Mama Bear

by Shirley Smith

  I told God, “No, I don’t want to touch that.” It was part of my memory that is the gap. I went into the living room where Lynette and PopaAuntie were spending another afternoon talking about the good ole days; and like it or not, my memories were regurgitated in words. All I could think was, Oh shit! Oh shit!

  I was spinning around in the living room with PopaAuntie saying, “Shirley, don’t kill yourself trying to remember all that.”

  I told her, “You don’t understand. I need to see it. It helps it all, all of it makes sense.” I think I was upsetting her, but I needed to say it all out loud to get it out of my body once and for all so I could heal. I told them, “I see the basement. I see the dirty mattress on the floor. I see some curtain hanging up with nails on it and my mother behind the curtain smoking on a crack pipe. I feel his penis on my butt.” I was hollering, the way I couldn’t scream and holler when I was eight.

  It was upsetting everybody, but I needed to say it all, to get it out of my body. I told PopaAuntie, “I’m not going crazy, putting myself in a bad place, but you have to understand. It’s all adding up.” I hadn’t explained to her my whole emotional and healing process of writing the book, just that I was writing the book. So she was wondering why I needed to do this to myself. I didn’t let myself stop until I was exhausted.

  Lynette stepped in and explained, “Shirley, the rest of the family didn’t know where you was until I saw you in Irvington Center that day.”

  Her and PopaAuntie had never even seen my mother high. They told me that my mother ran away from the family, and they didn’t know where I was from the age of like seven until the age of ten when Lynette started coming to pick me up once a week.

  One thing for sure with our families and with our pain is we can’t undo any of it. But we can get it all out in the open so nobody gets hurt because of being quiet or ignorant. We can go backward to go forward.

  We talked and cried until two o’clock in the morning. I didn’t realize that Lynette and PopaAuntie didn’t know what happened to me because I didn’t know what happened to me those years either. They only held the version of my mother that I never knew, and I held the version they never knew. They resented the way I talked about my mother and I resented the way they glorified her. It was healing for all of us and mended a longtime rift that I never really knew all the details of or reasons for.

  My family of othermothers had supported me all my life, but there were some things, like looking back to face the pain, that nobody could do for me. They didn’t know about so many of the pains I carried inside my body from childhood. They could ask questions but didn’t know the right ones to ask because they didn’t have all of the information. They could use intuition and rescue me without asking questions. They supported me, but until I gave myself permission to access and talk about the deep pains, no one had enough information to support me fully. My breakthrough was a game changer of healing for the women in my family.

  18

  Dakota’s Voice

  Speak up and speak out! Most of us grew up with everything on the hush-hush, and that meant we didn’t have a voice.

  Speak! Write it. Share it.

  This is what I be telling women, that the value of us writing and speaking our truths is essential to our mental and emotional well-being. We have to allow ourselves to share the negative things and the positive things in life. It’s all our voice and we deserve, as Black girls and women, to speak out when we need something and to be heard.

  We have a tendency to hold our truths. We feel like no one hears us, and sometimes that’s the very thing that keeps us from getting the medical attention we need in a world where our voices as Black women and girls aren’t heard.

  This became so clear to me recently when Dakota turned three years old and I found myself again standing in a hospital trying to get doctors and nurses to listen to me about my own child’s needs.

  I took Dakota back to Ohio for her first preemie visit as a three-year-old. Something wasn’t right. The doctor wasn’t able to pick up her hearing. They told me she needed to see an ENT (ear, nose, and throat) specialist and advised me to have a sleep study done on Dakota. They advised, “Mrs. Smith, you should go back to New Jersey and see someone closer to home.”

  February 2020, New Jersey

  Even though I was from New Jersey, born and raised, and live there now, Dakota’s life was saved at the hospital in Ohio. Her teams were there, and I wanted my child’s team to be on the same alignment for her special needs.

  I was reluctant, but I followed those orders. The sleep study was done at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Jersey. The results showed that Dakota had sleep apnea. Usually a child with sleep apnea will stop breathing once in the night, but Dakota stopped breathing thirty times in one hour.

  The specialist said Dakota suffered from extreme sleep apnea and her adenoids were huge, which is why she suffered from so much constant mucus. Every day, Dakota’s nose ran steadily and the mucus prevented her from being vocal. They told me she had to have her tonsils and adenoids removed to address the problem.

  I scheduled the surgery for June 2020, and then, COVID-19 hit the world. I wasn’t sure if the surgery was on or off with all of the precautions for the pandemic. To my surprise and relief, they bumped the surgery up to May and all was a go.

  It wasn’t clear if JR would be able to come home because he was in Los Angeles and travel wasn’t advised. It had been almost exactly three years since I left the NICU and although this surgery wasn’t life-threatening, it sent me back to the fears and panic of all of those surgeries where they didn’t know if Dakota would live or not. The day came, and I was by myself. Los Angeles was on lockdown. JR couldn’t get a flight out. I felt so alone.

  Dakota was lying there in her little toddler-size blue gown with the opening in the back, tubes in her arms, and she was scared and so was I. This is my baby. Looking at her I see a perfect combination of my toddler face and JR’s toddler face. She is us and everything we have been through and she is also her own feisty self who is supposed to be running around and making mischief.

