Something Like Beautiful

by asha bandele

  “I wish I could make this easier for you,” he began softly. “I swear I would do anything. I would do anything,” he continued as he rose slowly from his seat, stood behind me, rubbed my back, and then his fingers through my hair. And I leaned into him, leaned into his hard stomach, and closed my eyes and felt safe and felt a future.

  And then again later, I felt it, the future, as I watched Rashid hold his tiny daughter for the first time and the tears pushed against the corners of his eyes and then they pushed against the corners of my eyes, which was also the moment when I knew, I knew, I was looking at a man for whom—for all his years of penance and prayer, all of his struggle to transform himself, all of his remorse—this was it, the moment when he understood in every part of his DNA, the complete and total preciousness of life.

  And I did too. I understood it even more in the presence of my husband as he held his daughter, our daughter, and we talked about how one day, sooner rather than later, we, Nisa and I, would know father as an action word.

  “When I come home,” he promised, “you’ll never have to do anything alone again.” I believed him. I can’t imagine believing such a thing now. Now, I can’t imagine relying on anyone for anything, unless perhaps if I’m paying them. But then it was different and everything possible was so close. “It’s right here, baby,” Rashid would say. “The end of all this is right here.” And he was right, of course. The end was right there. It just wasn’t the end we had bargained and planned for. But there was no one to tell us and so no way to know. It’s why we were sure all challenges would be mitigated by the love and the promise of a certain tomorrow.

  On the day Nisa was with her father for the very first time, we looked at all the pictures I’d sneaked in that were taken of Nisa’s birth, and Rashid said, “It almost feels like I was there,” and I said, “I felt like you were there.” And that lie from my mouth sat there between us, a dead thing, a thing that smelled bad, but we did not notice right then. We did not notice it because we did not know it was a lie.

  We only knew our dreams, our push for an ever brighter tomorrow, and as we spoke of our tomorrows, Nisa nuzzled herself into Rashid’s chest and fell asleep right there, not for long, but long enough for him to take in her baby smell, implant the memory of it someplace that could not be searched or discovered or confiscated or destroyed. I could not have been convinced then, in that visiting room, watching Nisa and her father there and then, that I was single, alone.

  Nor did I think of myself as single or as alone later that first afternoon that we three, our family, shared together, when the day slammed shut and the guard was yelling out that visiting hours were over. I thought, It will not always be this way. We are connected, a team, and one day, sooner rather than later, there will be neither guards nor doors to regulate the expression and existence of our family.

  Even still it’s true that when that visit came to an end, Rashid nearly convulsed, not visibly, and not in any sort of way that another would notice unless you were a person who cared for him enough to really notice him, see him beyond a department number, a conviction. And I did. I loved him enough, I loved us enough, which is why I saw it, that thing inside a man, that piece of spirit that crumples up inside him when he cannot escape a situation that takes away parts of his humanity. They survive this, some do, and come back and grab hold again of themselves and assert their spirits when the time is right. But you and that man both know he will never be the same person again, never go back to a certain place in his heart. That’s what I saw at the end of the day I took Nisa to meet her father for the very first time: a man who would now have to forever traverse the world shielding a piece of his spirit and so a man who would, in a sense, never be free.

  There was nothing to be said and there was nothing to be done, because sometimes there is just nothing. There is just nothing. Prisons taught me that. But even as I knew there was nothing, no salve, no immediate remedy, I did not feel apart or separate. I did not feel as though I was a single mother. I was part of a team. I was sure of it.

  I was sure of it and I said it and we said it. We said it over and over, one hundred times, and then one hundred times more. Then we went about blocking out the crippling features of the life we were living, focusing instead on anything that made us feel attached to a life that didn’t have barbed wire wrapped around it. And never once did we prepare ourselves for a life without one another.

  Not even just after coming home from that first visit, when I sat beneath the dim orange light of my bedroom and I was holding Nisa, waiting for her father to call us, to check on us, as he always did: “Home safe, baby?” he asked, although obviously we were. And I stared at my baby girl and I wondered how much of this prison life she would retain, how much would recede far back into her memory.

  That night I wondered too if there would ever be a voice in her life that recalled one of those terrible, hate-filled guard voices, and if that voice would call her back to a bad place. And yes, of course, I wondered what choice I had made, what I had done to an innocent child. Yet even then, cloaked—not so much cloaked, but bound by my own hopes and dreams, even then I did not feel alone.

  From that first visit and on visits that came after, Rashid and I made plans. We talked about finances, child care, and how long I should breast-feed. We talked about religious instruction, how we would restrict television, whether to raise our girl vegetarian, vegan, or meat eating. We committed to serving only organic foods, obviously no pork, but also no beef, though chicken and fish were fine. (In the years since that decision, Nisa has rejected our food restrictions. While there’s still no pork in her life, Nisa declared one day recently that although all those animals were really, really cute, she “still had to eat steak and lamb and stuff. It’s just so juicy, Mommy!”). And religion? I don’t practice but Rashid is still a very pious man. We argued a bit about our daughter’s engagement with religion, but I reminded him that he had come to Islam on his very own terms, walked on his own out of Catholicism. “Let Nisa decide for herself,” I pushed and he finally agreed. “We won’t keep anything from her,” I said, “but let her find her own way like you did.”

