and the questions. Afterwards, a friend took me to a cookout and plied me with soul food, wine and compassion. Alone in the hotel that night, I stayed connected to Rae through Skype, comforted that she was surrounded by her husband and in-laws. My granddaughter, Allie, came into the world about five hours after my reading. Only 4 lbs, 11 ozs, she was even smaller than her brother at birth, but completely and blessedly healthy.

The plane couldn’t land fast enough the next morning, and I rushed to the hospital to be by my daughter’s side. I found her happy and relaxed, not at all resentful that I hadn’t been there when Allie came into the world. Maybe those fears had been all mine, leftover from my days of parenting, when I felt so much guilt over taking even the smallest pleasures for myself.

As I held Allie, I thought of what her life will be, a pendulum swinging between my paradigm of womanhood and the ideas of the Millennials, to the even newer ideas of her generation. Maybe her love for her daughter will never have to compete with the duty to love herself.

—

 

Desiree is a lifelong Detroit journalist whose work around the intersections of sexism and racism has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Desiree’s debut collection of flash fiction, Know the Mother, is now available from Wayne State University Press, March 2016. Know the Mother is being heralded by critically-acclaimed authors Angela Flournoy and Toi Dericotte and has received praise from The Rumpus, Feministing and The Root.

In Know the Mother, author Desiree Cooper explores the complex archetype of the mother in all of her incarnations. In a collage of meditative stories, women—both black and white—find themselves wedged between their own yearnings and their roles as daughters, sisters, grandmothers, and wives.

Find out more about her on her website http://www.descooper.com/

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing