by asha bandele
Nisa, who loves cotton candy, cucumbers, Coney Island, and being from Brooklyn.
Nisa, who wants a dog and who does not understand “lease provisions.” Her, that girl.
She is never my problem, never the struggle, never the one who disturbs my peace. I tell people that when they offer assistance, offer to watch her for an hour or two. She is not my problem. She is my joy.
People say, and I believe them, How can I help? I say nothing. It’s not that there isn’t any help I can use. But who would I or who should I turn to when my stress is born of a sudden forty percent increase in the cost of my rent and no concurrent increase in my income level?
Who can hold me down if the bottom line is this: I need to work outside the home just a little bit less so that I can make dinner for my daughter just a little bit more?
Who I am supposed to call about needing a health-care system that doesn’t take days to navigate and that considers mental health issues real and a priority? Or a health-care system that was just affordable and accessible? If someone wants to make me an offer, then be warned: these are the things I could really use help with. There are times I have really needed a human being and not a computer that leads to nowhere on the end of whatever customer-service call I’m making. But if not that, then perhaps a public education system that doesn’t take a one-size-fits-all approach to teaching children or operate on a fear-based discipline theory even when those whom they’re scaring are people who are five and six years old, seven and eight and nine years old.
I would like a nation of schoolhouses that actually look like schoolhouses and not detention centers where even now, today, too many first graders are walking into their schools and their initial encounter is with cops and sometimes metal detectors, and so in case those children didn’t know it before, they know by the time they’ve walked through years of detectors, been watched by years of police officers, seen years of bars on windows, that whatever any one told them, dreamed for them, they know their real destiny in this world is to one day be a prisoner. I could use that change.
I could use a country where no child really ever did get left behind. I could use an end to the war in Iraq, the conscription of children into armies, the genocide in Darfur, and the persecution of women in Afghanistan. I could use police who cared about my well-being and the well-being of my child and the well-being of children of mothers I know and I do not know. I could use a police force who didn’t have a habit of shooting unarmed Black men or women or kids. Fourteen-month-old kids. I could use a grocery store in my neighborhood that sold organic foods. I could certainly have used a different response to Hurricane Katrina.
I could use a media that reflected in relatively real time the world it claims to cover. I could use a little more courtesy when I’m out in public. I could use far less concrete. I could use having my daughter’s father home from prison. I could use having many fathers and mothers home from prison.
I could use an end to child abuse and rape and sexual harassment and male domination and white supremacy and all the isms that keep us hobbled and hurting.
They disturb my peace, those things do, but not her. Never my Nisa.
Even on the days when I have sat there just stunned watching her, Nisa, launch into a third straight hour of talking, of jabbering, on and on about absolutely nothing, but the sound of her own voice delights her even if it does make my eyes water up and cross. Even on those days, those endlessly noisy, exasperating days, she does not disturb my peace.
If I have any peace at all it is because of those days and these nights. And this is what I’m thinking as I stroke her hair lightly and watch her as she sleeps, and then with out warning her small body jumps. She jerks in her sleep and I am suddenly afraid, my fears are so constant, so present, even in this hour when I think I’ve banished all the negatives away.
Put to the test, I go right there: something terrible must be happening inside of Nisa’s head and I am waking her gently but urgently from the nightmare that I’m certain has gripped her sleep, because too often they have gripped my sleep, and before I can remind myself she is not me, my experiences have not been Nisa’s experiences and they will not be, she may never have nightmares, before I can tell myself any of that, I am calling her name, I am whispering it into her ear, Nisa, Nisa baby, wake up, wake up.
I am asking her this as her eyes open slightly, then shut again tightly. Nisa baby, what are you dreaming, what are seeing when you close your eyes? Are there monsters, is something wrong, you jumped in your sleep. And she pauses before she answers, this child who is still free, and I swear I do not want to put my stuff on her, my hurt, and I curse myself for having just done it again and I make another silent promise that I will stop. I will stop right now. And as I am making this promise with my arms around my child, Nisa says to me quietly but deliberately and just like this: I’m dreaming of rainbows, Mommy. Go back to sleep.
Chapter 11
reasons to live
When I at last had the courage to really look at myself, my errors, it finally dawned on me that yes, of course I would stop eating properly.
Of course I would start smoking again.
Or drink every night.
Or have unhealthy relationships, both romantic and platonic.
Of course I would alienate the people closest to me.
In the most simple terms, depression is a broken heart. And if the heart is not working, not pumping the blood, nothing else works either.
So then of course I would feel guilty. Who would imagine, after all my rhetoric, that this was the kind of role model any child should have? Certainly not me. What kind of future was I ushering in for her?
The cliché is that children have as much to teach us as we do them. And like most clichés, those words rang empty to me until I lived them. I lived them all the way out. And now I know that they are true. There were times in the midst of my great sadness when I would confess to friends the terrible breadth of the sorrow that had this viselike grip on my neck, my heart.