  The beeping noises had me watching the monitor. I yelled out every time there was a slight shift, “The numbers are down. What does that mean?” I was clearly panicky, pacing and feeling some of the trauma from a couple of years ago. I told myself, Stay calm Shirley, but I didn’t want to leave her side. I prayed, prayed, prayed. There were the pressures of the past NICU experience, plus COVID was a fear lingering in the air. I whispered to Dakota even though she probably didn’t know what I was talking about. “This is going to help you live the rest of your life to the best of your ability.”

  Thank God, the procedure was not long. I was in the waiting room reading my Bible. Then I spoke on the phone with my bishop, then ran out and got breakfast and as soon as I sat down, the doctor came out to talk with me and said, “Mrs. Smith, her adenoids were so huge. I’ve never seen them that large in a toddler, but she is going to be fine now.” I went in to see her and she was pretty out of it. There was dry blood and drool, and I held her even though there were wires in her arm and hands.

  As evening came and nurses were changing shifts, I settled my mind on another night in the hospital. That’s when I got a big relief. JR texted, “I’m in the lobby.”

  There was only one parent allowed in the room at a time, but they let JR come up so we could do the tag-team exchange. We hugged and just held each other. We hadn’t seen him in a few months because of COVID lockdown and all of those emotions flowed from my heart to his. I told him, “Okay, you spend your time with Kota.” We swapped and I walked up and down the hall.

  When visiting hours were over, he went back to the house and I stayed at the hospital. I felt more grounded that he was in town even though he had to get back to LA.

  The next day, Dakota wasn’t drinking her PediaSure and her tongue was sticking out of her mouth. I looked at her wondering if she was pushing her tongue out intentionally, but no. Her to
ngue was swollen. I told the nurses to come and look at her. My baby’s tongue was so big it was holding her lips apart. I told the nurses again that I really needed them to come and take a look. At that point I was still being polite the way we are taught to be polite in order to be heard, in order to keep people from thinking you are some loud Black woman. The nurse assured me, “We’ll take another look soon but things are busy.”

  I sat tight for a minute or two, but that panic from the NICU days set in, all of those times that they brought us forms on end of life. That’s when I paged the nurse again and this time stuck my head out in the hall not worrying about what I sounded like, just worrying about my child. I was a little louder, but still trying to keep it respectable. “Somebody needs to get in here. Look at her tongue. I need you to find the doctor. Somebody better call somebody, now.” They just kept on rushing around. I was like, “I can’t believe this shit.”

  I got a bit more demanding. I needed them to pay attention, but I didn’t want to piss them off and then have them intentionally ignore me. “Excuse me! My daughter is out of it. She can barely breathe. She’s stuffy sounding and nasally and her tongue is blocking her breathing. She is having an allergic reaction to something. Get in here and look at her tongue. Look at her damned tongue!” Unbelievable that they were still too busy.

  I called JR. “I don’t know what to do, her tongue is swelling up.” He told me, “Calm down. Call the doctor again. The good thing is you are in the hospital already. She is there. You just have to get their attention.” I went from demanding to yelling, “Somebody come in here and do something, now! Enough is enough!” I turned into that Black mother, that M-U-T-H-A!

  Lo and behold the doctor came in, and looked at her mouth with a little flashlight, which wasn’t necessary to see the way her tongue was swelling out of her mouth. “We are sorry Mrs. Smith. She must have had an allergic reaction. We are going to give her two doses of steroids to calm the swelling. This typically doesn’t happen. . . .”

  I was thinking, Of course it typically doesn’t happen, but it had to happen to my child. They said maybe she was allergic to the rubber they had to put in her mouth to hold it open during the surgery. The swelling, and my nerves, calmed.

  Every time the doctor came in Dakota freaked out. So I became the doctor and the nurse changing her diaper, feeding her, and monitoring her vitals. I told them just put the clean sheets there, her robe there, the diapers there. I did everything, but I was exhausted. I could not and did not sleep that night.

  The staff were doing their job, but I am her mother and they couldn’t verbally transcribe what she needed, but I could, so I did what I had to do. But I tell you what, by the second day, Dakota and I both wanted to get the hell out of that hospital and go home.

  When they cleared her for discharge, JR came and picked us up. It was just like the day Dakota left the NICU all over again except she was old enough to make some noise or act up or do something to let folks know what wasn’t going right. When JR buckled her in the car seat, she knew we were leaving and going home. She totally calmed down and was happy looking out the window. You could tell she was glad to get some fresh air. I was so happy too, it was over.

  When we got home, it wasn’t long before JR had to fly back to LA, but when he did, me and my mommy helper Miss Pam took shifts nursing Dakota back to health. They said it would be two weeks, but Dakota is Dakota. She showed strong recovery signs after a week. Her voice box could project. There wasn’t mucus or swelling in the way keeping her from being vocal. Her only side effect was her breath. Oh my God, it smelled horrible! She had a repeat sleep study done and it was 100 percent better.

