Tilling the Land

When my daughter told me five years ago on the phone that she no longer wanted to hear from me, I did not think she meant it. It was after one of our many disagreements and I had been waiting for her to call and apologize. And she did call, only that phone call took a different turn than I expected. I said nothing when she told me. I waited for her to finish speaking, kept the phone pressed to my ear, and only dropped my hand when I heard the disconnect tone. I wondered if the calmness in her voice was merely a facade, if she had practiced exactly what to say in the mirror, like she had done when she prepared for her spelling bee contests in junior high school. Straightened back. Focused eyes. And a voice so steady it unnerved some of the judges. I was so sure that she was going to call back any minute that I sat there in that same position, gripping the phone in my lap, until a power outage shrouded me in darkness. And even then I sat there, sinking into the couch that had survived all three moves, feeling the silence grow heavier by the second. I don’t know when I got up and moved to the bedroom, where my husband Kwaku was sound asleep. All I remember is waking up in a pool of sweat, alone, clutching my heart like I’d had a bad dream, and then it dawned on me: I was not dreaming. My daughter, Maria, flesh of my own flesh, had cut me off like a loose thread from a skirt.

I told no one. How does one go about saying something like that? How could I make anyone understand when I could barely grasp it? This thing, what they call “estrangement,” is not something we do. I don’t even like the word on my tongue. How it curls with pride and bares its teeth. It happens in other countries, yes, but not here. Not when a child is tethered to their parents in irrevocable ways. We are not a deck of cards that one shuffles and splits evenly. You are born into a family, and you plant the soles of your feet in its soil and stay rooted. Rain or shine. It is what I’ve done. It is what my parents and grandparents did. We till the land. We pull the weeds. We plant. We harvest. We bend our backs to do it all over again. What do you mean a child chooses whether or not they want their parents in their lives? That a person simply wakes up one day and insists on being separated from those who raised them, those who—and I know you’ll hate this — they belong to? I could never do that. Imagine having to yank a child out of me and say, “I give up. I don’t want any of this. I am going to walk out that door and you can do whatever you want with that child.” Wouldn’t you call me crazy? Wouldn’t you tell me to stay and fight, to face it even if it scares me, to wake up and do the heavy work of tending to someone even if breaks me, even if it kills me?