I cannot count the number of times people would say to me to look at Nisa and just live for her. Wasn’t my daughter enough? I was asked more times than I care to recall. Far, far more times.
I hated those admonitions because on the other side of them was the notion, the idea, that somehow I did not love my daughter with the whole of my heart. But I knew that the key was and would always be in me rediscovering the value of my own life, the measure of my own worth. I just didn’t know where to find that key and if I did find it, would I also find the lock it fit?
Yet, when I was able to shut out the world, the world beyond Nisa, and I just watched the way my daughter moved through life, I thought I might find the key, that it wasn’t hidden so well that it would remain forever beyond reach. If only I could have stayed in those moments, the ones that leave you in joyous disbelief: did my five-year-old child really just wander through the Basquiat exhibit, turn her nose up, and grunt, “This isn’t so great, Mommy. I can do better.” And then do it?
Did I really come home the next day to Nisa proudly displaying a painting, and with a big ole I told you so attitude, and then demanding that I take it to the museum and have it hung? Did she really say to me the next day, after I told her I showed my friends her work, did she really, with arm gestures and all, at five years old, say to me, “Oh, Mom! Now everybody’s gonna crowd me up!”
Nisa, my reluctant celebrity, my modern-day Greta Garbo.
And Nisa, my baby who takes my two rules—safety and manners—so much to heart that she will charge anyone who curses in her presence a dollar. For every curse. Curse more than twice, she’s negotiating for punitive damages. And no one is safe, not even people who don’t curse, because she adds other words to the list of “bad words.” She’s charged people for using the terms “shut up,” or “ugly.” “They’re not nice” or “appropriate,” she’ll snort as she demands payment from you.
We curl up in bed sometimes and watch reality shows—she l
oves them—but none more perhaps than Project Runway. At some point, she pulls away from me, leans closer to the television, crosses her arms, and begins doing her running commentary. It would drive me—probably almost anyone—bananas if she didn’t make the very same calls the judges make, each time. And I think, this is my girl, mine?
I like nice clothes as much as the next person, but surely I can live a year in gym clothes if given the opportunity, if given a year without public appearances or dinners. How did I end up with Anna Wintour’s secret love child?
But still, my Nisa, a child like so many others, rejects categorization. Her inner fashionista is not held back by the girl she is in school, the one who loves math and technology and reading and art. And while she loves figuring out math problems, even, God help me, word problems, it doesn’t mean that she won’t break free from me as soon as we enter the playground, calling over her shoulder that’s she’s going to make a friend.
From a safe distance I watch her, I listen. She will approach a child of her approximate size and ask, “Want to be friends?” Nothing holds her back from being just who she is: a little girl.
My daughter sees the potential for fun everywhere and tells me so. Not in those words of course, but in her daily excitement at simply this: we are alive and we are here and there are worlds out there that need discovery. Every weekend offers another opportunity, and try as I might to get her to allow me to sleep past six-thirty or seven, she will say, “I just can’t help it, Mommy,” and she will mean it.
She, more than anything, has been life-saving for me. I look at her and think of the baby I was who was given away and I think about the girl I was who was spirited away and I know that I am a woman now, able to see what it might have been like, to have been loved from the beginning, to have been wanted from the beginning. It’s doesn’t fix everything, this sort of vicarious way of healing. But it does help.
When I have believed that what I wanted more than anything else was to fold into my depression, stay in bed, not eat, not shower, not speak, move only enough to deal with the essentials, Nisa reminded me that the essentials include a walk in the park, spending time with friends, having dinner together. At the Botanic Garden just down the road from our Brooklyn home, when we go to see the roses each spring as they come into bloom, she literally makes us stop so we can smell each one.
It was Nisa who got me to finally take a walk in the woods once more, stand beneath the redwoods and gasp as we looked up and up but could not find the top of them. It was Nisa who returned the wonder of butterflies, the carousel, the majesty of the ocean, the beauty of an ancient shoreline.
She notices babies, dogs, the color of autumn’s falling leaves.
She tries to wrap her arms around the wind.
She sees life all around her and wants to embrace it at every turn.
And she wants me to be there too, full of excitement and embrace. That my daughter is all the way present in her life allows me to think, in my more clear moments, that I can do it too. I can be all the way present, if Nisa is to be believed. I did it before, there is a record of this, and I want it back, the feeling of being all the way in my own life. I want it now. Especially now.
How can her joy not be a cure-all, a magic bullet, an impenetrable shield against the sadness? In at last paying attention to this, paying attention to it more than to the frustrations, the harshness that can puncture all of our lives, each day stopped seeming as though it was just something to get through rather than something to live in.
And I don’t want or mean to sound Pollyannaish. Like any mother worthy of the title, I have lost my temper with Nisa, responding to her dramatics with my own. I have never hit anyone and could never imagine hitting my own child—but, let me tell you, I was a world-class yeller.