  I didn’t even connect the dots until then that I was feeling tension about how Denver was two and had words that JR and I could understand, but we still couldn’t make out anything my little Kota Bear was saying. It was not until those adenoids came out that it was clear that with some help she might be able to find her words.

  A month later, I had a meeting at Dakota’s school. They wanted to make sure that what they were doing for language at school was also being implemented at home. They made her a PECS (picture exchange communication system) board. The point was for her to communicate with us better, because things had gotten to the point that her frustration was just so high. She would be trying to tell us something, and we couldn’t understand what she was saying, and we would be shoving stuff in her face. “You want this? You want that?” and she would just throw a fit at some point.

  We purchased one of the same PECS boards that they had at school. The board had Velcro with all of these pictures. I’ve never seen anything like it.

  One night, I couldn’t understand what Dakota needed. She was crying and acting out in the high chair. I went and got the board and her book of pictures and I said, “What do you want Dakota? What do you want?”

  She went through the book and picked out a picture of a kid taking a bath. The girl wanted to take a bath. I would have never known that all she wanted was to take a bath.

  I gave her a hug. I also gave myself a hug, and I took her and her toys to the bathtub. She looked so sleepy and content and satisfied.

  I had already created closure around my mother issues, or so I thought. I knelt down by the side of the tub, sponged bubbles onto my baby’s back. There was her toothy grin, the way she looked at me, like she was seeing the sunrise. I saw that kind of love that makes peace with the spirit. I saw my mother’s eyes. I can’t even really give you words for what I was feeling in that moment. But I’m grateful to God for the healing.

  I have since thought a lot about that day. Dakota had something to say, and I was there to listen. She had a voice even when she couldn’t put her needs into words. That was something I didn’t have, but she did the work and I did the work as her mother to hear her, and something in that moment was complete.

  As fall sets in, Dakota is just months away from being four years old. To hear people tell me all the things she wouldn’t be able to do, yet for me to see with my eyes that she is so independent, is a testament to her strength.

  I have found a team in New Jersey to work with Dakota. After she was reevaluated, she started real school in a pre-K program. At first it was scary for her, then she started liking catching the bus. This little mama discovered her independence. She started telling us, “I am Dakota,” “I catch the bus,” “I go learn,” “I play with friends.”

  One of my main rules for her teachers is to not treat her like she has a handicap. She is full in who she is. When I tell her what she is supposed to do, I expect the same from her as with my other girls. That has allowed her to blossom, and she is hungry to talk and communicate.

  She has come so far from a little creature without skin, with me praying over her, to where she is now. She is a caterpillar who turned into one hell of a butterfly. Every night I anoint all of my girls’ heads with oil at bedtime. For Dakota, I also anoint her throat, the place from which they said she would not speak.

  She is a testament that you don’t tell a Black woman, a Black baby girl, what she cannot do.

  19

  My Voice and My Mother’s Voice

  December 2020, New Jersey

  Yesterday I had a spiritual meeting that was six hours long with two of my spiritual sisters. We do this periodically and just talk about our core wounds and what is really going on within our healing process.

  My big sister had us do an exercise where we had to list characteristics of our maternal and paternal grandmother and grandfather, anything that we could remember of their lives or what they were like. I knew a couple of things about my maternal grandmother because PopaAuntie had shared with me that I was named after her, Shirley. I had a couple of bullets to write down about my maternal grandfather, again through my aunt’s sharing. I didn’t have anything to write down about my paternal grandfather, my father’s father. I never even knew his name. I also didn’t know anything about my father’s mother. Not even so much as a clue of what s
he looked like.

  I had to do the same list for my mother and father. For my father, I knew the things I’d gone and found out on my own, including the circumstances under which I was conceived. And then, I made a whole page of bullet points about my mom and the things that she went through. So many negatives for my mother. I was like, “Wow.” I now know in my life why my mom had all of these negatives. That she was trying to use drugs and alcohol as coping mechanisms to mask the pain and run away from the things in her childhood. The same things I had been through.

  The last part of my spiritual sister’s exercise was to list characteristics for ourselves. It was crazy to see how generational curses drop throughout the bloodline without you even knowing it unless you write it down. Unless you see it or speak it out loud.

  When we were done, I was obsessed with memories about the day I read my mother’s journals two years after she passed away. It was before I even had kids of my own. It was a Saturday in 2008. A brisk fall day in September. I left work and went to Aunt Brenda’s apartment to do what I had made myself too busy to do.

  After Mom passed I busied myself with arrangements, moving, running from the reality of her death for two years. Finally, I was ready to look through Mom’s things, which were in a bag and a small box that I had under my bed in my apartment on Goldsmith. If I had known what was in that bag and box I would have peeled through them sooner, but I was young, and was dealing with my grief the best I could.

  I had the box and little bag in Mom’s big hobo bag with the colorful stripes. I walked down the steps to Aunt Brenda’s one-bedroom apartment. We sat down in the living room. She had her black coffee with sugar, I had my coffee light and sweet. Aunt Brenda was good for cooking. She asked me, “You want anything to eat?” Aunt Brenda’s was the place where I would go a year later to be consoled about JR fathering another child at the same time he fathered our first child, Demi.