Something Like Beautiful

by asha bandele

  In the days before prison, long ago, on another continent, shame was the center point of punishment. An entire village might turn its back—physically—on an offender (or perceived offender). It was, in some places, the worst punishment one could receive. Of course too, we know it here, in the American system of jurisprudence: from the seventeenth-century stockades to the twenty-first-century perp walks, shame is still very much a part of who we are.

  And in some ways it is effective. It can elicit an immediate response. The shamed one offers an ocean of tears, a head hung low, followed by a deeply passionate and public apology. But it does little to transform much in any lasting way. If it did, of course, we would not see the same people making the same mistakes over and over. Shame may stop a particular behavior in a given moment but it does not move a soul, and when you want to shift something in a person so that it doesn’t shift right back, there is only one tool to use and that tool is love.

  It is the only proven method, the one that lasts. Cruelty and fear and shame work only until those who have been cowed get their own weapons. I was no different. Feeling ashamed of my behavior, my self-berating, the berating by some of the people I pulled around me, did little to make me a stronger, clearer—sober—person.

  And now I look realistically at the people of this nation, realistically at myself, and know addiction and self-abuse and self-destructive behaviors are as American as apple pie. We may excoriate some and not others, but all that acting out begins at the same source, in the same river of pain, of disconnection.

  The National Institute on Drug Abuse reported in 2004 that some twenty percent of our population—48 million people—have used prescription drugs for nonmedical reasons in their lifetime. And these are licit drugs! Not coke or weed or meth or dope but the stuff that is in our parents’ medicine cabinets. But for just the prescription stuff alone, 48 million! What, then, are the numbers when we consider all those who struggle with health and other issues, because from McDonald’s to meth, from Vicodin to Valium, from weed to wine, from caffeine to cocaine, from shopping to sex, there’s something out there, some vice, we cannot leave alone or moderate?

  Working with my doctor helped me to finally begin to see myself without anger or recrimination and as just one thing: fully human.

  “That’s a good place to start,” my doctor said flatly, and then pushed me further. We talked more about Rashid and more about Nisa. She met Nisa. She led me to understand that feeling guilty about the breakup or not living up to some fantasy idea of the perfect mother was not going to change past actions. “You can feel guilty all you want, but are you going to get back together with Rashid?” she asked. “I can’t see it,” I confessed, “not with the deportation order.” Admitting that brought me to a greater truth, a good one, if not an easy one.

  I couldn’t see being with anyone right then. I thought about all the years I’d spent, from fourteen to thirty-seven, involved, engaged, or married. “I feel good about being single, about getting to finally know myself as my own woman, not a woman inexorably bound to a man. I want to know Nisa better too,” I said, and then set about the business of making that happen.

  Because when I looked at all of it, when I looked back through all of it, I had no choice but this one, this one that required my real sweat and my real, real labor: not only the work of dealing with my own fears and demons, but the work of taking those observations and using them to change long-standing patterns of behavior.

  In my own life, the war on terror has not been about distant shores or cultures, not about planes and buildings or suicide bombers. The war on terror was a battleground inside myself that I have fought on and fought on so that I could stand here now—not broken all the way, not broken so much that I can’t be pieced back together, not broken to the extent that I would be rendered an ineffective and useless mother to my Nisa, my child, my bright light in the big city. I will never be that broken. I will never come even close to it again.

  Chapter 14

  something like beautiful

  It’s a Sunday night and I’m thinking, this is it, the reason I did it, the reason I do it. The weekend has been perfect. Even with all of the imperfections in our lives—the locked-away father, the shaky finances, my addictions, my depression—this weekend they do not intrude on us. They do not stop us from being ourselves. They do not stop me from being me; Nisa is always herself.

  And it’s not as though there was some great incredible happening or happenings this weekend I’m telling you of; we spent one day in bed, ordering pizza, snuggling, watching scary movies. The other day, we baked cupcakes and read to each other and organized ourselves for the week and finished homework and spoke of many things. For nearly two hours on a Saturday, Nisa went on about her friends, whom she loves, whom she has always loved even if they are kind of annoying to her in certain ways (which she sometimes confesses to me really secret-like, pulling me aside, a whisper in my ear). She details who she wants to have sleepovers with and why and what they will do when they are together, and also who understands her because they’re an Aries like her.

  It is weekends like this, of which there are many, that make me weep from not understanding: why was I ever so sad? Why was I ever in so much pain? Not that there haven’t been losses, but for whatever else is gone, now, at long last, I see what is not gone, I see who is not gone.

  I see who is right here, right here and grinning and making up bad jokes and running back and forth and helping out with housework and hugging me and asking for just one more kiss as she blows bubbles from her bubble bath around herself and onto me.

  Another confession: as hard as it is, there are times like this weekend when I do not mind being a single parent. If I am completely honest, after all of these years out here on my own, I just can’t say that I would even know how to share decision making with someone else. After so long figuring out how to do this alone, how would I begin to be a fair coparent? Even with Rashid, I would find it hard. I would do it, of course I would do it, but when I think about it, I think about it in the way you approach figuring out how to win a tug-of-war.