  “Okay. Okay,” Rashid said, acquiescing one day, adding quietly, truthfully, that “the religion cannot be compelled. But I want her to know who I am.”

  “She will,” I promised, and then we moved on to other areas that would define our baby’s life. We mulled over the kind of schools we would want our child to attend, the suburbs or the city, places our daughter should see in the world, how many more babies we wanted to have someday, and whether I should work once Rashid came home. We talked and sometimes we struggled through things. We visited and revisited all sorts of theories about what makes for quality parenting. But we did it together, we did it as a couple. We did it just like any other brand-new mother and father.

  Chapter 3

  family tree

  Beyond the weekly sojourns up to the prison, in all of the ways that matter the most, in the same way that Rashid and I discussed the future as any other new parents, so too did Nisa and I live like the majority of new mothers and children. We were completely attached, fascinated by each other. Okay, well, perhaps she wasn’t fascinated by me, but I was by her. Still, I beamed when I saw how easily comforted she was by the sound of my voice, the voice that had been speaking to her for nine months in utero, the voice she heard first every morning, last every night.

  Even as she was barely weeks old, everything Nisa did seemed to me to be a miracle, a moment to be captured, shared, bragged about, held forever in my heart. Her discovery of her hands, the different faces she began to make, my God, I thought, no other child ever before, no other child ever after. I thought she was a genius and suddenly understood all those other parents I’d met over the years who always had ten or fifteen pictures of their children there at the ready.

  Humans will learn more between the time we are born and when we turn five years old, than we will for the rest of our lives.

&
nbsp; Nisa’s developing brain was taking in more information than I would ever again, even if I lived for another sixty or seventy years. It was a daunting process to witness and often I couldn’t imagine how hard it was, the toll it must take on the smallest among us. Early on, there were those who could not believe what they perceived to be my unusual patience with Nisa, but it wasn’t so much patience that I had, but reverence. And that reverence was rewarded; Nisa’s first word was “happy.”

  And she was, despite whatever challenges that she did not know were complicating our lives, Nisa was such a happy baby. And watching her discover life invited me to do the same, to see possibility everywhere and embrace it. That is what our beginning was, Nisa’s and my own, in the living colors of our home, and it was magic and joyful and perfect and if I was ever that blissful before, I don’t remember it.

  I only know that we were at the edge of summer, the days just before June after a spring in which there had been snow in April. But now it was May and the city was quietly alive in a pastel warmth and we strolled in it, through it, across it.

  Years earlier an acquaintance of mine had referred to her two-year-old son as her best friend. She was a single parent and her son was her constant companion in cafés and parks where she went to write or just sip coffee or tea. Back then I thought that she lacked proper boundaries. How could your child be your best friend? I wondered but did not say.

  Having Nisa taught me that what my friend meant, all those years ago, wasn’t that her son was her best friend as in, a steady emotional support, but best friend as in, there is no one else I would rather be with most of the time. Not that you have much choice when you’re raising a child on your own, but what I know I feel and what I believe she felt was that there was no one else who could bring us more pure joy than our children. I know there’s no one else whose laughter gives me such breath and movement. No one.

  Of course there are friends with whom I enjoy spending time without my daughter, but when I’m with Nisa, even to this day, it’s all brand-new, a fresh journey, and I am all too aware that I will wake up one day and it will be gone, the expanse of time I now get to spend with her. As I write these words in this very moment, Nisa is steadily securing her role as a grammar school star. Her time with me is shrinking. I am no competition now for a sleepover with three or four other girls who are her own age. But for as long as I can have her, for as long as I have a choice in the matter, more often than not, my daughter is my choice when it comes to who I want to be with and experience the world.

  But yes, there are people—friends—who have called me smothering. They’ve shaken their heads at me and warned me against stifling Nisa’s independence. Generally I don’t argue back, because to explain your parenting style is to then be dismissed as defensive. I’ve learned to let it go, because it’s not important that they know or acknowledge what I’m trying to make happen in Nisa’s life. It’s only important that Nisa continues to be the loving child she is. I actively work now to shut out voices so loud that they shut me out and shut me down for years and years, but finally I got it, that Nisa is happy and Nisa is thriving and so what else? Motherhood was my choice. It was more than a choice, it was my deepest desire.

  There was nothing I wanted more than to be a mother. I had seen much of the world; written two books; known great and defining love. I had certainly been to more than my fair share of parties, more than my fair share of clubs. Motherhood was then and is now exactly where I want to be. To be pregnant with a child that was made with the love of my life, my husband, was a dream come true for me, despite the obvious hard edges of it.

