In January, before the end of the first semester, I pulled up to my daughter’s high school and parked in the lot beside the campus green. School started two hours earlier, so I thought I timed the visit perfectly. Conditions were ripe for an unobtrusive entrance and exit. I’d slip her school-issued Chromebook across the desk in the front office and be back in my car before anyone noticed. This was how I wished to end my daughter’s stint as a traditional high school student: quietly and without question.

If I’d left the car as soon as I parked, my wish may have been granted. But I was hesitant. The late-morning air was frigid and, as usual after six years spent as a North Carolinian, I was grossly underdressed for the cold.

Apart from my climate-related procrastination, I just needed a minute to sit with circumstances. Once I entered the school, it would truly be over, at least for the rest of her ninth grade year, and though I’d given it this decision due diligence, I couldn’t be certain it was the right one.

We are not unaccustomed to pivots. We’ve been making them since Story was a toddler. She was nearly three and still barely talking when a county-run early intervention program visited our home, conducted a battery of assessments, and determined that Story was eligible for enrollment in public preschool. From preschool through kindergarten, she attended Campfield, an early learning center designed for kids with special needs.

There, I learned what it would be like to bring my concerns to a biannual table of educators who spent substantial time with my daughter without me present. They were learning more about how she listened, spoke, and processed information than I could determine at home.

Special needs are emergent and evolving. New ones crop up as others recede. Some seem to hide themselves altogether. They can be latent or elusive for years before detonating, mushrooming, and eclipsing everything else.

For first grade, the zone school Story should’ve attended — incidentally, one of my own elementary school alma maters — did not seem like an ideal fit for her. So we took a… non-literal approach to our proof of residency and enrolled her in the school across the street from her paternal grandparent’s house. It was in a homeowners’ neighborhood, which meant slightly better funding, resources, and ability to sufficiently accommodate an individualized education plan.

A mother must be inventive. A single mother must make new worlds materialize. Once she realizes she cannot provide the specific, specialized, expensive learning environments her child will require, she must learn to trail her finger along life’s well-worn maps and be prepared to chart new courses whenever once-reliable roads can no longer be traveled.

By the end of fifth grade, Story had attended three different schools and had four different learning experiences. After Campfield and the school right after it, there was a liminal year and a half where she wasn’t enrolled anywhere at all.

The first week of March 2020, I visited Story’s third-grade class to drop off two packages of black greeting cards, along with bags of assorted candy, for her teacher to distribute to her class. I’d arrange for her teacher to provide time for the students to write their farewells.

Story and I were moving from Baltimore County to Durham, NC, so that I could start the first full-time job I’d had in more than a decade. The day I took the greeting cards to her class was also the day I withdrew her from school. We were meant to get her enrolled at her new school the following week.

But that week happened to coincide with the start of the country’s near-universal Covid shutdown.

Story would spend the second half of third grade disenrolled from public school altogether, officially removed from the rolls at her Baltimore school and stuck in enrollment limbo at her North Carolina one. While most school were experimenting with remote learning models before they got a more formal handle on it in the year to come, Story’s Baltimore teacher told us she was welcome to join in their informal class meetings on Zoom, but whenever she did, it only seemed to leave her feeling lonely and disoriented.

Fourth grade was similarly surreal for her. She found herself one of very few students in a Zoom classroom with kids she’d never met in-person school. Most of her class had attended elementary school together in previous years. Academics proved challenging enough for her that her teacher recommended an extended school year. The summer following fourth grade was the first in which she would resume in-person learning.

But fifth grade would mark a real test of her social mettle. Her first full year back in a classroom, in an entirely new state. It took two quarters but by the second half of the year, Story found a tribe: a core group of girlfriends to play with at recess and eat with at lunch.

It was the last year I saw her happy in a school environment.

I’d been dreading parenting through middle school since the day I found out I was pregnant.

Middle school is a cauldron of hormones, a hotbed of hostility and hurt. For years, I shuddered to imagine what middle school might hold for my child. It has been the worst era of my own childhood and I worried history might repeat itself.

But after her great last year of elementary school, I found myself harboring hope that sixth grade might be better than I’d anticipated.

It was not.

Story’s middle school was predominantly Black and Brown, from the student body to the administration, and that was a bonus. It provided cultural continuity with her school experiences in Baltimore, something I’d been missing ever since we moved further South. But her middle school was also chronically overcrowded and underfunded. The special education department had a hard time accommodating her IEP. She was drowning academically and her teachers were too overwhelmed to provide her the attention she needed. The only time a teacher corresponded with me in a timely fashion that year was the one time Story’s academic frustration resulted in an eventual behavioral incident.

Above all, my daughter was just… dispirited. Every day, she came home weepy and demoralized. Every day, it felt like there was too little I could do about it.

When summer hit, we moved. I’ve never known how to navigate school choice. Beyond magnet schools, which I attended myself for middle and high school, I didn’t know the first thing about applications or lotteries or wait lists or charters.

What I knew how to do was move.

I felt like my only recourse was to rent in a “richer” neighborhood. I paid hundreds more than I had at our old apartment, but at the new middle school, I saw an immediate shift in the administration’s attitude toward my daughter and her IEP. It was a fair trade.

During the first ten days of Story’s seventh grade year, I received three phone calls from three different members of her educational team. Each of them greeted me with some variation of: “Just introducing ourselves! Just looking to learn more about Story and what her experiences have been like so far!”

It was the most personal attention I’d ever received as a public school parent, perhaps with the exception of the great care we enjoyed at Campfield seven years before.

It should’ve come as no surprise when I received another phone call, less than three months into the school year, from a speech therapist who was calling to introduce herself… and to ask me if I’d consider having Story assessed for autism spectrum disorder.

I have long wanted to write about this but even now I scarcely have the words. It is only with two years’ distance from that initial assessment that I can even begin to express what it’s meant for me, for Story, and for our family.

For now, I will only say that I fully believe we would not have this information, had we not moved to a better-resourced public school district.

In many ways, high school proved more tumultuous than middle school. One quarter in, I began to wonder how we would make it through the next three days, let alone the next three years.

There aren’t many free, public, accredited alternatives to traditional high school that don’t require me to take on the entire weight of my daughter’s education on my own. I’d never tried homeschool before now because I had no idea how to balance it with my work schedule — or with my non-existent K-12 teaching background and licensure.

But I did manage to find what I hoped was a viable option: a remote learning institution that is part of the state’s public school system, where each of Story’s classes are taught by experienced public high school educators.

It sounded to good to be true, and after the five weeks we’ve spent enrolled, I’m beginning to suspect that it is. Still, if the six in one hand is a child who struggles daily to navigate a school day and the half a dozen in the other, is a complicated web of academics help her sort through, I suppose, at least for now, we’ll take the latter.

In early January, as I sat in my car outside Story’s high school, students started streaming out of each exit door onto the lawn. I’d procrastinated a few minutes too long. Now the kids were on lunch break, quickly forming their social clusters: flirting, flipping, and pulling their prohibited phones out of their backpacks. I studied the different configurations, looking for points of commonality. Some shared a similar fashion sense. Others gathered according to musical, athletic, or conversational interests. Some were circling the school resource officer, bonded in their shared need to chip away at an authority figure’s stony exterior.

I couldn’t imagine my child feeling comfortable in any of these groups.

In the front office, the secretary’s face fell when I told her I was there to return school property. “My girl is leaving us?”

I returned her bittersweet smile. Story was a familiar face in the front office, in the counselor’s offices, and in stairwells crowded with the likeminded students who looking to dodge the lunch crowds on the campus green and the cafeteria.

Despite the fraught nature of the past four months, the secretary’s question made me second-guess our decision to leave. In some ways, it felt like I’d barely given traditional high school a chance. In others, it felt like we’d exhausted its possibilities.

The secretary at the high school was one of us. Her, “My girl is leaving us?” left me lingering on what we’d be giving up. For our Black daughters, trusted Black women administrators (like Story’s 7th and 8th grade school principal), counselors (like her 8th and 9th grade counselors), educators (like the ones she’d grown up interacting with in elementary school back in Baltimore), and staff (like this woman behind the desk in the high school front office), are invaluable advocates. When we drop our kids off in a physical space filled with women whose very language embraces and claims and includes them, we can exhale during the hours we spend apart.

“Maybe she’ll be back,” I offered in a voice that sounded unconvincing, even to myself. “We’re only testing this other school out.”

A day after I dropped off Story’s Chromebook, a different one arrived via UPS. It bore different school branding and bar codes. It was newer, with more capacity to provide clear and sharp camera coverage.

She logs onto it for four classes a day in the comfort and quiet of our home. I can confirm that it’s been life-changing in terms of her daily temperament. In a reversal of a near-daily teen experience, she has not shed a school-related tear since she left her brick and mortar high school. But there are also no opportunities for her to connect with in-person peers during a school day. The social support layer of instruction is greatly diminished.

And the academic path is perplexing and thornier.

There is no way of knowing for sure. No way to predict what will ultimately be best for a child. That’s the only parenting postulation of which I am entirely certain.

Suffice it to say, my daughter’s education will progress as it always has, with a careful eking out of observations, applications, and objectives, with an expansive approach to what’s possible — even if it means moving from county to county, getting Basquiat-level creative, or talking to an entire school system through the camera lens of a Chromebook.

1. Buick Reatta (1990, 2009)

2009 was a reclamation and a compression, a year of milestones either delayed or accelerated. In March, I took my first trip abroad. Sometime in summer, I secured my license after two mortifying driver’s test misfires. In September I bought my first car and rented the first apartment I ever lived in alone. By November: a positive pregnancy test, five days after I turned 30.

A year that eventful does not make for neat demarcations, so the occasion of purchasing my first car blurs a bit at the edges. I paid cash for it: $3,500 comprised of adjunct wages and the remnants of that year’s tax refund. It was the first time I’d saved up for a major purchase, of the type that had life-altering potential. I wasn’t just buying a car; I was buying autonomy, saying goodbye to a full decade of adult life spent at the mercy of buses, trains’ and car owners’ benevolence.

