Grieving the Relationship I Didn’t Have | In The Silence
Somebody’s Daughter by Ashley C. Ford
One of the most prominent voices of her generation debuts with an extraordinarily powerful memoir: the story of a childhood defined by the ever looming absence of her incarcerated father and the path we must take to both honor and overcome our origins.
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Somebody’s Daughter steps into the world of growing up a poor Black girl, exploring how isolating and complex such a childhood can be. As Ashley battles her body and her environment, she provides a poignant coming-of-age recollection that speaks to finding the threads between who you are and what you were born into, and the complicated familial love that often binds them.
— book abstract on Goodreads
Soooo good. You can tell thatby the amount of quotes I have in this post because I nearly highlighted everything. It’s a tough story and life, but it was written with so much care and beauty that it lets you take it in like a tight hug. A hug that both recognizes and releases all the troubles that we hold.
With so many topics and situations in the book especially so many that were relatable, I truly didn’t know what to focus my musing on. But I remembered a tweet from the author Ashley C. Ford that I saw before I had read the book.
I remembered seeing this, chuckling, and also thinking, “me too”. Of course, I haven’t written a book as well, but I related to the feeling of wishing I had more of a story to tell about me and my father.
A year before my father died in 2018 after a long battle with kidney disease but at the time he had been the sickest and in the hospital, our relationship started to gradually shift towards something that was more honest and peer-like. My aunt and I found out about my two half-siblings and the conversation I had with my father about it was the first of its kind. We were always only cordial before and focused on small talk to not weigh down the conversation with the things unsaid — “made up contracts for a shoestring bond” as Ashley C. Ford brilliantly said. This conversation was short, but honest. There were still questions I wanted to ask but didn’t have the courage to. And I imagine there were also answers he wanted to give, but wasn’t sure how to express them.
The few times I visited my father, though pleasant, bowed under the weight of our expectations. We were happy to see one another, but we could not always say the thing we wanted to say most and risk spoiling the other’s dream. We never discussed them, yet somehow agreed on these terms. An unspoken pact between an emotionally desperate father and daughter. Made up contracts for a shoestring bond.
But he spoke to me like a peer. Something I thought was strange at the time, but later on, I cherished this small feature and some of the information shared proved useful the next year when we had to figure out his burial plans. To have been seen as an adult that this man, who holds many mysteries, could share these things with was something I now see as an honor.
When my father died on September 30, 2018, it was the start of weird, but beautiful week. My first parental cousin (aka my father’s first niece) was born a few days later, unexpectedly before the due date. My aunt’s wife had her baby two days before we held my father’s funeral. Safe to say there was a mix of feelings that week, but in that week, I also questioned my grief for my father. I did not grieve like the rest of my family and I wondered why. I wondered if I was “grieving wrong” or that if not shedding tears would have other people question by grief. But I also did not have the same relationship with my father as everyone else. My relationship with my dad was a bittersweet mix of emotions but one thing I realized was that I had already been grieving for years. However, now my grief shifted. I no longer wondered and longed for what could have been — the father he should have been or the relationship I wished we had — but instead, I grieved for that which would now never happen. Ashley C. Ford also explains this well in a couple other tweets about their mother (there is additional context in their full thread):
Now I believe that the relationship with our loved ones doesn’t also die at death — it transforms. So I don’t think our relationship is done and sometimes, I’m reminded that perhaps he is able to be there for me better as an ancestor than he could have as parent on earth. However, there are ‘lost dreams’ that I have learned to let die and there are still more that I know will come up for me at future times in life. There are the experiences I wish I had and would have — and the stories I wish I could tell about them.
But there is one thing I know for sure I can always say about my dad and me: I have his face.
I always wished he’d say more about the little brother he loved, the man who left me with his face, and little else.
|Renée|
BONUS: Songs that came into my mind while writing
Almost by Tamia (not directly relevant lols, but still)
more quotes:
The library felt too good to be true. All those books, on all those shelves, and I could just pluck them out, one by one, find an empty chair, and read, and read, and read. When I realized nobody would stop me from browsing in the teen and adult sections, that books were a place where my age didn’t matter as long as I could read the words in front of me, I found a home for my mind and spirit to take root. My imagination had already taken me on a million wild rides, but here was unlimited adventure. For the rest of my life, I would seek out the library the way some search for the soft light of a chapel in the dark.
