Through Mother's Eyes

On conversations with mother about herself and father.

Photo by Adrien Converse on Unsplash

I live in a flat on the fringes of Bedford-Stuyvesant smack in the center of a gentrification wave that’s seemingly making its way deeper into Brooklyn’s soon to be formerly-black neighbourhoods. From our rooftop my roommate(rather flat-mate to be precise), notices that the high-rise in construction across the avenue has disseminated our view of the sunset. Cherry-blossoms now paint the city, accompanied by intermittent outbursts of late-spring T-shirt and short weather. The questions I reckon with at different moments feel immediate — ones of career, relationships, faith. I am beginning to avoid asking questions with an existenttial underbelly because they fall too far away from my daily lived experience of the mundaneness of being. Rather, being in the now and making plans to be with the people around and with me is where I’m finding more solid grounding and more exact answers to what I’m continuously asking.

On certain days, I’m drawn to think of my father whose internal world I barely knew but whose life’s work bore fruits through the people he influenced almost totally by his love for them. My mother, for one, speaks with much more deeper affection each time of him, I have a conversation with her. She unwraps the figure of a man that he was and paints some color, albeit through her eyes, the life that he lived fueled by the conviction he possessed about what to do and how to do things.

Nowadays, calls with my mother revolve around my curiosity about the person she was, the woman she is in the present and who she would like to become in the coming years. The distinction between the three, though, is rather mine and not hers. She herself ties all of them together in our conversations — seemingly indistinguishable. Time, as well, to her is presented as another dimension of her life — how it’s spent, the rote arrangement of each hour’s usage and the constant anxiety of it not being enough is not an exercise she employs in the same way I have been socialized. She experiences time move through her and with her, leading her to people and places that she cares most about. I admire her self-assurance, hope for my body to know that it will get to feel at home in this strange land and that I can continue define and redefine a space for it to occupy, around people that it feels safe, reassured and proud to be around. It has found some of that over the past couple of months, even though this work has only barely began.