Welcome to My Breakdown

by Benilde Little

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  She slumped down in her seat, indicating that this conversation was over.

  That summer, at her beloved overnight camp, Baldwin insisted we fly back early from Chicago, where we’d gone because Cliff had a business trip and Ford and I had tagged along. Baldwin asked that we drive the two hours and forty-five minutes to Pennsylvania, where her camp was, to see what she’d learned. She wouldn’t tell me why it was so important, just that we had to be there.

  We arrived at the converted barn just as Baldwin walked onto the stage, barefoot, dressed in a simple white eyelet dress. “Winter’s Song,” by Sara Bareilles and Ingrid Michaelson, began to play, and Baldwin performed sign language to the song. She was transcendent. When she was done, she got a loud, standing, whooping (okay, I was whooping) ovation. People said they had goose bumps. A celebrity photographer sitting next to us, wanted to take head shots and promised he could get her an agent. He’d taken Tom Cruise and . . . Yeah, yeah, yeah, Cliff and I said.

  “She has that thing, star quality.”

  After the performance, we walked the grounds to pick up her luggage from her cabin. I asked her again if acting was something she wanted to pursue. She was slightly more affirmative. “I don’t know, I don’t think so.” So I let it drop.

  As most parents do, I want Baldwin and Ford to be happy and fulfilled in their lives, in their work. I think of myself as someone who is outside of the suburban middle-class conventional thinking that either of them has to go to an Ivy League or Very Competitive College in order to have a happy life. Still, I know that I’ve tried to hedge the bets, giving them something of a backup plan; forcing Baldwin to be in the Civics and Government Institute at her high school, because rumor had it that this small learning community was where the smart kids were. Many of them did seem destined to argue their way through Harvard Law School, but Baldwin had absolutely no interest in that, and she was miserable the year she was in it. Now, of course, I kick myself for making her do it. Ford has extra work and a tutor four days a week after school.

  What would happen if I just let them be, not do some of the things to ensure their place at the Black bourgeois table, a table from which I sometimes feast, but from which I get little sustenance? The people from whom I get sustenance are vast and varied: My best friends are women who never married; one who is married but has no children; one who is a lesbian with children; one from college; one who is married with two kids; writers of varying racial and socioeconomic backgrounds; Black women who are successful and are thinkers; a Jewish woman; an Italian American divorced psychologist; a WASP guy who used to be a banker. I don’t limit my social interactions to just the Black intelligentsia. I’m both simpler and more complicated than that.

  The other day I was shopping in Target. I needed a new can opener, Dove body wash, and plastic storage containers. I go to Target every chance I get. I love Target. I don’t know why. I browse the entire store: pillows, picture frames, little gifts, clothes for Ford, cosmetics, books. On this trip, I discovered, at long last, that my Target has a full-on grocery section. Ah, Nirvana. Cliff called me on my cell right then. I answered.

  “Hey, what you doin’?”

  “I’m at Target. They have groceries now. I’m sooo happy.”

  Cliff was silent for a moment. Cliff is never silent for a moment.

  “Do you realize you just said you’re so happy because Target now sells food?”

  “Yes, I know. Pathetic, huh?”

  Is this what my life has become? I asked myself as I pushed my load of toilet paper and paper towels, the prices of which rivaled those at Costco; cheese and chicken and eggs and green peppers and bananas and Lactaid. I thought: If this is what does it for me, I’m good with that.

  It’s April 2011, three years and a month since my mom died. I’m doing the work—therapy, meditation, medication, acupuncture, sometimes a chiropractor and recently a woman who does amazing bodywork, which I can’t even describe other than to say it’s unwinding my body and my spirit. I spend time alone and time with friends. Cliff and I are together a lot more now that Baldwin is away at college. He and I spend a lot of time in fall, spring, and summer going to Ford’s baseball games. I’m not my previous self, and I’m still trying to let go of her and welcome the new self that’s struggling to emerge.

