Writing the Mother Wound

What is it and how did it become my life’s work?

There are things we go through, losses we endure, that rock our foundations, tsunami our lives so we’re never the same. For me that was the death of my beloved brother, my Superman, Juan Carlos. If you’ve read my work, you’ve read about him.

He was beautiful and awful. No one ever loved me like he did. And no one could hurt and disappoint me like he did either…because I loved and looked up to him so much. He was, after all, my Superman. But Carlos was never sober when he hurt me. He battled a 15 year drug addiction that eventually took him out. Not from an overdose though. It was a blood infection that he likely contracted from a dirty hypodermic needle.

It took months for it to be diagnosed. For a week, we thought it was cancer. By the time the doctors found the infection, after myriad appointments and tests, it had damaged two valves in his heart. That’s when we learned that the asthma he’d been diagnosed with as a child was actually a congenital heart murmur. He had two damaged heart valves that were worsened by his drug use. At the far too young age of 41, he needed double valve replacement surgery but had damaged his liver so bad that two surgical teams refused to do the surgery, because they said even if he survived the operation, he’d never survive the recovery. The docs gave him a few weeks to a few months. We got that news on a Thursday. I was set to leave to Berkeley that Sunday for a writing residency. When I told him I was going to cancel my trip, he insisted: “You have to go write our stories, sis.”

The last day I saw him, he asked me to take him to the waiting room so he could sit by the window. He’d been put in a room in the cardiac ward (of Weil Cornell Medical Center on 68th and York Ave in Manhattan) that faced a wall. An artist had painted a colorful mural of flowers and tropical animals like monkeys and parrots, but it was still a wall he was facing. He missed watching the current of the river, seeing the lights of this city he loved so much. He’d wanted to travel but he often said he could never live anywhere but NYC. To him, it was the center of the universe.

I can still hear the shuffle and scrape of his slippers on the linoleum hospital floor. His feet were so swollen from fluid retention, his skin was cracked and dry, and looked about to burst. He leaned on me, wheezing: “I can’t, sis. I can’t.” The defeat in his voice made my chest cave, but I held it in. I led him back to the bed and propped up his feet. The last thing I did before I left that evening was massage his feet with the Albolene I had in my bag. I was boxing then & carried it to moisturize my hands.

First I wiped his feet with soapy water and a bath towel. Then I massaged the Albolene onto his feet and ankles “Soft, sis. Soft,” he said. I used his moans as a map—they changed depending on whether he was in pain or feeling relief.

I’ve thought of this moment often. The intimacy of it. I always think about the story of how Jesus washed his disciples feet at the Last Supper, demonstrating his humility and selfless love. I am not comparing myself to Jesus. I am saying that doing this for my brother gave me a new understanding of the sanctity of this act… especially that this is the last thing I did for him, to relieve his pain, to assuage him, to love him.

The last time I saw him was that Saturday, two days after we got his death sentence. The next day, on my way to the West Coast, I texted him from the airport, sent him pictures from the plane and when I landed. He died that Monday morning, just hours after he signed the DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) order.

The grief over his loss sent me reeling into the darkest time of my life. In that grief, I did what I always do when challenged—I explored what I was enduring. How had writers written about grief? How did they survive it? How were they shattered by grief? What do specialists say about grief? How does it manifest? How does one get over it?

I read so many books and essays and blog posts and poems, but there’s a specific quote that comes to mind when I remember this era in my life—from Cheryl Strayed’s essay Heroin/e:

It is perhaps the greatest misperception of the death of a loved one: that it will end there, that death itself will be the largest blow. No one told me that in the wake of that grief other grief’s would ensue.

My grief was exacerbated by how my mother treated me. Her grief was angry and cruel. At times I felt she hated me for surviving. We went no contact for a while. How long I can’t remember.

Once, I ran into her at my aunt’s house. She looked disgusted when she saw me. Her lip curled, her nostril flared. She stood up with a huff, said curtly, “Me voy.” When she walked past me, she pulled in her shoulder so she wouldn’t touch me.

I couldn’t run from this marrow deep sorrow. I turned my attention to this new grief that was uncovered by my brother’s loss, and started researching strained mother-daughter relationships. There had to be others like me. That’s when I found the term the mother wound and I found the term that best described me: unmothered.

Merriam-Webster’s defines unmothered as: deprived of a mother: motherless <“adolescent gosling that, unmothered, attached itself to him”>

Dictionary.com takes you straight to the various definitions of “mother” as if unmothered couldn’t possibly exist. As if nature would not allow that, God wouldn’t. the universe wouldn’t… And yet, I exist—an unmothered woman.

I started amassing research on the mother wound and quickly found that the research was very white and cis-heteronormative. As an Afro-Indigenous queer woman, second generation immigrant, raised in poverty, I wanted, no, needed to know how the realities of racism, colonization, homophobia, xenophobia, the horrors of immigration, etc. complicated the mother wound. I found answers in literature. Read through the lens of the mother wound, much of Toni Morrison’s work is about the mother wound. I found Jaquira Diaz’s essays, poetry by Patricia Smith and Rachel McKibbens. I was birthing Writing the Mother Wound and didn’t realize it until 2017. Months later I launched the first class with these questions as guidance:

• What is the mother wound?

• Why does the mother wound exist? 

• How does the mother wound manifest? 

• How have writers written about the mother wound in creative nonfiction (memoir & personal essay), fiction and poetry? 

• How can we write about our mother wounds in layered, nuanced ways?

My Writing the Mother Wound work has taken off since then, though I have to confess that I didn’t really get the profundity of the work until the Writing the Mother Wound panel I organized and moderated at AWP 2019.

I was standing in front of the room setting up when I looked up and watched dozens of people streaming in. They quickly filled all the seats then started lining up against the walls and sitting in the middle aisle. People who couldn’t get in stood at the door craning their heads. We definitely broke fire codes that day.

A partnership with Longreads followed months later, then I partnered with NYU’s Latinx Project.

I’ve since traveled with and facilitated dozens of Writing the Mother Wound classes, multi-day classes and one day intensives, both in person and online.

I have no doubt that this is my life’s work. My memoir chronicles how my relationship with my mother permeated every aspect of my life and has affected every relationship I’ve had, especially my relationship with myself.

I’m always reading through that lens. The latest essay I found, that gutted me with its honesty and vulnerability, was in The Atlantic “I Never Called Her Momma: My childhood in a crackhouse” by Jenisha Watts. This essay hit me so hard, I’m including it as pre-reading for my next online Writing the Mother Wound Intensive, scheduled for September 24th, 12-3pm ET. The class was initially scheduled for June 3rd, but was canceled because my mother died that morning. The cause of death was a heart attack, but I think my mother died of a broken heart. She was never the same after my brother Carlos died, and the griefs that ensued after buckled her.

Her death and the writings she left me (so many many pages) affirm the importance of this work for me and, yes, for the world.

If you’re interested in taking the class, but can’t make the June date, I’ve scheduled another one day intensive for December 17th, 12-3pm.

In her book Bittersweet, Susan Cain writes: “The love you lost, or the love you wished for and never had: That love exists eternally. It shifts its shape, but it's always there. The task is to recognize it in its new form.”

I didn't know it when I created the movement, but I know now that Writing the Mother Wound is, for me, that new form. Ashe.