I was a child, unspoiled in a certain way. I didn’t doubt myself. I decided and I tried. Then I’d fail and try again. Or I would succeed and go on to try something new. I was not always as afraid of the world or as nervous about the other people living in it alongside me, or what they might do to me.
When my life was new, I understood in my bones how little it mattered what anybody else was doing, or what they thought about what I was doing. I believed my bones then.
A self that didn’t tell the truth because it had learned the same lessons I’d learned and knew the quiet and the dark could be good places to hide from screams and slaps.
I liked to think of my mother as protective, like she could rage the devil away if he came for me in the night.
I didn’t mind when she told those stories. I craved seeing her happy, witnessing that smile. It was easier to laugh at the jokes after you’d forgotten the pain. That smile sometimes made me forget the pain, and I would laugh too. Over time, forgetting the pain to make the best joke got easier and easier.
Living with my grandmother and her father in the fields of Missouri, I learned to think only of myself for hours at a time. Spending half a day alone, free of the company of people who would distract me from my being, I learned to think about who I was, who I was becoming, and what I wanted.
“You will have to go back. We’ll both go back home. Your mama misses you.” My grandmother reached over and grabbed my hand, both of us still staring into the hole. “These things catch fire without letting each other go. We don’t give up on our people. We don’t stop loving them. She looked into my face, her eyes watering at the bottoms. “Not even when we’re burning alive.”
She knew what I wanted, and she wanted me to know it would not be mine. We were locked in a power struggle, not that I would have known to call it that, and I was confused because I did not want power from my mother. I wanted her to acknowledge the pain in my body and heart. I wanted it to mean something to her because she loved me, and I knew it, and I couldn’t understand why she couldn’t just say sorry. What was so wrong with me that I didn’t deserve that?
My grandmother used to say, “What’s the point of living by everybody if you don’t want to see anybody?” I came from social people, and though I felt overwhelmed by their company, I was always glad to see them.
“When it comes to family, all we have is each other,” she would say to my brother and me often. Especially when we fought. She deserved more. This New Year’s Eve she looked like a woman who had more, whether that was true or not.
I was much more interested in bearing witness to all this freedom. Grown-ups seemed lighter at night, like their feet might hover an inch or two off the ground as soon as the sun went down. The later it got, the higher they flew. It didn’t make me want to grow up faster; I was content to wait my turn. Even then, my childhood seemed precious and like something to cling to. I just wanted to watch and be awed.
Now, I knew that family was everything you needed to make a new start. This was our home. Nothing bad could get us here.
We wanted to be good, as all children do, but as young Black children learn sooner than others, we don’t all get the chance to be seen that way.
I didn’t mind rules, but I didn’t appreciate being lied to by adults, and when I saw or heard it happening, I couldn’t shut up. Mrs. Miller desperately wanted me to shut up. And if I’m honest, I enjoyed making her feel that way.
He hadn’t grabbed or taken anything from me to make his point. He had offered me a bit of himself, the way he saw me, and I was as touched as anyone could be by the gesture. It felt like the kind of compliment that came along far too rarely, the kind you could keep without suffering for it in advance.
I wasn’t sure if this was love for me, but it seemed like the kind of thing you jumped into and figured out later like all the happy couples on television.
I thought not wanting him would be what kept me safe.
No one would know him, and he wouldn’t get to know the best of me. The me I felt like I was losing.
I did not mind getting hurt as much as I minded being surprised by the pain. I wanted to see it coming.
“If I give you all of me, and you give me nothing back, then what do I have? Less than nothing. Less of me, and none of you.”
Being invisible was still my superpower.
Did we all hate this together, but cry about it separately?
The outside of me didn’t present a little girl to be loved innocently. My body was a barrier.
He only had to sing and remind me I was still here, in this body. Every part of me was still here.
Her fearful desire not to be “talked about” expressed itself as a constant monitoring of Other People’s behaviors and presentations of themselves, and she offered swift judgment whether the behavior or presentation was good or bad.
To be fair, I always lost. Still, it seemed important to keep fighting when it felt like the right thing to do.
I kept myself from crying for the rest of the trip while my grandmother pretended not to watch my face. I was good at this. Control your breath, quiet your heart, die on the inside, only let them see life. Normal life.