  Cliff and I had just finished breakfast at the kitchen table. He was looking for a number on my cell phone and scrolled down and saw seven numbers for various doctors, some of whom are for the kids.

  “You have a staff,” he said. “Do you have them all on speed dial?”

  He launched into a skit about me speaking to all these different doctors. We both laughed until I begged him to stop. Tears rolled down my face; my stomach hurt; I felt that great release from a good laugh.

  Cliff can always make me laugh.

  I still do yoga, which works to calm my mind and gives me an extreme sense of well-being, although my hip has limited mobility, so I can’t do some of the poses. I stopped the running and other intense cardio exercise because of my hip and while my alternative treatments have eliminated most of the pain, I know that one day I will have the hip-replacement surgery.

  Several years ago when Baldwin and I went on a third round of college tours which included Wesleyan, we stayed overnight in a motel in Middletown, Connecticut. We each lounged on our separate full-sized beds. We were quiet together, reading, napping. We talked like girlfriends, laughed till our bellies hurt, and I told her I heard her when she farted. We laughed at the same things, read each other’s thoughts. and had the exact same take on each of the colleges we visited. The next day we looked at Marist. Afterward, in the car heading to see Bard, I reflected on a question about sorority life asked by one of the girls during our Marist tour.

  “So, do you think you’ll want to pledge a sorority?” I asked Baldwin.

  I was driving but could feel her staring at me.

  “Have we just met?” she said.

  I laughed out loud.

  “You are so my child.”

  We got turned around trying to find Bard, which was partly buried in the woods. We were late but caught up to the small tour composed of all mothers and their daughters, a few of whom had already been accepted. After a few minutes, as the guide said that coed roommates were acceptable, Baldwin whispered, “Let’s get outta here.”

  Because it was such a small group, I didn’t want to leave just yet, but I knew this wasn’t Baldwin’s place. Soon we peeled off, but not without the student guide looking at us with an incredulous “You’re leaving?”

  After we got back and spring break was midway over, I felt that I needed to do something with Ford, just the two of us. Thinking of something to do with an eleven-year-old who is a classic boy can be a challenge. His best friend’s mom suggested go-kart driving. I drove about a half hour to a huge place called the Funplex. It looked kind of deserted and not particularly clean, but I was determined to have fun. The game area was dark and depressing, and the teens who worked there were disaffected at best. We found the go-kart track and settled into our cars, anxiously waiting for the people already driving the track to finish. We took off. I passed him and was speeding around, hip cramped in the car but thrilled. He was trailing behind and I knew his competitiveness had kicked in and he was trying hard to pass me. I wanted to see his face; I wanted to see the joy in it. I let him pass me, grinning that satisfied smile that comes from winning. My spirit and my face were so joyful; my cheeks ached from smiling.

  One of the things I’ve questioned as a mother raising children in a privileged environment is how much cushion to provide. I know that too much produces disaster; children need the skinned knees, the disappointments, and to be told no. I sometimes tell my kids no, and when they press for a reason—which they always do—I say, because I’m the parent and my job is to raise you to be the best person you can be and getting everything you want is ultimately unhealthy. That answer usually shuts it down.
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  My mother was my biggest fan, tied with Cliff. She wanted always to give me things. She also desperately wanted for me to get back to my writing, to finish another book. “Hector wanna know when you gone write another one,” she’d say. She often called her friends by their last names. Or she’d say, “I ran into Bethea, she said she just can’t wait for the next one.” Or: “Davis said she gone keep reading your books till you come out with a new one.”

  Mom never came right out and asked me why I wasn’t writing. The most she would say is, “When you gone write another one?”

  Now that she’s not here urging me on, cheering for me, I have to do it for myself. After dealing with her death and the death of Cliff’s dad, my father’s dementia, the loss of income, Cliff’s cancer, and all the other stuff life can throw at you, I took a hard look around, stopped shopping, and quit a lot of the drinking. I got a job teaching writing at a college. It was part-time and left time for me to get back to my own writing.