  Not that I believe that this is either right or perfect. What I am saying is that while it is not perfect, I do like my life. While it is not perfect, it is something like beautiful, the rhythm we have found, my Nisa and I, the rhythm that we make, just the two of us here, alone, together. Despite my dreams about family, about having bunches of children and a loving husband, I looked up one day and had to come to terms with the fact that we were it, me and Nisa. And we may never be more than this, and that is fine.

  But this weekend, like on other weekends before it, none of these thoughts intruded. We were just us, as is, and as is, we traveled. We talked about Halloween, Nisa and I. We talked about Paris and the Mona Lisa and the Louvre. We talked about Malcolm X, the value of good handwriting, the Cheetah Girls, the Amistad, the hosing of nonviolent protesters during the civil rights movement, Marie Antoinette and the beginnings of fashion as we know it today. We talked about why one should oppose the death penalty, Mumia Abu-Jamal, what food dye to use to make the cupcakes the right shade of Halloween orange, the difference between granulated and confectioners’ sugar, and we talked about medicine; Nisa toys with the idea of becoming a doctor and lately has taken to watching the Discovery Health channel over Disney.

  When my baby finally drifts off to sleep and when I finally lie down to do the same, I wonder, with all of this exploration, all of this excitement, all of these big conversations over broad and thick landscapes, landscapes that even seem enchanted in some way, where was there room for depression to creep in?

  How did I not see it when it first began, how did I not feel it stretching me open, leaving a canyon of sorrow where there should have been peace? How did I not stop it? Did it happen while I was sleeping, while I was looking the other way, while I was multitasking, punch-drunk with exhaustion, reading the Times? Did it happen while I was worried about someone or something else? Did it happen, d
id I really let it happen on my watch?

  And if it did, if all this happened on my watch and if it is not simply my cross to bear, but a cross I allowed and that I willingly offered to carry alone, I want to say I was wrong. I want to say that to Nisa. I want to explain to her that perhaps I have closed away people because after everything, it has felt safer. I want to say I’m sorry I didn’t do better. I want to ask for another chance. I want to admit that I cannot imagine loving again. I cannot imagine being in love again. I can’t. But being unwilling to love, being unwilling to love as a grown-up woman, that cannot be the answer. It cannot be the model for my child, not for my loving child, not for my child who loves to love.

  My eyes are heavy now and I’m drifting off to sleep. I’m drifting and I’m thinking that I want to do better, I want the world to be better for Nisa, better for me. I may not be able to fix the world, reverse global warming, stop child abuse, or change a man whose rage blankets his heart. But I can fix me. I do not want to give in to my fear, my fear that to love is to open yourself up to pain that cannot ever be resolved. Which is why I know that to have more weekends that are just as incredible, we have to open up the door to it, I have to open the door. And to open up the door in ways I haven’t done, I should learn from someone who seems to have always known how.

  I have to take your lead, Nisa, and not be afraid, not offer only false intimacy, but offer the real thing, real friendships, real love. Like you do.

  So when it is late and the dark sky is encompassing and thorough and Nisa is sleeping next to me, I return to the place of peace I once knew. I return with all the humility I can conjure up and call my own, and then I meditate and then I pray for a space to be given, for a space to be opened up to allow in the bringers of light, the dream weavers, the supernovas, the luminous, the pure, the mighty believers in love, the earth angels in our midst, those who do not know how to hate or to reject, who do not know cruelty as an option, those who choose laughter and joy and kindness—mostly that, kindness—again and again and again and again.

  I ask them to come.

  In the sweet, soft hours I have learned to call on the seers to shore me up, to call on those who have a particular and clear vision and who are all around us and who come through us, even as we have set them aside. It’s the children. It’s always been the children.

  Without empty sentiment or hyperbole, we know this, we really do. We know what children see. We memorialize it in poems, in stories we exchange in the autumn of our years, about our once-upon-a-time innocence, our long-ago goodness before we made whatever decisions that took us out of our ethics, out of ourselves. This is the subject of novels and nonfiction alike, across cultures and generations. So we know. We know.

  And just as much, we know what they, the children, are capable of giving us. We pretend that our exchange with them is a one-way street—us changing the diapers or breast-feeding or helping with homework or paying for college. We have a million reasons why they owe us. But when we tell the whole truth, we have to acknowledge what we owe them, which begins with us embracing the beauty and the character most of our children give right back to us, and they give right back to us freely: their tiny bodies appearing seemingly out of nowhere just to say, I love you, Mommy!

  And we say that we understand this, we say that we know how important the babies are. We say it in slogans and we say it on T-shirts. We say it on bumper stickers and politicians say it on the campaign trail. Parents and educators say it in the PTA. And I know many of us mean it when the words spill out of our mouths. The problem is that we just don’t act on it. Not en masse, not as a movement. We have to be a movement even if we start a movement within our own singular hearts.

  If we do, if we are, schools across this nation will rise up from the physical and academic shambles. No child will ever die of an impacted tooth because somehow Medicaid’s paperwork and an insurance company’s paperwork mattered more than a young life, mattered more than life itself, which is why even with a mother on the phone almost daily, begging and begging to please help her baby, still watched that boy die waiting for someone to approve the needed surgery, died because the poison traveled up from his tooth and into his brain and he was twelve, just twelve years old in 2007, when it went down just like that. And it would not have happened if we put power behind the platitudes, muscle behind the musings.