  But if I was to be honest, and alone and away from all the criticism that penetrated my parenting style, my lifestyle in general, I knew that my desire for a child was so much larger than having no interest in parties, no interest being in the mix. A mother now, I could begin to look at something I had spent my life both running into and away from. It is the story that is part of my bloodstream, defines it, my genetic twists.

  And the thing about it is that it isn’t especially obvious, not like a physical deformity or birthmark you can witness and name. Nevertheless it has been both of these to me. But once I became a mother, once I gave birth, I could not stop thinking of it, and I could not avoid it and I could not deny it.

  Having been adopted near my third birthday, I had never seen, at least to my memory, one person who looked like me, or shared my blood and particular genetic makeup.

  I may never understand why this hurt me so badly, left me feeling for my whole life as though I came from nowhere, belonged to no one. But it has. It always has. And it was there all during my pregnancy. It was there all during the time that I refused to see myself as a single mother. It was there, that thing, that heavy tarplike thing that hung over my head, my heart, and reminded me I was not the one worth being claimed.

  I was the one who could always be given away. Nisa would never feel that. She would never know that. She would know that she was wanted, that she was wanted every day of her life. She was wanted before she even got here and she was wanted by her father and she was wanted by me. Me who looked like no one, came from nowhere. I looked at Nisa and was certain that as much as she came from me, I came from her.

  One of Rashid’s friends—this was during our first visit—stopped by our table and looked at Nisa and said loudly, “Man, that girl’s all you, Rashid. All you.” He was joking, playing, but those words slapped. He could not have known, that man. But Rashid did. He knew all of my past, and knowing, he rushed to my defense. “That mouth, those eyes, those ears. That’s all asha. Can’t you see, man?” he implored and almost sounded convincing. This is what Rashid knew: I needed Nisa to look like me. I needed it.

  Nisa may very well have been my present and my future, but in a very real way, she was also my past. She was, to be sure, where I was headed, but her very life said everything about where I had been, who I had been, who I had not been, who I had not come from, where I had not come from. So there it is, perhaps the whole of my story whittled down into a few short paragraphs. And yes, I mean it’s also true that, of necessity, I have had to have little faith in blood ties. But I longed for them, longed for what I imagined they carried, all that history, those unbreakable bonds, unbroken.

  The oft-repeated interpretation by my parents, the ones who adopted me, the only ones I have ever known, is that I was twice loved—first by my birth mother, who must have wanted the very best of homes for me, which is why she gave me away, and then second, I was loved by them, by my adoptive parents, the ones who chose me. Chose me willingly.

  My own take on it, which was evidenced about as well as my parents’ version of the truth, was that I was the mistake, the one who could—and would—always be given away. Everywhere inside of me has lived the story of a child who—sight unseen—was unwanted. I admit that that changed, sort of, when the social worker and my adoptive parents—and I do not wish to minimize the only people who have ever taken responsibility for me, and people whom I love deeply—scooped me up nine-one-one-style late one winter night out of a foster home that was rife with trouble that no one, even now, can fully disclose to me.

  What I will tell myself like a mantra even to this day is that my parents came to my rescue only because they’d already met me once or twice before at the orphanage or whatever it was. People stepped in—and I realize too that this makes me lucky—because it was apparent that there was something wrong in the foster home I lived in at the time. Even before that night, I am told, my social worker would periodically take me to meet other potential parents. From the beginning, there were concerns.

  My mother, father, and I, it is said, got along famously from the very beginning. As their version of the family history goes, I was a very pretty child, startlingly verbal, inquisitive, and affectionate, an all-around charmer. I was two and half years old.

  But what if I had not been? What if I had been obviously flawed? I mean, all humans bear flaws, but some of us hide t
hem better and I’m a master at hiding. But this is the question. Would my parents have chosen me? What qualities must a child possess to be chosen, accepted, taken in and loved? And not just children who are adopted, but all of our children? Is there some predetermined formula that makes one kid count and another counted out?

  What if I had been shy or a crier, not too bright, maybe a little funny looking? Would I have been relegated to the dank, pest-infested cellar of child rearing: multiple foster and/or group homes? Or would there have come a moment when the new parents, foster or adoptive, grew tired of me, gave me back? If someone whose body you grew inside of could give you away, then anyone could? Right? This the story behind any story I tell the world about who I am.

  My story is not about being a charming Black girl who graduated high school at fifteen, rides English, and can discuss opera or hip-hop depending on the audience. My story is about a girl who believes if she is not perfect she will be left behind; it’s kind of an ultimate tale of childhood horror about being the last one picked, or worse, the one never picked at all when the kids on the playground are choosing sides.

  Here’s the point. I wanted a family and most especially a child, a child from my own womb, because I wanted someone who would love me, flaws and all. Because didn’t they have to, didn’t we have to, well, love each other no matter what? We were, after all, family, and we had the damn DNA to prove it.