  I’ve had to figure out who I am. How many times was I going to have to do this? Didn’t I do this in my twenties, my thirties, and forties? Didn’t I prove myself to myself—as a writer, daughter, mother, woman? The answer, I now know, is I’m going to have to do this as many times as it takes.

  The good news is I’m still standing. I found Diana, the psychologist and nurse practitioner who helped me get back my life. We found a medication that worked for me after coming to grips with the fact that talk therapy alone would not work. I now own my diagnosis of major depressive affective disorder—clinical depression. Five years later, I have settled into good place. Are things perfect? Of course not. But, as Baldwin pointed out so elegantly to me, I’m a “grown-ass woman.”

  I’ve incorporated what Clara taught me with my own view, my very own take on life. I no longer expect that happiness is some kind of birthright. I know in my soul that there is danger in pursuing perfection, that life is messy, and growth requires that we get dirty. There will be highs and lows: your kid gets a countywide acting award; your mother dies; your other kid is named player of year; your father-in-law dies; your husband gets prostate cancer; your dog goes blind; your best friend’s mother dies. I had to learn to recognize moments of grace in the midst of all that—seeing my kids walk together across the street in front of my car to the bookstore, the same long and taut bodies, same butterscotch skin, simply gorgeous, inside and out.

  As much as I want to be like my mother, there are things that I’ve done, and that I’m proud of, that she couldn’t do. I’m not talking about going to college or having an artistic career; circumstances beyond her doing made those things impossible. But in other ways, I am more like Clara than I like to admit. My mother couldn’t tell my father that he was a good man, even though he was and she’d sometimes admit it to other people. I, too, often want to tell Cliff that he is a good man, and sometimes I do. When Ford was ten, after one of his baseball games and after we’d had dinner, it was time for him to shower and go to bed, but Baldwin came downstairs to the basement where we all were, whispered something to him, and off they went. I was distracted, thinking about the papers I needed to grade. I’d needed to make up for a lost day’s work because I wanted to see my boy play shortstop. He also pitches, but Cliff, his coach at the time, hasn’t been using Ford on the mound. “You’re not firing the ball hard enough, and these kids are much bigger,” Cliff would tell him. “They can hit you too easily.” Ford was slightly taller than average and quite thin.

  That night, I was lost in my head, trying to figure out which task I should attend to first: grading papers or signing Baldwin up for a summer program at the Fashion Institute of Technology. It gets filled quickly. A lot of kids want to go into fashion. I was on my way upstairs to my office when Cliff motioned to me and told me the kids were outside jumping on the trampoline.

  “Come here, look out the window. Let’s go watch them.”

  I joined him at the window that looked out into our backyard, where the trampoline was set up behind a swing set and some hedges.

  “They love that thing,” Cliff said, as he put his arm around me.

  “See, it was a good thing,” I said, reminding him that it was my idea to get it, although I didn’t have to convince him. I never do when it comes to something for the kids. We watched them, holding hands, bouncing up and down in unison, squealing. Baldwin was almost seventeen, and too often now that she was a teenager, her brother got relegated to the “annoying” corner of her life. At that moment, standing at the window next to Cliff, seeing our kids happy together, was a feeling so delicious, like eating a perfectly sweet, ripe peach. I looked at Cliff’s face, and he beamed back at me what I felt but couldn’t say.

  “I gotta get some work done,” I said to him. He nodded and continued to look out of the window, mesmerized by these miracles we’d created.

  “We have a happy family.”

  I heard this simple statement and knew that it came from me. I surprised myself by uttering it. I’d thought it over our years as parents but never said it aloud. Now that it was out, it felt good to acknowledge this accomplishment, even though Cliff didn’t respond. I don’t think he heard what I’d said; perhaps he was too enraptured with what was going on in the yard. I did it, I thought as I walked up the stairs to my office. I wasn’t so angry anymore. I had broken the family cycle.

