I will never stop writing about my mother

Here's why

My mother, August 2013

Dear ma,

This past weekend I dreamt of you for the first time since you died. Friends dropped me off to meet you. You were pissed, about what I don’t know, but you took it out on me. You had that same angry glare that sucked up my air.

In the dream I couldn’t run from you like I had so many times. You said words I don’t remember. I just remember the earthquake in my chest, then a caving, a rockslide, a collapse. The same way I felt the last time I saw you over a year ago, until I remembered I’m not a kid anymore.

I said No. I said: Stop.

I didn’t do that in the dream. I woke up heaving, tears pouring, and thought of your daughter, my sister, who hates so much that I write about you… who is more concerned with your reputation than your actual behavior, than how you treated me…

She says I need to get over what happened in our childhood. The thing is, ma, I’m not writing about “our” childhood, I am writing about mine.

I’ve spent years trying to understand you, writing about your life, your pain, how it shaped and influenced mine. Ma, I can say with absolute sincerity that I’ve forgiven you for what happened in my childhood. I get that you were doing the best you could. By the time you were 21, you had three kids and had suffered unspeakably. The thing is, ma, you still treated me with the same cruelty when I was an adult. I was reminded periodically, no, often, why I fled your home in the first place when I was just 13. The world felt safer than you…

Do you think it feels good to have had this childhood? To have had a life where even in adulthood I had to run from you? I wish I had another story to tell. I wish this wasn’t the memory of you, my mother…but, alas, it is. And what am I to do? Not write it? Choose someone else’s approval over me, my heart? Do you know how many times I’ve done that?

I vowed I was never going to that again. I’m not going to start again now. Not for anyone, and especially not for my sister. No.

***

Dear reader,

The first time storytelling saved me was up in the plum tree of our backyard in Bushwick, Brooklyn. We moved into that apartment in the spring of 1980. We hadn’t been there a few weeks when mom climbed our first floor window into the yard. I imagine her visioning, like I did when we moved to our land in the winter of 2021.

As she cleans the years of trash, she sees the tomatoes hanging heavy on the vine, the peppers are starting to redden, the pumpkin is stretching its arms, it’s leaves huge, the flowers bright yellow.

At four years old it was the tree in the left corner of the yard that pulled me out of that same window, up the path, to its feet. I stared up at its wide canopy, the bright green invited me up. I’d never climbed a tree before, but that wasn’t going to stop me.

It was in that tree that I started telling myself stories. I’d climb as high as my thrashing heart let me that day. Then I’d sprawl myself on a limb, scabbed legs hanging, I’d close my eyes and I’d tell myself stories.

Writing saved me in boarding school when I couldn’t fit in and stopped trying. I wrote pages and pages of letters every week. Most weeks I spent my $8 allowance on stationary and stamps.

In college, when I was in an abusive relationship with a drug dealer from uptown (as wild as it sounds, it’s probably even more scandalous than you imagine, but this story is for another time), I rollerbladed the city—Dyckman to the West Village, Bushwick, Downtown Brooklyn, across Fordham and Pelham to Orchard Beach. All I carried was a beeper (holy flashback!), a small backpack with a bottle of water (that I filled in open fire hydrants), a few dollars, a bag of weed, a cigar to roll that weed in, and a journal with a pen. Wherever I stopped, the Christopher St Piers, Purple Lights in Battery Park, Maria Hernandez Park in Bushwick, I smoked a blunt and wrote.

I wrote my way out of that relationship.

I wrote my way out of a few more fucked up relationships including the one with my daughter’s toxic dad and the ones that followed.

I wrote my way out of jobs I hated, friendships that unraveled. It was in the writing and the movement—blading, hiking, biking, handball playing, dancing—that I found myself again.

I think of the Derek Walcott poem Love After Love:

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Writing is me feasting on my life.

Writing and the old growth forest of Inwood Hill Park saved me when my brother died and I reeled into the darkest place of my life.

Writing saved me when that grief of griefs, my mother wound, came rushing at me with the force of a thousand tsunamis. It was in literature that I found I wasn’t alone. It was in pages of books and journals that I found my life’s work—writing the mother wound.

And now, after loosing my mother on June 3rd, I am putting my grief into hiking the old growth forests of the Hudson Valley, where I live. (I did 25 miles last week.)

I am putting it into my garden—my three sisters plot, cucumbers, zucchini, green beans, strawberries, and more—like I learned from my mother in the garden oasis she built in the war zone that was Bushwick back in the 80s.

I am putting my grief into my writing, into my book, these newsletter essays, and more.

---

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t wish my sister and I could talk about why I do this work, how it has saved me, how I’ve helped so many people pen their stories and ease their pain. I wish she could hear what my childhood felt like for me, so bad that I ran away and never stopped running…but we can’t do that. She won’t listen. And I won’t try to convince her. That is a relationship that never existed.

I never felt protected or safe with her. She never had my back like big sisters are supposed to. As a kid I watched the Little House on the Prairie series and wondered why we didn’t have a relationship like Laura and Mary Ingalls. Yes they argued and disagreed, but they always looked out for one another. They never betrayed one another. But my sister was more like the mean girl Nellie Oleson, always ready to get me in trouble and spill my secrets.

I got a nasty message from her a few days after I posted my last  newsletter, My Mother Died. We hadn’t spoken in a year. I was going to post it here but I decided against it. What I will share is this:

if you let your “trauma” outweigh all the good in our childhood…maybe it’s time for you to look within yourself & see what’s the problem.

I had been working on it for weeks, but didn’t post it because I knew I would see her at my mother’s memorial. I decided I’d give her that much…

I called her when ma died. We weren’t on speaking terms, but you call your sister when your mother dies. Within seconds she said: Let me tell you something, Vanessa. Don’t write about my mother.

Me: This isn’t the time.

Her, over and over: Don’t write about my mother.

Me, over and over: This isn’t the time.

She hung up on me.

We saw each other the next day. We hugged and sobbed. Agreed to talk in person at a later time. Obviously that never happened and isn’t going to happen. She didn’t want to talk. She wanted to make demands.

Don’t write about my mother.

I finished writing the essay and posted it days after the memorial. My sister found it because she went looking. She left a message on my Facebook author page: “And THIS is why we’ll never have a relationship.”

This is not why. There are so many reasons why. Too many to list here…

Still, this feels like another death.

An elder once told me: “You can’t love your writing more than you love yourself, Vanessa.” Ten years later, I know this for sure: I love myself, my work, my writing, more than I care for my sister’s approval. And I’m not sorry for that.

I will not relinquish what has saved me to appease people who don’t care about me or my heart, who put trauma in quotations marks (“trauma”) to demean and dismiss me. No. Absolutely not.

I will keep writing about my mother, with love, honesty and nuance. I won’t write a lie. Not about her or myself. I’ve spent a long long time looking within. I’ve spent a long long time with these stories. And I am going to continue writing them. And I will continue publishing them. Y ya.

With love, solidarity, and deep unfuckwithableness,

Vanessa