As much as my mother, teachers, cousins, grandmother, and classmates had already spoken to me about the mechanics and morals of sex, no one ever mentioned that rape isn’t sex.
The hands of a musician move over anything they love like an instrument.
I received one of the greatest gifts of my life: the deep knowledge that I had had sex, with my own intent and will, and it had been like nothing I had ever experienced before. Nothing.
School felt like practice for white collar prison, and I couldn’t really pretend to care as much as it would take to make everybody happy.
I’d been accepted, and despite all I’d taught myself about wanting less, and needing less, I couldn’t pretend I didn’t want to chase this dream.
I didn’t need to belong to him or anybody else to be on my way somewhere I’d never been before.
Brett is very nice, and that is a beautiful ring. But you have your own diamond. You don’t need one from anybody else.
I did not feel afraid though. I felt free.
I am freer than you, and that is worth all the things I don’t have.
We didn’t know, back then, there are about a million ways to love and be loved by another person. We thought what we had, the way we had it, was the only way it could be.
Over the next semester, I fell in love with my body. I loved it the way it had always meant to be loved: ferociously and compassionately. I did not like the way I looked every day, but I loved myself
It doesn’t take long for children to teach themselves not to want what they’ve already learned they won’t have. I couldn’t find a good enough reason to torture myself by acknowledging my futile desires for more stuff.
But when you’re a single parent, you take your wins and accept your losses. My mother’s fear kept her children fed, clean, and housed. It kept one foot in front of the other. For the most part, up until this point, my mother’s fear had assisted her in meeting her most necessary goals. She had no reason to believe it might kill her until it tried to do just that.
But they were good listeners, and though I tended to hold adults to impossible standards, I seemed to have infinite patience for children. Unlike some adults, I never quit remembering what it was like to be one. Their small plights were familiar to me, as were their big feelings. I didn’t feel like a child, but I felt children.
When someone you can’t remember being physically involved in your life asks for physical involvement in your life, it is hard to know where and how to make room for them. I was twenty-five years old before I decided to make room for my father. The weight of this lingering choice should have shamed me. But the high of possibility, the potential for what kind of man my father might be, persisted.
My father was a mystery, and his letters were the clues to where I’d come from, why I was the way I was. I would take my letter to my bedroom to open privately. For many years, I did not write him back. I’m sure I had my reasons why I
didn’t write. I couldn’t remember any of them now.I did not know that there are miles between running out of things to say, and running out of the strength to say them
Do me a favor, Ashley? When you write about you and me? Just tell the truth. Your truth. Don’t worry about nobody’s feelings, especially not mine. You gotta be tough to tell your truth, but it’s the only thing worth doing next to loving somebody.
For half a minute, I was flying. For half a minute, I knew I had it in me to tell the truth, and be loved anyway.
I was also afraid to go back and live there again. I was different, and not everybody was going to be able to handle that, and I didn’t trust myself to handle them.
“You need to go to the library,” my grandmother offered. “Remember when you spent so much time at the one up here?”
A nagging thought demanding my attention, telling me how good and smart I might be, more so than I realized, and how much more I might be worthy of. Like a better story.
She let out a breath. “Ashley, you’re the only person who has to live in your skin, and wake up with the consequences of your choices. That’s why you can’t let other people make the big choices for you. You have to do what it feels right to do, and you can’t let anybody stop you.” I heard the stifled smile again. “Not even me.
She turned her head toward me at half speed. She looked into my eyes and said, “I don’t want to do chemotherapy.” I leaned close enough for my grandmother — my dearest love-to hear the smile I couldn’t bring to my face. “Then you
don’t have to.”My cousins and I were raised like siblings who lived in different houses.
If I’d learned anything being on my own these last few years, it was how much I needed this time away from my family to see myself clearly.
Who could die with that kind of fire coursing through their veins? But whatever burns will also burn up. Maybe it never made sense for anybody to run that hot for so long. Maybe, in her own way, she decided to drop that torch, and let the light fade. Maybe she was ready to go even if I wasn’t ready for her to be gone.
However complicated, I could exist in both, as me, fully me. I could be strong enough, because I had to be — if I didn’t want to lose this. And I knew I didn’t.
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