I visited a couple of used car dealerships and came close to keeping a car I was allowed to take off the lot for a full weekend but in the end, the vehicle — a white SUV that felt like the inside of Jonah’s whale — wasn’t right for me. My aunt and uncle then enlisted the help of their longtime car salesman, who kept his eyes peeled for a solid selection at my very modest price point.

The Reatta was both reliable and rare, a domestic two-door, two-seat coupe, produced by General Motors for only four years. The model I bought was made in 1990. It had what must’ve been one of the first electric “computer” consoles, a modern amenity at odds with the old-school weight and shape of the car. It was sleek and sporty but also felt like a tank whenever I sank into its faux leather driver’s seat. I liked how compact it was, how it wrapped itself around me so closely. It was a burgundy metal bear hug. For its vintage, Hepburn-esque elegance, I called it Audrey.

How strange that a car that made perfect sense for a single woman in September could become so impractical for an expectant mother in November. I kept the Reatta even after my baby was born, even after my mother came to live with me and all three of us had to fit into the two-seater somehow. For months, on the way to pediatrician’s appointments, grocery runs or church visits, I’d slip into the narrow, un-cushioned crawlspace behind the front row and lie flat as my mother drove with Story’s rear-facing car seat strapped into the passenger’s seat beside her. With no room to sit upright, I never had any idea how far along we might be in our local journeys. If I could see out of the window at all, all I ever glimpsed were clouds. My body absorbed the full shock of each speed bump, pothole, or hard-braked stop. Despite having the car for under one year, I rarely got to drive it after my daughter was born unless I was alone or she was the only other passenger.

Whenever I rode in the crawlspace, I felt like a sentient regression. In finally getting a driver’s license and purchasing a car at 29, I’d taken a new level of control over my own life. In spending my 30th year lying down like a hostage in the back of it, I felt like I’d managed to lose it.

By the end of Year 1, retaining the Reatta was unsustainable (and so was living in my one-bedroom apartment in Michigan). I sold the car to move back home to Baltimore. It would be two years before I could afford another one.

2. Nissan Versa (~2009, 2012)

I was riding the bus from Pikesville to Catonsville a few times a week to teach at the local community college. The closest stop was a half-mile’s walk. The commute took three times as long as it would’ve in a car, but the bus ride was a straight shot from my Nana’s apartment to campus. I often found myself riding with students ten years my junior, a handful of whom were in my classes.

I can’t say when I realized I’d scraped together enough for a down payment on another car. Maybe I wasn’t even sure that I had; I just worked up the courage to take a shot at it. My mother drove me to the CarMax in Ellicott City, where she waited in the car with my almost-three-year-old for hours, just in case things didn’t pan out. I had no credit history and my annual earnings skirted the poverty line. It was completely plausible that I’d walk away with nothing. I braced for it.

After telling the salesman I wanted something compact and affordable, he steered me toward a silver Nissan Versa. As soon as I sat in it, I saw our future, mine and Story’s. School pickups and drop-offs, field trips trailing behind the school bus. A growth chart emerged in the rear-view mirror: lengthening legs dangling from a car seat, then a booster, then maybe the regular backseat if I could keep the car long enough.

CarMax offers a no-frills buying experience, so the transaction itself was unmemorable and perfunctory. But that was probably what I needed, heading into the market alone, knowing next to nothing about car manufacturing, maintenance, pricing or financing. I bought that Nissan Versa on vibes and the strength of the worker’s word.

That must’ve been enough. The Versa proved to be a great investment. For four years, it did the yeoman’s work of getting us all — Story, my mother, and I — from point A to point B. It was a “Mommy car,” the kind that fit everything a single parent and small child might need to transport, the kind that would feel decidedly cramped once a toddler became a pre-teen. As if to punctuate that point, Story christened it “Gippy Car,” a name that only made sense because a three-year-old bestowed it.

I paid off Gippy Car in 2018 and totaled it not even two months later, prematurely accelerating into an older woman’s back bumper as the light in front of us turned green.

3. Toyota Camry (2016, 2018)

Losing a newly paid-off car to an accident makes for an extemporaneous, if not inauspicious, buying process. I didn’t take the time to consider other dealerships; returning to CarMax was the route of least resistance. Because of the sudden urgency to replace Gippy Car, I headed into the showroom with nothing much in mind. Make and model weren’t as important as budget and reliability, but I did think it could be cool to at least get a car with a less neutral color, something a little more interesting than a nondescript silvery gray.

Car exteriors, I presumed, were meant to reflect the interiority of their owners. Over the years, I’d dreamed of owning a VW beetle or bus, maybe a Mini Cooper, perhaps a vintage Datsun with a truck cap and sometimes, on very rare occasions, a Vespa. In my imagination, those were the methods of transportation wanderers preferred and I was nothing at 39 years old, if not a waylaid wanderer.

In my brief history as a driver, I had yet to experience the privilege of leisurely research. Though I’d loved the two cars I had, they were options dictated by circumstance or offered by way of trusted recommendation. Maybe this time, I’d give myself permission to explore my preferences.

The network of sales cubicles was bustling. The man who met me at the entrance was white and middle-aged with an even temperament. He was neither gregarious nor impatient. He wasn’t warm but he wasn’t overly solicitous, either.

When I spoke with him, I heard myself lapsing into my distressed damsel dialect, a melodic lilt of ignorance only half-feigned. I sounded like this whenever I spoke to car salesman, mechanics, or fix-it-folks of any kind. Every since intimated a silent plea to save me from the intricacies I didn’t know and wouldn’t (or couldn’t) learn.

The salesman walked me through the lot, pointing out cars in my price range, steering me away from the cuter makes and models with the colorful paint jobs and impressing upon me the importance of buying for longevity. “Toyotas are always a good bet,” he said, “And you know, they don’t want to tell you this, but most of the Toyota models have the same engine as the Lexus.”

He led me to a long, tan 2016 Camry with relatively low mileage. When he opened the driver’s side door, I took in the light tan cloth interior and immediately recoiled. “I don’t think this will work,” I warned, envision upended pots of McDonald’s honey mustard and Rorshach splotches of spilled fruit punch. “I have a toddler.”

He shrugged off my concern, assuring me that dirty seats can always be spot-cleaned or steamed. “At this price, for this vehicle, you won’t do better.”

I took him at his word, after hours spent in financing and detailing, I signed on the dozen dotted lines and drove the increasingly dingy-seated Camry off the lot and into the next four years. Despite the smoothness of its ride and the deftness of its handle, I never felt at home in that car. It never rose in my estimation beyond its practicality.

For the third time, I’d chosen a car that reflected my complicated finances and compounding responsibilities but nothing of who I was as a person. In an unwitting echoing of that sentiment, Story gave it the perhaps the plainest car name possible. Inexplicably, she called it Sarah.

4. Hyundai Santa Fe (2019, 2022)

In 2022, I was learning to trust myself more consistently. That year, I left an underpaid but practical position in public service for an overpaid senior role at a startup. For a solid 10 months, between the startup and the contract role that followed my layoff from the startup, I was on track to make six figures for the first time in my life. Though the pay-scale-induced alteration of my brain chemistry was short-lived, I managed to slip a car purchase through that portal before it closed.

I was still inexperienced at browsing, but I felt slightly more confident about navigating the car-buying landscape this time. I’d sought out a few cars online, including a reasonably-priced, chocolate-brown Mercedes on a lot in Apex. I pulled up beside it to see it in person, but there was a sold sticker on the windshield. The next day, I drove back out to the same area and rode through random surrounding lots, waiting for something else to move me as much as that Mercedes had.

A steady rain began to fall as I locked eyes with a cute, young, quota-driven Black salesman who clocked me as a mark before I even had the Camry in park. He gestured for me to roll down my window and asked what I was looking for. A change. A ride that I could steer, rather than feeling like it was steering me.

Every time I tried to reiterate that I was “just looking today,” the salesman papered over my protests with banter, charisma and a carefully cultivated sense of urgency. Everything felt like it was moving too fast. But maybe that was okay. Maybe this was how it felt when you started your car search began at desire instead of dire straits. Maybe this was the rush you were supposed to feel, the whimsy that had been missing from my other buying experiences.

In the span of an hour, I test-drove an Infiniti SUV and a Santa Fe. The former was older than the latter; the Infiniti still had a CD changer while the Santa Fe had Apple Car Play. But the Infiniti had leather interior and the prestige of its name. I asked the sales guy what he’d buy, if he were in my position.

“The Infiniti seems like the obvious choice, I’m guessing?”

“They’re very different vehicles,” he hedged. They were. One felt aspirational, like an outward projection of where I hoped to be professionally and financially in a few years’ time. It wasn’t a Benz but it wasn’t a Nissan hatchback, either.

“Actually, if it was me…” the salesman amended, a conspiratorial glint in his eye. “The Santa Fe is a newer car. It’ll be less expensive to repair. It’s got a better warranty.”

“And a better sound system,” I pointed out.

During the test drive, I thought the Santa Fe edged out the Infiniti for size and sound. Its silver exterior made me nostalgic for our Versa. If a car could grow up, this Santa Fe was what Gippy Car would’ve become. But I’d second-guessed myself and only settled on the Santa Fe after the salesman validated the choice.

Men have long had a reputation for “taking advantage” of underinformed women at dealerships and repair shops, up-charging us and pretending their efforts are protective. But that can only happen if we believe they are inherently more knowledgeable, that they must know more than us.

Men are not intrinsic to the car-buying process, but they can definitely alter its outcome. This was the vehicle purchase that taught me that.

Decision made, it was time to head to financing. And that’s where, for the first time in my car-buying history, I felt truly out of my depth. This was the type of dealership where buyers were expected to negotiate, and I hadn’t considered the implications of that. I’d driven up on a whim, only meaning to look around. Now, here I was, having multiple hard inquiries pulled on my credit, while being convinced that the five hidden add-ons ballooning the sticker price were not only a steal but critical to my protection. Despite putting down $2,000 in cash, my monthly note jumped $210 over the cost of Camry.

