Eumenides

As women we make certain promises to ourselves. Things that we will or won't do when it's our turn to raise a daughter, if we even choose to have one after everything that life has motivated us to endure. We dream of the woman that we'd like to create and the world that we'd like to create for her, but like all dreams some are realized and some are deferred. Just like our mothers before us we see in our future daughters salvation, from who we are, and maybe redemption from what we've allowed ourselves to become. In her, the non-existent, but ever present her we see everything that is ourselves and everything that is not ourselves. Hope and fear all contained in the same ideal, in the same desire.

I allow my mind to wander often to a future where I am mother. Good and bad, I compare to the relationship with my own. No matter how much I dissect the bond between my mother and I, I am unable to fathom a reality where I am not subject to the same pressures and the same mistakes as the woman that birthed me. I owe so much to her essence, yet I seek so desperately to be different. To refuse the blessings and subsequent curses that come with being her offspring. Her first born. I have watched my mother love. I have seen her fall out of love. I have felt intimately her search for herself.

At 8 I watched my mother divorce my father. It was the smoothest separation I had ever heard of. There was no scandal, no one cheated, no one was cruel, there were no transgressions of any kind on either part. It was however a case of lacking. A lacking passed on generation, to generation, woman to woman. My mother was victim to the same disease that now afflicts me, the issue of fantasy and reality. What we intend to give our daughters, what we would like to give our daughters, and what we actually do. My grandmother fought for my mother, literally. She wrapped her arms around my infant mother exhausted on her delivery bed as three nuns tried to pry her from my grandmother's arms.

Within 2 years my grandparents were divorced. By the age of 6 my mother had to stand between her parents on a porch, in hopes that her small body would shield her mother from her father's fist. So you see there is what the mother hopes to give her daughter, what the mother has dreamed of giving her daughter, and what life circumstances lead her to share in actuality. My mother had inherited from my grandmother not just the hopes and dreams of a first generation Cali girl, southern born, East Oakland raised, but also the pain and the weight that all of this entailed. This is the same pain and longing that lead her to divorce my father, and the very same pain that she has unwittingly gifted to me.

I stand now at 22, moving back into the last place I thought I would be, my mother's home-- on the eve of her second divorce, no less. This marriage produced a second daughter, one like and unlike me in many ways. Strong, sensitive, confident, and delicate all in one. Like me, this 12 year old has inherited a culture that is distant and haunting. A pain and a burden that is not her own. She watches at roughly the same age I was as her parents divorce and her reality folds. Though I know from experience that she will raise from these ashes a phoenix reborn, I wonder why it is that she even had to burn. I wonder why it is that I myself had to burn.

All the hopes and dreams that I garner for my future daughter, all the things that you aspire for your future daughter are no less applicable to my little sister. To this person who has done nothing wrong other than to be a woman born in America. Further, to be a colored woman born in America, and further still (if I may) to be a member of a dying race glamorized only as an object of wealth in rap songs. What is it that my family passes onto it's daughters other than a legacy of pain, shared generationally? What is it that any of us pass onto our daughters, physical or metaphysical when we allow ourselves to become objects rather than subjects in our own realities and allow our daughters to do the same?

I watched my 12 year old sister throw a tantrum the other day, one befitting of a two year old. She screamed and threw things at our walls. Knocked things off of her desk and my desk. And of course she was less than short of harsh words for me. My first instinct was to join her, to demolish our room. I wanted so much to encourage her rage because I knew what it was really about. She was filled with a fury that I was all too familiar with. It was the very same one that pumps through my veins. The structure that had been imposed on her, by her mother, the code which she had been given, by her mother, the innate female law laid from umbilical cord to hungry stomach had been broken.

My sister was angry because of what she had been made to believe as a female child living in nuclear middle class American structure. Horrified, she was empty at the thought that everything she had been taught and everything she had been stomaching was soon to be ripped from under her feet. All of this, ALL of this I know too well, but how do I, at 22, tell her, at 12 that this too shall pass- that she too has a choice? I want to tell her so badly that this is pain we have inherited, but not pain that we must accept.