  Chemicals would not be dumped into specific neighborhoods so that all the babies wake up one Harlem morning with asthma. Childbirth would not still be—as it was in the thirteenth century—the leading cause of death for women. Rape would not still be pandemic and the majority of rapes would not occur before a child is eighteen, with half of those occurring before a child is twelve. The infant mortality rate in Mississippi would not have doubled almost exclusively because of Clinton’s welfare-reform policy, which has made getting prenatal care almost impossible for the poorest of mothers.

  We would not hire more police to stem the flow of urban violence. If the police could fix the problem, there wouldn’t be so many jails and prisons, a back-end solution to a problem that is best addressed head-on, in the way of G. Asenath Andrews, principal of the Catherine Ferguson Academy in Detroit, a school for pregnant and parenting girls, children normally left at the bottom of the list when their names are mentioned at all. Under her leadership, ninety percent graduate from high school. And one hundred percent of those are accepted to college. We would turn to her, and we would ask her to help us develop a curriculum that is meaningful in our own children’s lives. We would listen to her because she listens and pays attention to young people. We’d listen to her or else we would listen to Mad Dads or Barrios Unidos, the people on the ground who honor our children, put their lives on the line for our future’s sake. We would listen to them over the voices of the screaming mad men and women on talk radio shows, on Fox News. We would listen to our own children. I am trying to listen to my own children, the one I made, the ones in my universe.

  Which is not to say that children know all, or see or understand all. But the breadth of the integrity most of them embody and are willing to share with the world, until we talk or beat or trick or lie or neglect them out of it, the genuine space of love and truth in their hearts that is so readily and easily accessible, and their real curiosity, and their true push to do better, be better—I know that these are the qualities too often missing from the adult world I inhabit. We would listen to them, our children, and right now we do not.

  We listen nearly exclusively to those who have the right title, or the right figure in their bank account, sometimes just the right look. But all those things, which admittedly I have coveted in my life—good looks, money, position—I know now, after everything, that I can live without them, without the kind of money I once strove for and without the stature I once thought essential and Lord knows I can live with not being the prettiest, but I will not survive without what my daughter brings to me each good morning: love, spiritual excellence, integrity. And gratitude.

  So yes, in the quiet hours, I say it and I say it and then I say it again: Come, Nisa.

  Come, Nina and Naima and Adasa and Jahiya.

  Come, Lauren and Spencer and Mark and Aanisah.

  Come, Zakiyah and Adisa and Eleni and Monifa, little Asha and Zioni and Truth; come, Eva.

  Come, Aja and Butterfly and Petricia and Brianna.

  Come, Nico; come, Sule; come, Lucas; come, Charlie and Simone.

  Come, Adana and Zuri and Arian and Amina and Amina.

  Come, Tuari. Bring your brother. Come, Brooks, bring your sister; come, Aljameer, and come, Aundre.

  Come, Karin and Justine, Brittany J. and Diamond.

  Come, you all, everyone.

  Come, let all of us see you. Let you see yourself, and then let every one of us who needs it be able to finally truly see ourselves and begin to heal.

  Chapter 15

  motherhood, lost and found

  It’s Thanksgiving weekend and I am telling Anne the story, the re
al story, the one I have lived, the one I have denied. For years my sister has stood alongside me steadfast and faithful, waiting and asking, “Sister, when is Rashid coming home? What’s happening with his case?” For years I have answered these inquiries sort of Rashomon-like, telling pieces of what’s happening, small corners of the nightmare, letting her put her own spin on whatever I shared.

  But I want to claim my life now, for all that it has been and all that it has not been, and I tell Anne this. This is my one life, I say to her. I want to have it and have it fully, no matter what that means.

  We have returned to my Brooklyn apartment from our mother’s home, the home we grew up in. And we are, for all the stumbling and stuttering and missteps and mishaps, grown and sexy women now, possessed of all that that means:

  We have a past—lost or found loves, bruises that still show and wounds that have healed.

  We have a present—families and debt and decisions about schools, irritations on the job.

  And we have a future, three children between us—my gorgeous, sometimes sulky, and teenaged niece, Lauren; my nephew, Spencer, a boy’s boy, who bounces off walls, falls out of trees. He was born six months before Nisa. And we have Nisa.

  She has left me and my sister in the living room, and has taken her cousin Spencer by the hand and led him down my long hallway to where the bedrooms are. Warren, my brother-in-law, jet-lagged and exhausted, is asleep in my bed and I tell the children not to wake him, not to go into my room. They say okay, and they do not break their promise, but later, when my sister and I wander down the hallway to check on our babies, who are dangerously quiet, we discover Spencer and Nisa have pulled out what appears to be every last toy Nisa has ever owned and barricaded them against my bedroom door. We shake our heads, my sister and I, decide there has been no harm done—Warren’s slept through the whole thing—and we return to the living room. We return to the comfort and familiarity of our sisterhood.