In the end, I loved the Santa Fe. My first SUV. But the day I drove away from that dealership, I couldn’t shake the suspicion that I’d been cheated. That I was paying more than I should’ve for what I’d received. I spoke to my most recent ex about it, after the fact, and he said, “You should’ve taken me. He scammed you.” Whether or not that was true, I’d wanted to make the choice on my own. Though my relationship with choosing them was imperfect, cars have always been proof of my own self-sufficiency. I still needed to prove to myself that I could purchase the right one for me, without hiding behind two male egos colliding across the financing counter. This was the closest I’d come.

5. Hyundai Santa Fe (2023, 2026)

At nearly 92,000 miles, up 65,000 in the 3.8 years I’d had the vehicle, the Santa Fe — which Story, incidentally, never gave a name — was beginning to break down. Last week, I found out that the starter was dying and the price of repair would range between $800 and $1,200. I was also due for a tune-up that would run me $675. The brakes would likely need replacement before the end of this year.

Even before the car stopped turning over reliably when I hit the start button, I’d been contemplating a trade-in. Most of the miles I racked up on the Santa Fe were hard, highway miles. Dozens of trips up and down I-85 and I-95 between North Carolina and Maryland had taken their toll and I wondered how much longer the Hyundai would hold out under that kind of pressure.

When I decided against paying for the starter repair at the dealership, I knew I needed to either double-down on keeping the car until payoff, or trading it for something I wouldn’t have to start making $700 - $1,500 repairs on multiple times a year.

I was always more in favor of trading it. But I wasn’t sure if I was up for another round of car sales roulette. Even after all I’d learned over the years, I didn’t relish spending five or more Saturday hours in a dealership, hoping not to be duped.

I did have a car in mind, though. I’d been eyeing it for nearly a week, refreshing the dealership page daily to make sure it was still there. A 2023 Hyundai Santa Fe with 32,000 miles, painted a gorgeous, shimmery azure shade called Stormy Sea.

It was new to just know. But I’d been doing the research. I wanted a newer model of the car I already had. One owner, no accidents, low mileage, fair price. And this car was the package.

Before heading to the dealership, I called to confirm the car was still there. The man who answered was the man who met me at the door. I knew as soon as I saw him that the prayer I’d whispered while leaving the house — Please just let me feel peace, if this is a purchase I should make — was being answered.

Mr. Banks was a retiree, a military veteran who sold cars simply because he enjoyed it. He’s been working at the same dealership for more than 20 years. He was one of only two Black sales associates I spotted on the floor and knew how to pronounce my name correctly without me having to say it. At every stage of the process, he was steady. He moved at a pace that matched my own. It read as, We’ll see and I hope.

When I asked if I could test out the radio a minute after pulling off the lot for the test-drive, he reminded me of North Carolina Central’s call letters in case I wanted to hear jazz and made sure to let me know that our local HBCU-licensed public radio station also played gospel on Sundays. As he pointed out an entry lane for the highway, he asked if I noticed the young Black couple next to me, who were leaving in a new Hyundai Palisade as I pulled up. I had. We talked about how happy they were with their purchase and how how much it had pleased him to be able to sell it to them.

Mr. Banks was a native New Yorker who’d come to North Carolina with his Georgia-native wife years ago, and as we continued to talk like cultural familiars, I knew I would’ve guessed he was from the Northeast even if he hadn’t told me.

Mr. Banks only kept me in that dealership for three hours, one of the shortest purchase days I’ve spent in one, and I never once felt pressured, rushed, or worried.

I was no longer the new mom who toggled between driver’s seat and crawlspace, no longer the lady feigning total ignorance and letting men she perceived to be more knowledgeable take the reins of her buying process.

I was someone who knew exactly what she wanted, exactly what she was getting into and why, a woman who couldn’t have existed without all those earlier versions of herself.

He never wanted much to do with us. Not before he bared half his body, onscreen and on tour, and not after. He withstood a spotlight, rather than basking in it, debuted in a brown leather jacket, delighted in artful obfuscation, shrouded himself in so many garments, it could be mistaken for sartorial mummification.

He wanted to disappear, into melodies and meaning, away from our insistent eyes, our wanting, impatient ears. Even the lyrics were muffled, under the weighted blanket of his mouth.

If we were meant to hear, we would have to work for it.

D'Angelo was as reclusive as his music was relatable, as sophisticated a songwriter and composer as he was a symbol of soul and, for the briefest of eras, of sex. He was my bedroom-poster crush when I was 14, the summer when Brown Sugar dropped, when the watery dreamscape of “Jonz in My Bonz” floated through my Discman headphones, when I force-skipped “Sh*t, D*mn, Motherf*cker” because I was still in the throes of the guilt-inducing churchiness D’Angelo himself was shuffling off as he penned that single around the age of 19.

By the time I turned 19, I couldn’t listen to “Lady” without being reminded of the four-years-older first boyfriend I’d just broken up with. Couldn’t pull my eyes from the four D’Angelos onscreen whenever “Me and Those Dreamin’ Eyes of Mine” looped on Video Soul. Fantasized about walking down the aisle to “Higher.”

I pulled that debut album over and around myself like a lover’s hoodie, always listening to it alone. Intimately. The way it was made. The way it was intended.

My junior of college, I rode the yellow line to Sam Goody at Greenbelt Mall to buy Voodoo the week it dropped. Still a church girl raised to be deeply suspicious of anything resembling the worship of non-Judeo-Christian spirits, the journey felt like a mission to obtain contraband. When I plucked the compact disc from the display stack, he was staring out at us, bare-torsoed, from the cover, with eyes that read clearly: I see you and lips upturned just perceptibly enough to convey: you will never quite see me.

My religious superstitions precluded any unfettered enjoyment I might have experienced with that album. Between its title, the title of “Devil’s Pie” and the collective, orgasmic hypnosis “Untitled (How Does It Feel)” into which all listeners descended (… ascended?), I worried, at 20, that getting as deeply entrenched with Voodoo as I had with Brown Sugar, would somehow lead me astray.

So I took pulls of “Spanish Joint” for a quarter-century. I embraced “One Mo’ Gin” as a transmutation of longing. I came to mark the possibility between an artist’s sophomore album and his debut in D’Angelo distance: a sonic measurement of maturity, anguish and exploration, an equation so many find impossible to reconcile, a solution involving reflection, self-protection and incalculable growth.

There were always rumors whirling in the chasm of his absence. A leaked track that eventually made its way to the third album. Whispers of James River. Infrequent, if eager, incantations of D’Angelo is the studio. D’Angelo is back in the lab. Speculation involving addiction, illness and recovery. Hushed hopes for good health in the years that bore no word.

Then the third coming, an ultra-rare reemergence, a transmission from another realm: Black Messiah in 2014. It may not have come when we wanted it but it was, indisputably, right on time. In the year of Eric Garner. Michael Brown and the subsequent Ferguson protests. Tamir Rice. Akai Gurley: “The Charade.” The public exposure of the Flint water crisis: “Till It’s Done (Tutu).” When the audience who’d grown up alongside him were grown enough to be earning lasting commitment (“Really Love”) or losing it (“Betray My Heart,” “Another Life”). He appeared just long enough to reassure us that he living in tandem with us. And understood.

He was grappling with his own mortality (and ours) then.

He was grappling with his own mortality (and ours) then.

He was barely 40.

Eleven years later, almost as long as we had trained ourselves to wait for his albums to incubate, he is gone. Or rather, the parts of himself he never consented to share us are gone.

D'Angelo was, perhaps, the most decisively, intentionally private R&B artist of our generation.

He has bequeathed us exactly as much as he intended for us to have. We are still as close to him as we will ever be. We’ve acquired far more than we were entitled to, more than we deserve, more than we are given by most.

I needed to stop drinking regularly.

It was a habit* I picked up a few years into parenthood, when day and night conflated under the weight of sagging diapers, under the cries that grew so insistent they stopped the baby’s breath, under the loss of the old life, where I’d only, just barely, managed to claw my way to independence.

When all of that was replaced with interdependence, when I had to give up the one-bedroom apartment I could barely afford with a newborn and my mother, who’d moved in to help, when all three of us had to burden my Nana and pile into her one extra room, when I was starving myself and staying up day and night and only finding work that covered a few of each month’s bills.

And when that state of barely-making it stretched from months to years.

When I had no control over the volume of a television at 11 o’clock at night or whether the lights in a room could be turned off at 2 a.m. When even the things I bought, paid for and managed myself felt like community property. Things like my car. Things like my debit card.

I picked up nightly red wine then.

It calmed my frayed nerves. It dulled the harsher edges of my reality. It kept the panic at bay.

I had rules for it. One glass a night, always after 9 or 10, always consumed when no one was looking. I’d swap wine out for beer in the summer. Wine warmed. Beer cooled.

Never liquor. Well, rarely liquor. Liquor could be consumed in a mixed drink and only in a social setting. Margaritas made it look like you were having fun. A lychee martini made you seem like a sophisticate.

But for sleep, for a sense of emotional regulation (however false), for a dampening of desperation and rage, a glass of wine would do. A bottle of beer sufficed.

Alcohol got me through early motherhood. The sharp, insistent loneliness of it. The need to let each day of it go, when the days were without end. Consumption created a delineation between night and day, added routine where it was often lacking. It was the counterbalance to the caffeine I relied on every morning. And I ate so little between those two tentpole beverages that I could feel the effects of each as they hit my bloodstream.

It was a grounding exercise, when I felt I might float away.

I could go for stretches without it. Weeks, months.

I seemed to be able to manage it. As I would with a prescribed medication, I kept to (roughly) the same dosage daily.

And it felt, for a long time, like a kind of self-medication. I have a depressive temperament, always have. Just a latent, baseline of sadness that makes me feel most like myself. Any long-term state of anxiety, excitement or irascibility makes me feel out of my element. Single mothering is nothing if not a long-term state of anxiety, excitement and irascibility. Single mothering around people who don’t think you’re doing a solid enough job of it is even more discomfiting.

