It’s a miracle.
[No. 96]
WHAT ARE THE NEGATIVE ASPECTS OF YOUR UPBRINGING THAT YOU TRIED NOT TO INCORPORATE INTO YOUR PARENTING BUT ENDED UP BEING UNAVOIDABLE? HOW DID YOU COPE WITH NOT BEING ABLE TO PREVENT THAT?
An essay by poet Jazmine Williams
Baby Jazmine & her brother
In a living room so dark and tiny where the children sit cross-legged on the floor playing with the dog, and adults sit thigh-to-thigh on the sofa while our 100 year old great-grandfather, Papoo, rocks in his Lazy-Boy, a high-pitched “F***K YOU, B***H!” cuts through the air, humid with steamed vegetables and meatloaf. We are at the peak of daytime television in the early 2000s, and Jerry Springer is running a feature on out-of-control teens. The blood in my face goes hot as the family audience in my grandma’s living room is triggered into commentary:
“I WISH SOMETHIN’ I’M FEEDIN’ WOULD TALK TO ME LIKE THAT!”
“I’D KNOCK [insert my name or my brother’s] INTO NEXT WEEK!”
“THIS WHY I DON’T PLAY THEM GAMES—I’M NOT ONE OF YO’ LITTLE FRIENDS!”
My brother and I sit up straight assuming our role as targets. In my family, self-righteous discipline moves faster than a bullet at a shooting range when the behavior of children is concerned. Our mom works at a preschool in Hollywood and is often deployed by stay-at-home moms in the hills to come after-hours for a “Scared Straight” session when they can’t get their children to behave.
There’s a belief in my family that the rot begins in childhood, and even more so, that it’s biological to our DNA. My birth mom was trafficked and had me at 14 years old, so the family prerogative is a heavy dose of general slut-shaming and a tight leash to make sure I’m not “fast.” My brother’s birth mom was addicted to crack, so his behavior at the tender age of 9 is often likened to that of a dope fiend. Luckily, we were adopted into a loving family willing to break leather belts, extension cords, broom sticks, and heavy cooking ware against our naked skin while praying for us from Sunday to Sunday. They aren’t being facetious when they say they’re saving us from ourselves, lest we become the out of control kids on daytime television, well on the way to teen-pregnancy and crack addiction. Even luckier? We’re told our whoopins don’t hold a candle to the ones our adoptive mom and her siblings grew up on.
Our palms break out in sweat as the adults cut their eyes on us before loudly laughing over childhood stories of being sent to the backyard to pull switches. Back in the day, a whoopin included the selection of three thin branches pulled from a tree and handed to Big Bertha [deceased] to be braided up and whooped naked with. They share these memories like sacred bloody heirlooms, solely responsible for their success as teachers, nurses, and librarians in adulthood. At the mention of his late wife, Papoo stands up and hobbles into his bedroom–one foot away–sits at the edge of his bed. He packs his pipe with sweet tobacco using his pointer finger, which smells of the garden where he spends his days. He hums an old Negro spiritual, one of the few things he and Big Bertha brought to California from Arkansas after his brother was lynched. They were both born to mothers who were born to slaves. Though a man of few words, Papoo’s caramel skin and blue eyes have much to say about the shame that is carried in DNA.
Papoo and Bertha came from a long line of beatings and prayers that claimed responsibility for all that was good about them, while all that was wrong was biological–it is the stain of slavery on the collective consciousness, both resented and praised in the upbringing of generations of children. After a whoopin, my mom would wipe the sweat off her forehead while she cracked open the Bible and found a verse to share. If she caught our eyes tracing the welts on our skin, she swiftly reminded us that “we were lucky” we didn’t experience the types of beatings she did and that she did it to raise us to be decent people. A sentiment that felt like a boomerang you could trace back to a fiery red-faced man in Arkansas with his knuckles wrapped around a whip. The idea that any proximity to the hateful spirit of slavery could be bastardized as “love” was a hard one to accept. Yet, here I was, decidedly grateful to have a good mom that wasn’t as violent as the generations before her. One that could protect me with her radical belt, from the fate of my biological disposition. And even luckier? I knew I wouldn’t be anywhere as violent as she was when I became a parent one day. So we were making good progress. I guess.
Fast forward to 2024, I am a 31-year-old mom to a brilliant 8-year-old. I don’t hit her, call her out of her name, or make reference to ugliness in her genetic inheritance from me and her Dad. And…I’m still often confused as to how far or close to the baseline of a loving mother I actually am. I know I love my child. I’d die for her. But am I loving in a…normal way? That’s what I often ask those closest to me who look bewildered at my question before answering, “Duh! Tf?”
But the thing is, abuse is a difficult point of reference for how well you’re doing as a parent. It’s worse when you’re oblivious to having been raised in it, but still pretty bad when you’re actually aware. Like my own mom [who believed she was good and normal], I still sometimes find myself directing my child’s gaze to the generation before me as evidence of how much I love her, only to be met with vocal disgust and confusion at just where the hell I’ve traveled from in this life. LOL. For example, on a regular school night my daughter loudly grunts when asked to clear the table and load the dishwasher. Exhausted by my own day and her attitude, I yell, “Don’t you know my mom would’ve slapped the taste out of my mouth for doing that?! I wouldn’t be able to walk the next day if I acted like you!” To which she quickly cleans off the table and then sits across from me with a confused look on her face, “Why were people so mean back then?” The unspoken part is, “You’re being really mean right now.” I swallow my embarrassment, apologize, and tell her it’s a long story that I’ll have to explain when she’s older.
It’s the conundrum of generational progression. I was raised in poverty, with systemic and direct abuse. My daughter, on the other hand, is being raised softly in the suburbs by parents that at least try therapy. She will never understand my idea of love from where I come from. Or why I’m proud of the baseline normalcy that I’ve given her, and why it feels like such an accomplishment to me. And she shouldn’t have to. As tempting as it is to pretend that “What’s not abuse is love,” it’s my job to be aware of how fucked up that self-righteous default is. A generational curse meant to be shattered into glitter and blown into the cosmos for alchemy work, if you will. My job is to understand what love looks like in her world of softness and emotional intelligence because I want a parent-child relationship based on how deeply I love, not on how much worse things could’ve been. And that’s not an easy place to get to. Not for me, or any other parent trying to be just a little [or a lot] better than the generations before them. I don’t make excuses for the decisions of adults that were in my life as a child, and it’s damn hard to find anything in common with many of them, but this is a rock every parent’s foot will eventually hit—regardless of consciousness. Our glow-up is the next generation’s baseline, and the echoes of generational pain must die with us — unheard, unexcused, and unexperienced by our children. And that’s okay. It’s more than okay even, it’s a fuckin’ miracle.
