To My Mother...

A Tribute to my Mother 

I walked through the front door of my house in Northern Virginia with my laundry in hand and eager to start my winter vacation only to find my father in his office working vigilantly on the computer with a strange looking device by his foot. On the computer screen connected to this strange device, I saw a young child about the age of six or seven standing next to an older woman of a similar complexion hand in hand and smiling as though she had the world in front of her eyes. The older woman was my mother and the “world” was simply a giant Aladdin themed birthday cake. There was something peculiar about the footage of my seventh birthday party I noticed as I continued to examine the way I clung to my mother as though she were my only advocate, and tried to emulate every movement she made from her hand gestures to the way she angrily told my older brother to stop acting “foolish.” I remember little of the moments in which I looked up to my mother with adoring eyes and more so of the violent temper tantrums and the, often hurtful, words exchanged in these altercations.

 I realized in that moment that much of the tension that ensued between my mother and I was fostered by strong feelings of envy I developed growing up in middle-class suburbia. As I started hanging out around my white friends at summer camp and school in Atlanta, I grew envious of the things they had and eventually angry that I could not have the same. I was often the only black child in the mix of Anglo-Saxon white girls and instead of emulating my mother I began to emulate my friends. I wanted to wear my hair out to be free, flowing and straight like the white girls but my mother refused and sent me on my way each morning with two chunky braids on each side of my head. I became enraged when my mother would pick me up at eight o’ clock at night from sleep over parties while all the other girls would return to school Monday morning only to talk elatedly about the movies watched and the games played in my absence.  My mother and I grew apart because I wanted her to be something she was not. I longed for her to be a stay-at-home mother like my next door neighbor and have cookies and milk prepared for me when I came home from school. I wanted her to buy me the same toys and the same clothes my white neighbor would flaunt before me. She was not that kind of mother. She was an educator, an enforcer, and authoritarian. Most importantly, my mother was a Black woman. She carried with her a burden in every gesture she made, each word that rolled off her tongue and the way she raised her three children, one of whom is autistic. My mother, like many Black women in America, was given a different set of rules than the white women in suburban Atlanta. She had to adjust her actions in order to conform to societal standards and avoid racial confrontations in order to provide a comfortable life for her own family.