When I finally moved out on my own again after 8 years of multigenerational living, I kept to my routine of ending my nights with wine or beer. The only difference was that I wasn’t secretive about it. The only difference was that there was no elder looking over my shoulder, warning me of the horrors that may befall me if I continued to imbibe. No one branding me an alcoholic. No one telling me that, if I weren’t careful, someone would take my daughter away over that nightly glass of wine or beer.

Instead, that voice of disapproval came from a smaller source. My daughter, 9 by the time we moved and 14 now that we’ve lived on our own nearly 5 years, is also very much a prohibitionist, very much in favor of teetotaling, very opinionated about alcohol consumption.

At least, she was — for the first four or so years of our time living by ourselves. We used to discuss it on a granular level, on a regular basis.

She’d ask: What does it feel like when you drink?

I’d say: I just get warm and sleepy. And I think a little less.

She’d ask: How come you don’t act like the people on k-dramas when you drink?

I’d say: Because I don’t get drunk when I drink.

She’d ask: What’s the difference between drinking and getting drunk?

And I’d tell her that, for me, it’s in when you stop.

I’m not sure she would’ve noticed that I’d stopped if I hadn’t pointed it out to her. Every now and then, I continue to bring it to her attention, just to see if it still matters.

I say: Hey, I haven’t had alcohol in a week, two weeks, over a month… since before the holidays.

She says: Oh.

I say: But I think I might want a beer when we watch that movie next weekend. How would you feel about that?

She says: Sounds fine to me, I guess.

I ask: Can you tell the difference between me when I’m drinking and me when I’m not? Do I act any different?

She says: Sometimes.

She says: You never act… drunk. Just… different.

I ask: Bad different? Scary different?

She says: Just… different.

And I think about all the things that that might mean.

I can’t say that anything in particular prompted it. Typically, I abstain when I visit the apartment where I picked up the nightly habit. I do that out of respect for the women who live there, neither of whom have ever been drinkers, one of whom once accused me of having a problem. I do it to prove to myself that I don’t have one, that I can stop on a dime, abruptly, cold turkey. That I can sustain that sobriety for the length of an emotionally taxing visit home. So I stopped drinking in mid-December, since I was spending the second half of the month with family.

But when I came back to our apartment after the holidays this year, I just kept… not drinking. It wasn’t a New Year’s Resolution. And I didn’t want to attribute it to Dry January. And I don’t call myself sober now, just like I didn’t call myself an alcoholic at the height of it. I don’t believe in extremes. I always opt, instead, for moderation.

So it was about two months of nothing. No alcohol. No caffeine, either. Two nights ago, I had a beer, just to see if I could without feeling the need to have more.

I could.

There are noticeable differences. I lost 10 pounds. Just… dropped them immediately, straight-up alcohol weight. My eyes are clearer. I sleep through the night, most nights. I don’t feel on edge after dark. My blood doesn’t tingle through the veins.

And I sit with the long hours between getting home from work and going to bed. I do not seek to dull them with a depressant. I don’t try to hasten them with hazy IPAs. I spend a little more time talking to my daughter. I see the tasks I need to accomplish more clearly. I tolerate my work life a little better.

My internal organs have grown a little quieter.

In the end, I suppose I stopped drinking nightly for the same reason that I started. I am always trying to regulate myself.

Having a child at 30, after a decade of self-doubt, creative listlessness and a jarring breakup with the child’s father, who I’d been with since I was 21, shook the foundation of who I thought I was. I needed a little distance from the difference. A calming of the agitated nerves.

Raising a child on my own, after a decade of having my mother and grandmother’s help, an interstate move, an eccentric little pandemic relationship, a pandemic, three job changes in three years, one apartment and school district change in five, the onset of perimenopause, two year-long bouts of hair loss, the aforementioned weight gain and the need for a maturing of my perspective of parenting that would keep apace with my daughter’s maturation…

That was another shakeup. It’s the kind that requires more than a fermented beverage.

I don’t typically write about drinking or not drinking, because I’ve never wanted my perspective on either to be influential. I’m writing about it now because I consider it to be a significant change to my experience of home — and that’s what I write about here.

I do not court judgment, nor do I seek to be judgmental. And I don’t consider any decision I make to drink (or not) to be a moral choice.

It is merely a personal one. I think about the function in my mind and body. I think about the effect on my emotional state. On my daughter’s. And to a lesser degree, I think about the truth: that alcohol is a carcinogen and to consume it at all is to damage a bit of yourself.

I think about the degree to which I am comfortable damaging myself.

And I choose, day by day, accordingly.

* To be clear, I started drinking well before I became a parent, but I wouldn’t say it was a habit until after I became one.

In Baltimore, my nana’s living room layout has had many configurations. Decades of dismantling, repositioning and reinventing. She used to shift things around once every two years or so, perhaps as a way to liven up the apartment in lieu of leaving it for a renovated unit. We’d visit her one day only to find that the prints on the wall had changed — a gallery of small, gold-framed images had been replaced with a large print of a Buffalo soldier; a watercolor of an anonymous jazz saxophonist had shifted to a side wall to make way for a pencil print of Grover Washington. Sometimes a piece of furniture had a green upholstery cover. Next visit, it would be brown. Then, when she was certain there would be no more small children present to press sticky hands onto the arm or the cushions for balance: then draping fabric would be a soft white. Sometimes there was a mirror tilted against the wall near the front door and coat closet. Other times, an ottoman occupied the tiny vestibule. The houseplants tumbled and spidered out of and around the bases of their pots were as old as the lease itself.

But Nana’s living room, for all its changes, kept many of the same components, the sum of its parts always equaling a representative whole. Invariably, her living room spoke to her taste. She favored expensive furniture, designed to withstand generations of wear. Eclectic accents like a table lamp with a pure brass base or a floor lamp with a shade shaped like a clamshell. Metal figurines carved to resemble angels. She favored noise from multiple sources — a local jazz or gospel station droning in low on the Bose speakers in the dining room, while MSNBC or WBAL blared on the living room TV a few dozen feet away.

Some years ago, she decided to buy an electric piano, a decadent purchase meant to resolve a childhood grudge she’d held against her parents and her older sister.

“She was the only one they let take piano lessons and she skipped them with her friends. Then when it was time for me to learn, Mama and Daddy didn’t even bother.”

Nana intended to take lessons of her own — and did, for a time. She practiced long enough to play 16 bars of “Ode to Joy” before her interest seemed to wane. But the existence of a piano in her living room echoed generations of family living rooms before hers. Her mother, my great-grandmother Verlia, had one in her dining room. She’d been taught to play, along with her sisters, as a child. Along with poetry recitation, piano performances were meant to denote refinement, a willingness to entertain guests in ways that were unique to a home prosperous enough to own and maintain an instrument in need of care and tuning. By the time I came along, it was rare that Grandma Verlia ever used her piano, but when she did, it was always slightly out of tune. Occasionally, she played “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” with a cacophony of key-and-pedal pounding as she sang along in a voice less that was dulcet than it was determined.

None of Nana’s successors play the piano, neither my mother nor I, and my daughter has shown no interest in taking up the instrument, either. But I’ve long admired Nana’s follow-through, if not in becoming a virtuoso on the keys then in simply gifting herself the possibility.

The latest iteration of Nana’s living room is different than the ones I grew up with. Some things never change: there is always the olive green and umber tweed sofa filled with down feathers, always the heavy glass tables and at least one oversized chair. The Buffalo soldier still hangs above the couch, and the piano and its stool still take up some real estate. But the green/brown/white-covered convertible hide-a-bed loveseat, an erstwhile staple, migrated to one of the guest rooms long ago. The computer monitor-sized TV that sat atop of a black and gray stand, kitty corner to the sliding balcony door, had been replaced with the larger Roku flat screen I bought her as a Christmas gift, shortly before the onset of her dementia. And now there are three chairs positioned rather at random across the layout of the living room floor. Only one of them, a swivel glider Nana bought to fill the space her loveseat once occupied, nods to the last of her decorative intentions.

My daughter and I spent the holidays at Nana’s. When we are there, much of our time is spent in the living room. Before, when she was well, we all had our corners. Story took up space on the floor, playing with toys or watching an iPad. I lounged on the the sofa, still surprisingly comfy for something as old and filled with prickly, fabric-protruding feathers as it is. And Nana either held court in her swivel glider or drift back to her bedroom to make long phone calls filled with cackles and gossip.

It was hard to know where to be this time. Nana was using her chair as storage for blankets, pillows and, from time to time, her purse. She used the other seating, a former dining room chair covered in fabric and an armless accent chair for which the risk of falling seemed inordinately high. Throughout the days, she dozed off in each at turns. During her waking hours she seemed both comfortable in her surroundings and oblivious to them. Perhaps the starkest confirmation of this were the constant loop of the same 10 or so alternating episodes of Judge Mathis and Family Feud streaming on Roku’s judge show and game show channels each day.

While I sat rewatching them with her for hours at a time, she’d say: “Now, I’m pretty sure I already saw this one. They play the same ones over and over….” But when I’d offer to change the channel or venture to change it when she was out of the room, she seemed slightly discomfited by the adjustment.

I often wondered, during our holiday stay, if things were the way she would’ve wanted them, if she were still the version of herself I used to know. And I learned quickly not to move much of anything without asking, because the new version of her — the one I am still getting to know — is accustomed to the current, uncanny configuration, replete with the draping of tinsel, lights and bulbs my mother had strung around the living room to infuse the space with bittersweet sprigs of festivity.

I have no particular connection to my own living room; I rarely use it. It has a green couch and loveseat (green couches seem to be a familial interior design tic), a gorgeous, colorful rug I picked out on Wayfair and my aunt sent to me as a housewarming gift, along with a matching indoor welcome mat, a flat screen TV atop a TV stand my daughter’s father assembled and no lamps or tables because I’ve never found a good time to spend money on them.