But the longer I was a mother, the longer we did this thing together, the clearer it became that most of my annoyances, most of what sent me off into the land of the banshee, were mostly to do with all the many things that pull and prick at us. Kids can annoy you with the constant questioning or talking (I read somewhere that the average four-year-old, clutch your pearls, asks 429 questions a day). But for most of us who are lucky enough to only have to negotiate the usual irritations—bedtime, homework and such—the thing that sends us out of ourselves is usually never just the kid. It’s the child and the bills and the partner or no partner and the housework and the idiot boss and the three percent raise against six percent inflation and the wacko driver who cuts you off and almost kills you. It’s all those things or some of those things added up together with the 429-questions-asking cutie-pie you really do love but God please, just be quiet, please baby, please. Though please baby please is often not the first way it comes out of your mouth. What comes out are like those serpents and rats from our childhood poems. It comes out mean and it comes out loud and what I finally came to understand was that it didn’t work. If my goal was to make life simpler, more calm, then yelling my way through it resolved exactly nothing.
A teacher and friend told me once the best thing you can do in shark-infested waters (if you can’t get right the hell out, of course), is to be still. So that has become my goal: to be still, to be calm, to focus more on what I do have rather than what I don’t have. For sure I don’t always manage it and even when I do, it doesn’t always make things either feel or actually be better, but overall, I know I am not as continually sad at the very core of myself as I once was. And that’s not only good news for me. It’s also good news for my daughter, who, much to my surprise, looked at me one day recently and said, “Mommy, if I was gonna describe you, I would say you were calm. You’re silly. But you’re calm. And I like that a lot.”
No one was in more shock than me to hear those words. And no one more than me wanted to be able to live up to that edict more, either.
So it was this conviction that was finally married to all of these amazing remembrances, the ones that came wandering back when I first started on my return. The conventional wisdom all these years on remains that if you’re nervous because you have to speak in front of a crowd, picture the audience naked or else focus on that one friendly face in the crowd. Because I think so much of what my story is about is being nervous in front of life, I have my own trick. I picture Nisa. I picture her at all ages. I remember how even as a baby, the sight of her round knees, her cherubic cheeks, the sound of her fast raucous giggles, has always brought me immeasurable delight.
It changed me, those images of my baby, in the moments that spiraled into some unattractive version of frenzy, and in the middle of tears or their internal twin, I would demand of myself: why the hell can’t I just settle into gratitude and even bliss? When I nearly became nauseous with guilt from that question, I would pretend that all I needed to feel better was to remember my child’s face. And then one day it wasn’t pretending anymore.
In my better moments, in my best moments, I know that what I have to do, what I have to learn, perhaps relearn, comes daily from the four-foot-and-a-half sage with whom I live, the one who instructs because she inhabits, rather than because she is inhibited by, all the corners of her life. She sees possibility and color and light in each corner of her life. She sees reasons to live. And what will I ever teach her that is greater than this lesson she offers freely to me?
But then it occurred to me the thing she doesn’t know, the thing I want to show her. Renewal. Children, if life is fairly good to them, will not have to learn this while they are still small. Adults, if we live any measure of time and with any measure of energy, will most certainly run headlong into it, that challenge: to come back or not. Many of us will have to learn it over and over. We will have to figure out how to renew ourselves after the loss of a love or a job or a friend or a parent—or ourselves.
We figure it out or else we give up and then there is nothing to save, nothing to renew. I did not give up, not all the way, not even at my lowest points. I remember standing in the center of my own hell, and a close friend of mine remi
nded me, just like this she said it: asha, you are a survivor. And something switched on, a tiny beam of light. It was true. There was evidence. And one of those pieces of evidence was this girl, my daughter.
Chapter 12
open wounds
When I began the process of excavation, trying to understand myself in a context that was both who I was and who I was a part of, I had to admit that this is the truth:
Sixty percent of Black women in the United States suffer from depression.
Forty-three percent of Black women in the United States report that they were verbally or emotionally abused during their childhood.
Forty-two percent report that they were sexually or physically abused during childhood.
Every single day in America, this big and wealthy nation of ours, somewhere there is a mother dying during childbirth, somewhere else there are four children who are being killed by abuse, five more who are committing suicide, another eight, still, dead from firearms, thirty-three from preventable accidents, still another seventy-seven who will not know their first birthdays.
The contributing factors for depression among Black women include sexism and racism but also economic insecurity. With more Black households headed by single mothers than not, we are at the top of the list of those at risk for depression and all its many symptoms.
And yet Black women are twice as unwilling as whites to seek mental-health treatment. We fear it. This is what we say. We are actually afraid of it. Indeed, we are more afraid of potentially getting well than we are of living in pain, living a half-life.
But this is also the truth, it’s my truth.
I have been in therapy on and off since I was a teenager, most deliberately and intensely during my first years with Rashid when I was struggling to come to terms with the childhood sexual abuse. I don’t wear this as a badge, and it is nothing I feel especially proud of. It’s just how it was, that’s the truth, whether or not I liked it, which I never have.
