10 months out...

An open letter to my mother on surviving the last 10 months...

Hi Mom-

I'm home today still nursing a cold but feeling better than I have in days. I just wanted to drop you a note to tell you how much I enjoyed our conversation yesterday. You felt much more present...I'm so glad that you seem to be negotiating with a bit more ease the gist of this chaos we loosely call life. No it's not easy and most times it's not even pretty but it is OURS to do with what we want. A true gift if one places to one side the icky parts and thinks about the rest of it very, very long and hard!

I found the passage below by Octavia Butler. It spotlighted for me so many things...issues around motherhood (which I think about now and again, not suprising since this is my nine year),constructions that touch on persistence and perserverance, heroism, and the traps of superficial cleverness verses genuine instances where we actually exihibit strength of character.

I think that everyone as they look back on their lives wants to know that they proceeded draped in the mantle of ethical fortitude. But it's such a ferocious ordeal to get to that space in real time. We're beset with doubts and morose thoughts of surrender...as you say...we're just so tired...it's hard to imagine that there is any authentic and honorable response to fear, sadness, grief, anger, etc., other than pallid capitulation. Reading this passage below helps me to remember that there is in fact a direction that makes sense.

Big hugs and love,


"When I was in college, I began Kindred, and that was the first [novel] that I began, knowing what I wanted to do. The others, I was really too young to think about them in terms of 'What do you have to say in this novel?' I just knew there were stories I wanted to tell. But when I did Kindred, I really had had this experience in college that I talk about all the time, of this Black guy saying, 'I wish I could kill all these old Black people that have been holding us back for so long, but I can't because I have to start with my own parents.'

That was a friend of mine. And I realized that, even though he knew a lot more than I did about Black history, it was all cerebral. He wasn't feeling any of it. He was the kind that would have killed and died, as opposed to surviving and hanging on and hoping and working for change. And I thought about my mother, because she used to take me to work with her when she couldn't get a baby sitter and I was too young to be left alone, and I saw her going in the back door, and I saw people saying things to her that she didn't like but couldn't respond to.

I heard people say in her hearing, 'Well, I don't really like colored people.'
And she kept working, and she put me through school, she bought her house – all the stuff she did. I realized that he didn't understand what heroism was.

That's what I want to write about: when you are aware of what it means to be an adult and what choices you have to make, the fact that maybe you're afraid, but you still have to act.''


-Octavia Butler interviewed in Locus Online- June 2000)