Story has commandeered our living room space as her rec room. She tosses her backpack and shoes into a corner. Her disembodied hoodies flail on the arms of the sofa and love seat. Sometimes her glasses and other important knick-knacks find their ways under the cushions. She struts the length of the area rug like she’s working an auditorium stage, her cell phone in one hand and her impromptu choreography and song-streaming adlibs racking the rest of her body.

My bedroom is just off the living room. I keep the door crack in case she needs me, but otherwise leave her be. For all intents and purposes, my bedroom is my living room. I have a TV atop my dresser. My bed is a more comfortable lounge space than my sofa and I rarely have share or cede any portion of the space unless I want to. This is the beauty of making a home: a place for everyone and everyone in their place.

But the living room is vital, isn’t it? Whether it is meant to display your personal taste, to provide an adolescent daughter a site of post-middle-school decompression that’s much closer to her mother than her bedroom across the apartment or to welcome a family to bear witness to the quiet, disconcerting changes in the temperament of their matriarch, the living room is often where the crux of communal home life occurs. It’s a more meaningful expanse than I might’ve noticed, had I not seen it through Nana’s lens all these years.

1.

May it radicalize you.

May you spend these last four years of childhood and adolescence sharpening your politics and familiarizing yourself with the finer points of your anatomy’s inner workings.

May you master the wielding of words. May they turn under your tongue and remain undetected upon inspection.

May you grasp the purpose of money and promptly divorce it from your values.

May you value the education you will need to earn outside the classroom, as well as the educators who will spend the last gasps of their union-protected, Department of Education-fortified careers equipping and empowering you for (involuntarily) independent study.

May you never run afoul of a young man who sneers as he utters, “Your body, my choice.”

May you never encounter an old man who is undeterred by your age.

May men who believe that they no longer need to honor your “No.” never find you.

May you find your road in the underbrush. It will not be the obvious one. It will (neuro)diverge in the wood. It will be illumined in fire. You will find it forged in scorched earth.

As you walk it, resist redirection from anyone who endeavors to convince you that the climate remains the same.

It has changed.

Everything has.

2.

In recent weeks, I have tried to halfheartedly remind you that we have both lived through something akin to this one before. You have answered wholeheartedly: I’m older now.

I should have known that I could anticipate this response from the girl who has nearly become my mirror: the realist I’ve raised, the cynic society sired.

I am older now. We have not lived through this before.

I should have known that I cannot be the mother who reassures you that all will be well. I would rather be the mother who ensures that you survive.

We have no recent precedent for surviving this. But I can already be certain that platitudes won’t make it possible.

3.

Darling, you must understand faith as practice performed between you and your God, rather than a notion imposed by your country.

You have a mother for whom prayer is as quiet and constant as thought; otherwise, it is impossible to know who else might be listening. You will know when and if you need different expressions.

May there be instructive art. May you be among the instructors.

In the event that no faction of technology resists purchase by or the platforming of fascists, may you lean on existing libraries. May you aid in the creation of new ones.

Draw maps that mark only those territories that are least hostile to women and children. Hide them away in your hippocampus. Hasten toward any home you might be able to find there.

4.

Home will always be hard to find in a country that begrudges every patch of ground you gain. Ours is a niggardly nation, all the more tight-fisted toward those whose movement it could once limit and whose labor it could demand, in blood, for free.

Home will continue to be hard to find in a country that no longer just pines for those bygone days but open and aggressively sets its intentions toward returning to them.

So you must remember that your body is the longest home you’ll have. Situate it in the safest spaces possible, Open it only to those who will not harm it. Above all else, secure its borders.

Aunt Smuckie's green-shingled house has two enclosed porches. Historically, each portal has conveyed distinct intent. If you were coming over for a real visit–if you were like me as a child and you were meant to spend multiple nights, or if you were planning on a true sit, to share tea and cigarettes or listen to records or talk for hours while BET-edited versions of Black classic movies played on a TV in the background–you knew to pull into the gravel driveway on the side of the house, to hook a quick right and walk up the steps to the back porch, where the inner door was often open in the summer, so that your approaching footsteps could be heard through the screen. The crunching pebbles were an announcement under your soles, and often, a diminutive silhouette would appear in the doorway, unlocking the screen before you even had the chance to knock. 

If you were just stopping by--if you were an acquaintance or postal worker or stranger--you parked on the street and politely rang the front doorbell. The front door was usually closed, so that no movement could be seen inside as you approached the house. Though Aunt Smuckie was almost always at home, you'd have to open the outer door and keen your ear toward the inner one, to see if you could make out the shuffling of slippered feet. Sometimes you couldn’t. On rare occasions, she actually wasn’t on her way to see who was ringing her bell. But more often than not, you could hear her familiar footfalls and soon, you'd hear the tumblers of that front door unlocking, too. 

Of course, if you were blood, you could come to either porch. Sometimes you'd just find yourself riding down the quiet rows of mostly Black-owned homes on her block of Wall Street and you'd pop in on her just because it was polite to do so if you were passing by. If family rang that front bell, it signaled that we did not intend to stay. We were just paying our quick respects while running an errand or heading on home. Aunt Smuckie would then lean outside the front door and chat with you awhile or, on rarer occasions, if that chat ran too long, she’d  invite you into that liminal space that was the front porch, where baskets of decades-old Jet magazines sat under a series of covered seats. You might linger there for a bit but you would not sit. Despite its deceptively inviting decor, the front porch wasn't really for sitting. 

Besides, if you made it that far inside the front of the house, you might as well pull around back and park. 

In my memory, Aunt Smuckie's home is recollected in stages. When I was a child, she lived there with her husband. They would've been in their late 40s or early 50s then — not much older than I am now. Uncle George was brawny and bald and reminded me a bit of a dark-complexioned Mr. Clean. He smelled of motor oil and worked on cars and other things that needed fixing, mostly out of their detached garage behind the house. But he also made house calls, all around the city. 

Uncle George kept a barrel smoker in the backyard and was known as one of the best barbecuers on his side of Jackson, Michigan. Aunt Smuckie was petite with an impossibly tiny waist. She wore slacks and blouses almost exclusively. Dresses and skirts were only for particular occasions. She smelled of perfume and nicotine and, in those days, her hair was pressed and curled into a soft, short roller-set style that perfectly framed her face. 

Aunt Smuckie had a bit of a strut to her. She'd hook the straps of a pocketbook on her inner forearm and saunter her way through a door with a surety that let you know she'd arrived. Her eyes held a glint of mischief. A smirk often played on her lips and before she would even take a seat, she’d dash off a quip so wry, you’d smile before you’d even processed the punchline. 

It was easy to see what might’ve drawn my uncle to her years before. She was pretty, but perhaps more importantly, she was as smart and as quick as a flicking whip. 

They were a striking neighborhood couple, Aunt Smuckie and Uncle George. 

When I spent summers in Michigan during elementary school, I often stayed in one of their two spare bedrooms when I wasn’t at my great grandparents’ house. Like everyone else who took me into their care during the summer months, they treated me like I was supposed to be there, like it needn’t even be a point of discussion. But it felt a little strange being there nonetheless. Their home was filled with what looked like carefully curated spaces: the living room with its cream and rust-tapestried furniture, statues and busts either of a lone woman crouched pensively or a bronze couple frozen in a passionate embrace, trinkets strategically placed on the surfaces. Coffee tables and lamps too fancy for a child to relax around. We were not meant to spend much time in the living room. 

Mostly, we visited in what I always considered to be a dining room (though we never dined there during my visits). There was a chifforobe in that room, a cherry wood table with sides that folded down and a massive framed picture of their firstborn grandchild Cedric hanging on the wood-paneled wall.

That picture could transfix you with its sepia tones, the chubby cheeks of a boy in toddlerdom whose massive, leaping ‘fro filled a near-third of the frame. Cedric’s was the only family photograph I remember being displayed. But of course there were many others. They were just so much smaller. Dozens of family photos filled the rooms, each in a frame of its own, tilted just so on surfaces throughout the house.  

There were two sets of stairs in the house. The ones off the living room led to a bathroom at the top of the stairs and three bedrooms, two on the left, one on the right. The farthest room on the left was the master. I remember it as very white, from the walls to the bedding to the headboard with the bookshelves to the dresser with the vanity mirror. Aunt Smuckie had jewelry boxes; she loved gold accessories. Sometimes she’d riffle through them and hand you something to keep. 

If you were a woman or girl staying over, this floor was your obvious appointment. But if you were a boy or man, you might spend more time descending the other set of stairs, the ones off the kitchen that led to the basement. The basement was Uncle George’s domain, a man cave before we knew that phrase for it. I remember it as impossibly dark, even during the day, though it had tiny windows that sat above ground, so that small rectangles of light did shine through.

At the bottom of the basement stairs was a wooden door with a metal hook latch. When I was a kid, I might find it either open or closed. If it was open, it meant that Uncle George was fixing things, as it was his repository for tools and supplies. He had his own furniture down there, his own hi-fi with a built-in 8-track, his wall hangings and statues. A half-bath, so he needn’t make the long trek to the second floor of the house to reach a restroom. 

The only time I knew Aunt Smuckie to go down to the basement was to do laundry or to retrieve meats and sundries from the deep freezer next to the washer and dryer. 

We kids could explore the basement during the day, but only if Uncle George wasn’t at home. It was off limits to us if he was. Sometimes we were dispatched to call out to him from the top of the stairs but we were not permitted to go down. At least I wasn’t. I can’t speak for the boys and the men. 

Spending time in the basement made us feel like we had our own apartment, like we were little sophisticates, raising ourselves, sharing our little secrets in a space we believed was too deep and dark for them to be heard. 

There was a kind of magic to other people’s homes when you were a child. Every space felt more mystical because it was not your own. You could stare at every trinket, examine every bit of decor, snoop through the kitchen cabinets at all the snacks foreign to your own household, peer down into trays of ash and cigarettes butts ringed with lipstick. You could open a refrigerator door and tilt your head in curious wonder at the precarious arrangement of provisions on each shelf. You could flip through the pages of trade paperbacks—westerns and romances and Black arts movement titles, both fiction and non-. And you’d think: This is a whole other life. What must it be like to inhabit it?

