Something Like Beautiful: One Single Mother's Story

212 Pages·2009·0.58 MB·English

by  Asha Bandele

something like beautiful
One Single Mother’s Story
asha bandele
For Nisa, daughter and inspiration
and
For Victoria, agent and midwife
If you want to understand any woman you must first ask
about her mother and then listen carefully . . . Wistful silences
demonstrate unfinished business. The more a daughter
knows the details of her mother’s life—without flinching
or whining—the stronger the daughter.
Anita Diamant, The Red Tent

Contents

Epigraph iii
Chapter 1
Love in a Time Of Confinement 1
Chapter 2
Statistics Don’t Tell the Story. The story Tells the Story. 29
Chapter 3
Family Tree 43
Chapter 4
Girl Child in a Compromised Land 55
Chapter 5
Deportation 65
Chapter 6
Crash 83
Chapter 7
Not Love, Actually 93
Chapter 8
The Essence of a Life In A Day 113
Chapter 9
The New Normal 127
Chapter 10
Dreams 137
Chapter 11
Reasons to Live 145
Chapter 12
Open Wounds 155
Chapter 13
Coming Back 165
Chapter 14
Something Like Beautiful 175
Chapter 15
Motherhood, Lost and Found 185
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Other Books by Asha Bandele
Credits
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
Chapter 1
love in a time of confinement

This is a book about love and this is a book about rage.
This is a book about those opposing emotions and what
happens to a woman, a mother, when, with equal weight, they
occupy the seat of your heart. This is a book about what hap-
pened when they occupied the seat of mine at the very time when
all I should have known, all I was told I should have known, was
joy. Because what else is there but joy when a mother is staring
into the brilliant eyes of the daughter she dreamed of, prayed for,
and finally, finally made manifest? My laughter in those hours,
days, weeks, and early months when Nisa was new and in my
arms, on my breast, then, my laughter was loud, raucous even. It
was regular and it was unbidden.
And then everything changed, dipped down so very, very
low, but this is not a story about postpartum depression. It’s an
everyday life story of an everyday mother.
It’s a story about the orbit of sadness that begins spinning
in you and around you when you discover that the great life
and love you had put together, the emotional balance and
financial wherewithal, nearly everything you had counted on—
everything I had counted on—disappeared, or, perhaps more