  28

  I Hope You Know

  IN THE days after Mom’s death I was in high-productivity mode, planning the funeral: I was at the printer’s for two days while they typeset the program, which I filled with pictures of her. I selected a casket with Daddy, spent hours selecting flower arrangements with Joni and the florist. The task was made easier by my mom, who had listened to my suggestion and written down everything she wanted for her funeral. She’d done this a decade earlier, when she was still healthy but had entered that phase of life when her main social outlet was going to funerals. It had seemed like my parents attended a wake or funeral once a week. She’d call me and tell me how Evelyn’s hair just wasn’t done the way she would have liked, or that Charles wouldn’t have wanted Cora to sing—everybody knew Cora couldn’t sing. The ultimate was when the service for my godmother, Grandma Ida, was held at a funeral parlor. Grandma was a member of Mt. Zion A.M.E. for many years, but for some reason her family decided to have the service at Cotton Funeral Home. My mother cried her heart out at losing her good friend. She told me again and again that having the service at the funeral parlor instead of her church was just sacrilegious for a churchgoing woman like Ida.

  After hearing this for years, I told her to write down exactly what she envisioned for her own service. And she did. My brother Duane took on the chore of writing the obituary and picking up her underwear and her mint-green silk dress with the lace jacket; it was the dress she’d worn to my wedding. Even during that desolate time, I remember laughing to myself as I tried, over the phone, to help him find the falsies Mom always wore to fill out her bra. Years of breast-feeding had left her flat.

  Joni was with me the whole time, and one day on our way back home from the printers we decided to stop at the Short Hills Mall to have a drink. In the mall I saw a woman who was probably in her late forties arguing with her elderly blue-haired mother. The mother wanted to go to some store that wasn’t near where they stood. She had a walker. They argued and the daughter became more and more impatient with her mother. Eventually the mother said, “Fine, I’ll go by myself.” She began walking away, on her own, and the daughter watched her, clearly irritated.

  Without even thinking about it, I went to the woman and said, “Excuse me, I don’t want to interfere, but I just lost my mother, and it is the most painful thing I’ve ever felt. I just wanted to say to you, don’t let little things get in the way of this time you have together.”

  The woman was silent for a moment and I, in my altered state, didn’t consider that she might curse me out. But she listened and then she said thank you and walked away to catch up to her mother who, whi
le tenaciously slamming the walker on the granite floor with each step, hadn’t gotten very far. The daughter gently touched her mother’s elbow and walked with her, presumably to wherever she had wanted to go.

  A year later, I was driving in my town when I noticed an elderly woman dressed in a flower print housedress like the kind my mom used to wear. She was walking arm in arm with a late-middle-aged woman. I figured that they were mother and daughter and something struck me about the patience with which the younger one was walking slowly with the other; the elderly woman looked to be well into her eighties, maybe even her nineties. I thought of my mother, of how she didn’t reach a very late age. I’d always assumed she would have. But she died a month after her eighty-fourth birthday, her fist balled up, her lips open in a silent howl. She didn’t go softly into the good night. She went out fighting. I thought she’d live until she literally couldn’t anymore, and I guess that’s what she did. I wanted so much more of her. Like so many daughters of indomitable mothers, I thought that she’d live forever.

  As I watched the mother and daughter on the street that day, I felt myself welling up. I thought I’d have to pull my car over to sob. Instead, I was able to admire the way the two women walked arm in arm, and I smiled at the memory of doing that with my mom. I now knew that I would always miss her. And while I also knew that I’d never see her again—a thought so powerfully sad I sometimes have to just sit and weep—I could hold on to my fortune at having had her at all.

  It’s now been a long five years since my mom died. I’ve struggled with the idea that I’d have to be my own fierce wind. I’d have to figure out how to be as proud of myself as Clara was of me, as a woman, a Black woman, a mother, writer, wife, as someone productive, capable of floating a lot of balls. I still struggle to embrace all of myself, be my own warrior, while also taking my mother’s place as the family matriarch.