Sometime between my teen years and my early 20s, Uncle George had one stroke, then another. An elaborate ramp was added to the front of the house, so that on the rare occasions that Uncle George would leave it, Aunt Smuckie and her son Delbert could maneuver Uncle George’s wheelchair down to the sidewalk with ease. 

We all, at some point or another, walked that ramp if we approached the house from the front. The walk was a sober reminder of how significantly life had shifted for the couple living inside. By then, both Aunt Smuckie and Uncle George were disabled. Sometime before the strokes, Aunt Smuckie had a tumor removed that left her with deeply impaired vision. 

Over time, she began to walk with a white probing cane when she left the house. Both she and Uncle George needed to be driven by relatives to their appointments. Family, neighbors and friends ran their errands and did their store runs. They could no longer keep up with the formerly bustling goings-on in the backyard. Gone were the days of barrel-smoked barbecue. Their cars were eventually absent from the garage; driving had long become a thing of the past. And the house was much quieter on the whole, as the strokes left Uncle George largely non-verbal while Aunt Smuckie’s legal blindness, as well as the demands of caring for her ailing husband in-home, rendered her life more somber than I’d ever remembered it.  

Visits were more morose, too. Aunt Smuckie’s wit was as sharp as it had ever been, but the demands of the illnesses suffusing her home seemed to hamper her humor’s natural levity. 

Or maybe it was just the effects of growing up. Maybe it was the growing infrequency of my trips back to Jackson. I was there far less after I turned 18. Annual summer visits were a thing of the past. 

When you’re a child, you never think about the logistics of being “sent to family” for the summer. You don’t think of the cost or the time commitment. Those are not yet your own expenses to carry. You don’t notice the restriction of movement you may feel as an adult spending extended, car-less time in a town it can feel hard to leave, even when you have your own transportation. 

There is an invisible pull in Jackson, a gravitational tether to the past, an acquiescence to others’ expectations. You can only feel free there once you’ve learned how to sever it. But severing the tie you feel when you’re in that town leaves you lonely whenever you spend time in it. Jackson is not a place where it is very easy to be your own person. Some might argue that that’s for the best. Every Black person there seems to know one another. News about your life, whether good or bad, travels faster than you can catch it. Plans are made for every minute of your time there before you even cross into city limits. 

At 44, I can locate the beauty in that, the intimate familiarity that stretches from one end of town to the next. The way nothing there, whether good or bad, ever changes so much that it becomes unrecognizable.

At 25, though, when our family matriarch, my great-grandmother Verlia died at 95, and in all the years that followed, when there was no more “family home,” no nucleus or need to fit in as many visits to our oldest living relative, it grew harder to imagine returning to the town it was no longer prescriptive for me to visit. 

I did not consider that Grandma Verlia’s daughters, my nana and Aunt Smuckie among them, were not getting any younger. Like their foremothers, quite a few of the women in our family live long and active lives. They are sturdy and stalwart, almost omnipresent in the imagination. 

You think you’ll have time. 

During my late 20s, I lived in Michigan for four years. Not in Jackson, but rather on the western side of the state in Grand Rapids. I got back to Jackson a few times during those years, but it was usually for funerals. We lost a lot of people in the aughts. Uncle George passed in 2006. My cousin Lynette in 2009. My aunt Sharon in 2010. I was expecting during those last two homegoings. I’d discovered it days before my cousin’s homegoing. At Aunt Sharon’s I was four months along. 

I came back, too, for my cousin Marcia’s baby shower. She was a few months farther along; her baby was due in May 2010. Story was due in late July. I came back again in 2011 for my cousin’s daughter’s first birthday party. Then, for the last time, for my own daughter’s party. 

Story had two first birthday celebrations, one in Grand Rapids with my father’s side of the family and another in Jackson, with my mother’s side. 

It was a good day, albeit an exhausting one. I’d flitted from one side of town to the next buying tiaras and wands, foods and favors. Many hands made the work light. Cousins helped us cook out and pick up the sheet and smash cakes. Someone kept the music going. Someone else entertained the kids when they tired of entertaining themselves. We all looked after the elders, making sure they had some shade on the sweltering August afternoon, fetching them ice cream cones to stave off the heat and plates when it was time for a full meal. 

I remember the day well. I have always remembered that day well. It was the last one I would spend in Jackson for 12 years. 

It is fitting that Aunt Smuckie’s passing was what would bring me back there. Before the last weeks of her life, she and my nana, two years apart in age, spoke on the phone multiple times per week for most of their 80+ years of life. If my daughter was in the room, Nana would put her on the phone. She spoke with Aunt Smuckie far more than I did. The two older women would chuckle over the silly, precious things my daughter said. 

This was the only way my daughter knew her, as a kindly, aged voice wafting through a landline phone. That niggled at me but not enough to get Story back to Jackson. There would be time. When I finally found a full-time job, for instance, when I could afford to make the trip on my own terms. If I found myself elsewhere in the state, visiting the other side of our family, I’d think as I flew back out of town (on tickets my paternal aunt helped me and Story afford): I’ll get over to Jackson next time. 

And then, when I moved further south from Maryland to North Carolina, the trip felt even more daunting, the distance seeming much farther. 

As it turns out, it is a 10.5-hour drive, through Virginia, West Virginia and Ohio to Michigan. It can be done in a day, twice within three days, if you’re motivated. 

I rented a car and left Sunday for Aunt Smuckie’s Monday afternoon service. On Sunday night, we checked into our hotel then hopped back into the car for the wake. After that, we found ourselves back at Aunt Smuckie’s house, to pay our respects to her son, who was receiving visitors there. 

The house, now his, looked different on approach, but only because it was so open. I could see people milling about inside, their silhouettes fully visible through the open door. One of Aunt Smuckie’s grandsons was sitting on the front porch. Unsure of the rules, now that they had changed, I asked, “Should I close the door behind me?” He said I could leave it; he’d close it if need be. The couches in the living room held multiple visitors. A small flat screen TV was there, a sight I thought I’d never see in the living room that had rarely been used for entertaining. 

But more surprising than the things that had changed were the many things that had not: the chifforobe and picture of Cedric on the wood paneling; the cantaloupe, watermelon and grape-bunch magnets in the exact spots on the fridge and freezer doors where I’d last seen them decades before; the black rotary phone on the kitchen wall; the wooden fork and spoon set and wicker fans in the breakfast nook; the basket-bearing woman on the floor, sometimes used as a doorstop for inner back porch door; the lighter shaped like a can of Orange Crush sitting on a counter in the basement, the inexplicable wall tapestry of two dancing white folks hanging on a wall down there, that hi-fi with the built-in 8-track, that metal-latched wooden door. 

It was uncannily different and eerily all the same. Aunt Smuckie was gone. Aunt Smuckie was also everywhere. 

Story walked from one room to the next, gleefully absorbing each scene. “This is exactly like I imagined it,” she said. “All the houses here look like they’re from the 1940s!”

She wanted to see everything, the upstairs too, but given its most recent use for hospice care, it wasn’t open to company. 

“I wish we’d come here sooner,” she lamented. 

I watched her cut the same paths I had at her age and younger, from breakfast nook to kitchen to dining room to living room and back to the front porch. I watched her face light up whenever a new cousin greeted her. I felt her crowd-leery grip loosen on me over the course of the 40 or so hours we spent in town. I heard two adult cousins ask her to put their numbers in her phone, so they could keep in touch, whether I was inclined to answer my phone on a given day or not. 

“Yeah… we can cut out the middle man,” Cousin Chelsea quipped.

It was clear to me then why Aunt Smuckie had so often wondered when I was going to bring Story back there. It was for all the expressions of love and attention she was missing, all the exploration of welcoming family homes she was being denied. It was the work that needed to be done before she grew too old to appreciate its value, while witnessing the way her relatives lived still felt like something magical. 

I should’ve done it sooner.

I’ve been so negligent here, and there’s a reason for that, albeit not a very interesting one. I’ve been working. Like an actual, honest-to-goodness, 9 to 5 job. And it’s been an adjustment for someone as professionally peripatetic as I’ve been my entire adult life.

I started working my first full-time job in 15 years in March 2020, just as office buildings shut down for quarantine, so the two years I spent in that role were largely remote which, for better or worse, never required the full adjustment from setting my own hours as a solitary-working freelancer to the invisible labor of daily small-talk, managing office personalities (my own and others’) and learning company culture.

I left that job in 2022—traded it for my first-ever “senior” position. It paid twice the salary (which is to say: twice as much as I’ve ever earned in life). But it was also remote and, unlike the former position, it was precarious, as the company itself was a start-up and our division — the ostensible “podcast division” — was an experiment that proved itself to be on the verge of collapse within two months of my hire. The bulk of the podcast department was laid off one year ago this month. I’d been an employee there just 8 months at the time. But those 8 months earning in the low six figures were almost immediately life-changing.

So when a friend offered me an even more temporary position — a six-month contract earning even higher in the $100ks, starting three weeks after my layoff, I had no choice but to accept.

I was reluctant despite the money. Yet again, I’d be working in a remote senior-level capacity (an interim executive capacity, to be even more precise) and despite the title at the prior company, I didn’t believe I’d worked at the managerial level long enough to be confident that I could be an executive for a new employer.

Plus… the team I would be joining wasn’t one I was excited to enter. This veteran daily public radio show at one of the largest stations in the country had been plagued with problems for most of its 15-year run. The fact that they needed an interim executive producer at all was because the show had cycled through four EPs in under three years. If folks with demonstrated experience at running a project of that size found it untenable, I was fairly certain I would, too.

That proved to be true when I logged onto Zoom the Friday before my first day on the job, when the host of the show interrupted my introduction to the entire team with a ten-minute monologue, essentially outlining the volatility of the relationship between the show and the station brass. The host disclosed details about the breakdown in negotiations and trust between their team and the station’s executives — and more pointedly, the subsequent suspicion my hire raised. “I’m sure you’re a fine person,” the host said, with eyes cast toward my box in the team Zoom meeting, “and if we’d met under different circumstances, I imagine things would be different. But I don’t think you should’ve been hired. And I want you to know: I plan to be a problem. I am ungovernable and unmanageable.”

I could tell that the host was impassioned, and that her frustrations with her requests going unmet by executives long predated my hire. I also knew that the host, like the hosts of the other daily shows I’d worked on, was incredible at her job. Large-market daily show hosts are an awe-inspiring lot, capable of an extemporaneous choreography of thought and conversation — both with guests and with their producers — and collaboration that most people outside of the field will, mercifully, never have to manage. It’s work I inherently appreciate, and it is high-pressure work that can only be effective when the host remains in an uncontentious relationship with the rest of the staff.

An executive producer — even an interim one — is responsible for ensuring that that relationship remains free of contention. And in this moment — this clarifying, pre-first-day moment — it was clear that I would not be able to excel at the task.

The speech the host gave had little to do with me. It was above me then and it would remain so the whole time I worked there. In that moment, though, it all felt extremely personal. There I was, being upbraided in front of an entire team for accepting an executive role on a team who believed it didn’t need executive oversight. There I was listening, as the fires of distrust were stoked, as the show’s host conveyed an implication that I was only there to eavesdrop on the team and report back to folks higher on the hire list than myself. One-third of the people on the call would become my direct reports. Over the six months I worked with them, I doubt I ever gained their trust. It would’ve been improbable, with such an inauspicious team introduction. Regardless, I barely had an opportunity to do whatever the job was actually meant to entail, as two months into my hire, the show was canceled.

The cancellation set off another eruption of frustrations, hurt and anger — all of which I was meant to either absorb, mediate or mitigate. Attempting to do that for a team I’d never met in person (and never would) was one of the more challenging professional charges I’ve ever been tasked with. Those attempts were further complicated by prolonged intra-team tensions and suspicion.

The six months I served as a remote, interim executive producer earned me the highest title and the most money I’ve ever made — and in the shortest period of time. It was also the worst job I’ve worked to date, in terms of daily stress and discomfort.

When it ended, I was both relieved and worried about what I’d do next.

Attendant to every job’s end is the unique opportunity to pause and ask yourself the hard and necessary questions that define our professional life: Am I still doing what I set out to do? Am I challenging myself in ways that will lead to growth? Is it time to pivot — and if so, in what direction?

After two consecutive layoffs (and a near-layoff/role-restructuring embedded within that first full-time job I mentioned, the one I worked from 2020-2022), I knew my answers to those questions would mean more now than they ever had.

I never set out to work in radio. I had zero intention of it, despite the cassette-dubbed commercial “radio shows” I used to put on with my friends in my early teens. I don’t even listen to the radio. I’d never listened to NPR in any regular capacity before I started working for its member stations.

From age 8 until now, I’ve always wanted to be a professional writer. Nothing else.

But there’s also been some internal block that has prevented me from following through on the types of longer term, disciplined projects that lead to a career in professional writing. I write essays. Advice columns. Reviews. Radio and podcast scripts. But I don’t do magazine profiles. Deep, investigative reporting of the type that wins one prestigious honors and the ability to continue working in the field. I don’t sell books.

This is not to say I haven’t tried; I just struggle with it in ways I still have yet to parse. It’s partly an enduring insecurity about the quality of my work. It’s partly a discipline issue. It’s partly an inability to await payment. Sometimes, it’s a terrifying paucity of ideas.

So my professional life has taken quite a few detours. I taught as an adjunct for six years. And about seven years ago now, I stumbled into podcasting, which led to an even steeper tumble into daily radio public affairs show production (and from there, a volleying between the two). I’ve worked in the private audio industry. I’ve worked in public media. All that’s clear to me now is that the farther I stray from creativity and storytelling in either of those markets, the less fulfilled I am as a worker.

Conversely, I’m at an age and at a point in my mothering journey, where I am constantly asking myself if I can still afford to care about fulfillment. Because I know what it is to be a somewhat stable earner now, in a way that I didn’t when I was prioritizing work that fed my passions. I know how much difference an additional $40-60k annually can make for myself and my child. Creatively unfulfilled or not, I rest a little easier not having to deny my daughter an extracurricular or academic growth opportunity because I’m uncertain about whether or not my bills are covered. I rest a little easier working steadily enough to even have and maintain a home of my own—something that simply wasn’t possible as recently as four years ago.

So I haven’t been keeping up with my intended weekly schedule here. And this is not as much an essay about home as I would’ve liked it to be. But I wanted you to know that I have been working. And I have been thinking of this newsletter the entire time I’ve been doing it, pining for appropriate moments to resume the working of writing here.

I am back at the same company I worked for in 2020. I am doing, essentially, the same job that I was doing then. And though I’m earning more at the work now, I took a steep pay cut to return to this company and to work in this role.

I had little choice; it was this or long-term unemployment since, as you may have heard, the entire audio industry is shrinking. It’s ironic, as I pivoted into this industry (at least on the public radio side of it) for its relative stability. And to be fair, it’s the public radio side that has served as my safety net when the more creative narrative work in podcasts has dried up.

Daily shows require certain rhythms. Dedicated hours in which the work is all you can allow. It’s booking, pre-interviewing, scripting, host-prepping, line-producing, web-posting, social-promoting that you do for several hours in office (and often, if you haven’t managed to keep cadence, for several hours more at home).

The in-office aspect of this work has also led to a significant shift in how I parent. Where I have always been able to maintain a practice of picking up and dropping off my daughter before and after school, I’m unable to in the afternoons anymore. I’ve lost 2-3 hours with her in the evenings (even when I leave the office early, as I try to do whenever possible). And four months in, neither of us are quite accustomed to it yet.

Fortunately, she’s 13 now. Both she and I know that we were together for more hours than most single parents have gotten to spend with their children in the first 13 years of their lives. But also: she’s 13 now. And that’s a tricky time to suddenly start leaving a highly supervised kid to supervise herself. It’s a necessary transition but it niggles at me the same way having to place my creative pursuits on the backburner does.

It isn’t just passion and parenting that feel out of balance, but growth does too, in some ways. It’s hard not to feel the impact, both financial and professional, of the choice I’ve made here. I’ve joked a bit with friends about my “Icarus months” as a “senior” and “executive.” And I’ve bemoaned what I then felt was an inability to “learn the work” because I spent so little time doing it before layoffs reclaimed the opportunities. But I did learn. And I grew exponentially. I was able to do things for myself, my child and my extended family that made me feel accomplished and adult and proud in ways I’d only dreamed of before.

Without taking on a second job, I won’t be able to lavish those benefits on us all anymore — at least not right now. But this is steady work. And it is respectable. And scarce, in this industry, at this time.

I am learning here, too.

I think it is the wise person who does not covet positions of power (or the salaries that come with them). Sometimes, they’re more trouble than they’re worth — like when the only “power” you will ever hold is a masterful ability to hold your tongue (and your temper). Or when you’re tasked with managing a team that either resists or already has adequate management. Or when your addition to a well-established dynamic does more to disrupt than propel it.

Despite what many of us believe about the trajectory of a career, being “upwardly mobile” needn’t mean receiving incrementally higher titles until retirement. For me, upward mobility has come to mean working in roles that help me reach my personal objectives. It hasn’t taken me long to realize that my current position will help with that in some ways and fall short in others. It will take me longer to figure out how I’d like to address that.

In the meantime, I’ll keep at it. Become a stronger producer. Find better outlets for my creative self. Continue relishing the work of raising a teenager. Figure out how to get out of my own way as a writer. Learn to trust that my growing experience and talent will be fuel enough to carry me over the next horizon.

It was the first time I was ever given the power to make a difficult choice. The program fell on the same dates as my family’s biannual reunion, which was being held in Los Angeles that year. (What starstruck 10-year-old would pass up the chance to fly to California for the first time?)

My mother told me I could either make the choice that would have long-term impact (the summer program) or fly to the reunion with Nana (a memorable and fun, if fleeting, experience). I chose the program. 

(Quick aside: This anecdote is family lore, not an actual clear memory of mine. Now that I’m both an adult and a parent, I doubt the choice was entrusted as wholly to me as I once believed.)

My decision may have implied a level of maturity that boded well for my capacity for success in advanced placement classes, but there were other factors at play that would muddy the transition. 

That summer was also when my mother married for the first time. Until then, I had always lived among women. Men were never a daily (or even frequent) presence. My mother and I would traipse freely through our home in our dressing gowns, pjs and underwear. Our bathrooms were a mess of countertop potions and feminine products. No one ever fought over music, TV or movie choices, accepting without debate that there would be early era Commissioned or Winans albums on the hi-fi, ‘70s era comedies and classic tearjerkers on VHS, The Cosby Show, A Different World, The Fresh Prince, Blossom or any other sitcom I chose before my 9:30 pm bedtime on the TV. Like most ‘80s kids, I was largely unsupervised after school, letting myself into our apartment, choosing whether or not to do my homework in the hours before my mother came home from work and losing myself in fictional families after she arrived, while she cooked dinner, made phone calls or dozed off after her long days and longer public transit commutes. 

The sudden addition of man changed all that. I couldn’t bound through the house in whatever state of dress I chose anymore or peek into my mother’s bedroom to ask questions whenever I wished or climb into her bed after a bad dream or choose what to watch on TV without asking. And I didn’t quite know where I stood in our drastically-altered household, either. Rules felt more rigid, new permissions needed to be requested, “politeness” and “respect” took on new and foreign meaning. 

Above all else, after living my whole short life as an only child to a single mother with a long-distance father I only saw once a year (on a good year), I felt my place in our family shifting in ways I didn’t understand. I’d committed to calling the new guy “Dad” because “Mr. FirstName” didn’t make sense after he married my mom, but within months of their marriage, the title felt like ash on my tongue whenever I spoke it. I didn’t like him. I wasn’t sure that he liked me, and I wasn’t entirely convinced that he even liked being married to my mother. Their relationship never felt like one either of them were happy to be in, and I never knew how to be happy around them. We all tried tipping around the tougher parts of interacting with one another, but that was especially hard for me. 

I was already headed toward that sullen, boundary-testing phase most preteens have to navigate; my mother’s marriage in the summer after fifth grade accelerated the process for me. 

The gifted and talented summer course marked my first brush with academic rigor. It culminated in a research presentation on a foreign country and its culture, during which we were to don our chosen country’s traditional garb, if any, and bring in a dish reflective of its culture. 

I chose Jamaica, my new stepfather’s country of origin. I dressed in my usual uniform of a t-shirt and jeans–”Jamaicans dress like Americans, for the most part,” I explained, thinking of my stepfather’s t-shirts, jeans and church suits. I brought in a dozen beef patties he’d picked up from his favorite local spot. We cut them into quarters to stretch the serving size. It remains one of the few memories I have of us working well together, of us wanting to. 

I did okay in the program – I didn’t fail – but I noticed that I wasn’t a star pupil there, and I didn’t know how to become one, either. I’d shown up, putting in the exact amount of effort that amounted to success in elementary school, but I could already tell that it would no longer be enough. 

Sixth grade was jarring in all the expected ways: I didn’t understand three-ring binders, loose leaf paper or dividers, the need to separate work by class, the urgency to complete assignments right away so that “incompletes” didn’t accumulate and crash in on me at the end of a quarter like a ten-car pile-up. I couldn’t comprehend my heightened awareness of boys, how their voices were starting to squeak, croak and deepen, how it seemed that every time I turned around I had an unrequited crush on a new one. I never knew what to do with my hair. Locker combinations may as well have been physics. Pre-algebra may as well have been calculus. And I was convinced that my friends were light years smarter than I was, that their easily-achieved As and Bs meant we didn’t belong in the same classes, not when I could barely clear a C or D. 

Even English confounded me in middle school. I hated Ivanhoe and Watership Down and every other assigned work by a white male author. I never read them, so I couldn’t write well about them. Every book report was a bluff. (As it turned out, I was only interested in reading and writing on my own terms, not Baltimore County Public Schools.)

The adults around me were trying to figure out why I was flailing. My mother figured I got lazy and forgot how to apply myself. My guidance counselor was calling my mother in, asking first if anything was wrong at home and then musing that I probably just wasn’t “gifted and talented material.” 

I was crying a lot. Acting out. Hiding bad grades and interim reports marked in danger of failing. I was watching TV after school with nary a thought toward a single assignment I was supposed to complete at night and return to a teacher in the morning. No one spent time checking my work at home so I rarely bothered to complete it. Any attempt I made to finish homework assignments was impeded by the pesky fact that I hadn’t paid attention to the in-class lesson on which the assignment was based. 

It took me a full five years to get my performance in school back under some semblance of control. I did it in time to graduate high school with a 2.7 GPA (which would never have been so high without the higher weighted averages of “gifted and talented” track work). That 2.7 was just enough to be admitted to a few colleges. And I went on to graduate college with a 3.4 and grad school with a 3.9. But none of that could happen until I taught myself how to study, organize, and cope with my complicated emotions about my home life.

For as long as I’ve been a parent, I’ve dreaded the long-looming day when my daughter would have to start middle school.

As the day approached, I tried to be both positive and realistic. I said that the experience might feel intimidating but it would provide her lots of chances to grow. New kids meant potential new friendships and also new challenges. Her teachers would be a little less attentive but that just meant their trust in her ability to do things on her own was growing. 

I didn’t believe a word of it, unable to shake my own memories of those years and how long their impact on my education lasted.

Still, I silently hoped she’d have a better time of it than I had. We’d already navigated the one serious relationship I had during her childhood, where she knew, bonded and clashed with my partner, then processed my breakup in tandem with me. I’d acquitted myself well enough there; though she still brings up her memories of that short-lived Man in Our Lives, I can tell that nothing she experienced shook her faith in my devotion to her.

Middle school was a different animal, though.

The one she attended for sixth grade turned out to be wildly overcrowded, with over 35 kids in some classes and teachers who were vocal in their frustration about everything from their students' unruly behavior to how overtaxed and under-resourced they were. The work my daughter brought home ranged from rote and repetitive to oddly worded and confusing. Her teachers never hesitated to slap a failing grade on a test, quiz or assignment but rarely responded to my concerned correspondence or expressed any concern of their own.  One of her teacher’s retired abruptly mid year, but not before telling my daughter’s class that she was tired of teaching students who “didn’t take their education seriously.” And on more afternoons than not, my kid hopped into the passenger’s seat of my car seething and crying over some challenge or other she’d struggled to navigate. 

I thought about my own sixth-grade year on those afternoons, how I’d gone home to an empty house, suppressing my tears, tuning out and turning off for hours before lying to my mother’s weary pre-dinner queries about whether or not I’d done my homework. 

I thought about how, even though I was in a position to meet my daughter at the site of her frustration every day, I couldn’t always ease it for her. 

There are only so many things I can do to keep her from flailing.  

I can talk to her about standing up for herself but I can’t keep a girl in the hall from calling her a bitch when she tries to. I can’t shield her from children who use the n-word with a hard -er within earshot. I can’t convince under-responsive teachers or overtaxed teams of special educators not to let my concerns fall on apathetic ears. I can’t do my daughter’s work for her (or even understand it much better than she does at times). 

I just do what I can. I talk to her. I try to get her to explain to me the peer conflicts she’s navigating, her successful or failed attempts at friend-making, the cafeteria table pecking order, why she’s hopping into my car at dismissal, crying. I can gently point out when her binder and backpack are starting to look like landfills. I can be proactive about reaching out to her teachers when it seems like she’s in over her head. 

I can let her emote after a tough day and point out to her when she’s crossed the line between relying on me as a sounding board and using me as a punching bag. 

I can even uproot us from one neighborhood and plant us in another for no other reason than to provide what will hopefully be a better school environment for her. 

It’s what I did this summer. 

It’s too soon to know whether the new school will be “better” for my kid who is, admittedly, a self-professed school-disliker, but it’s not too soon to declare it objectively a calmer, more responsive space with a better capacity to manage classroom behavior and communicate with parents about accommodating their child’s special needs. 

My daughter now has two weeks of seventh grade under her belt. She has hopped into the car crying once already, but she’s also greeted me with an afterschool smile, which never happened on any day last year. 

If she looks back on this time as one of the defining eras of her adolescence, I want her to remember how her tears were wiped by my hand almost as often as her own, how committed I was to communicating with her, even as her emotions grew to unwieldy to articulate and how little need she had to hid things from me, even when she chose to do so anyway.

Earlier this week, she had a trying day. When I dropped her off the following morning, I said, “No matter what today is like, remember that if it’s bad, you get to come home at the end of it.”

She nodded resolutely and I pulled off, hoping I’d made our home a promise, a substance to be hoped for, a waiting balm to greet her at the end of all her bad days.

At first I thought it would be a typewriter. Or a quill in a pot of ink. A single word, a scripture. A tree with a Black girl reading a book in its branches. I considered having it etched in a space that clothing typically concealed; it would exist as a secret, revealed to a cherished few. Then I thought of the billboard that is the outer bicep, a favored location where all the world would see. Maybe stars and a crescent moon between clavicle and shoulder? Perhaps a tiny black heart hung low on the curve of a hip? 

It took me years to even think of the possibilities. I was raised with Pentecostal leanings and aesthetically marking the body had always been frowned upon. Sometimes the body itself seemed frowned upon. It was something to keep covered, an outer casing for the most essential part of the self: the soul. Its instincts could not be trusted. Its urges were not only to be suppressed but, ideally, ultimately, killed. We were dying daily to the flesh, so what reason would there be to adorn it? 

When I was growing up, tattoos carried many connotations for women and most of them were negative. Tattoos suggested immodesty, an eschewing of purity and innocence, an invitation to wanton eyes to roam an exposed bit of body. Tattoos were seen, in my tiny circles, as symbols of a life hard-lived. 

As a girl who wanted grow into an artist, I didn’t believe tattoos were as taboo as they’d been touted. For me, they just symbolized risk. They were visual declarations that the choices a person made about their body were theirs alone.  Whether guided by impulse or laden with cryptic significance, tattoos were an intimate discourse best understood to the wearer. 

That doesn’t mean I liked them. The first tattoos I ever saw up close were at my high school. In the mid-to-late 1990s, teen tattoos were as trendy as oversized Polo, Nautica or Tommy Hilfiger and herringbone chains. Tattoos carried the added cachet of rebellion, though: showing up to school with one under the age of 18 meant you’d procured it illegally. Pulling that off, presumably without parental consent, was a stark and undeniable proclamation of grownness. No matter the tattoo itself, whether Marvin the Martian or the traditional Chinese symbol for courage, it seemed emblematic of adult decision-making because it was irrevocable. 

Back then, we weren’t thinking much about regret, so it’s likely we didn’t care how a tattoo could be covered or how most evidence of it could be lasered away. In high school, having one just meant you were individuating. 

I didn’t individuate for a long time. I went off to college but I came home a lot. I spent the first half of my 20s with my mother and even after I moved away, her influence (and my nana’s) never felt too far. Neither of the women in my immediate family have tattoos. Neither regard them with much admiration. So it would’ve been hard for me to, had I chosen to get one early in life. 

I was deep into my 30s before I even considered it, well on my way to becoming a woman whose inner voice was not hidden under the tenor of her matriarchs’. It wasn’t until then that I could be sure that if I chose to adorn my body with permanent ink, I’d be doing so simply because I wanted to, simply because I liked the idea. 

Of course waiting till your mid-30s to make skin-altering decisions means doing so with a fuller understanding of regret, a higher awareness of risk, a constant calculation of what might constitute frivolity. 

How much did I really want this thing? Would it be worth the investment? Would I want to look at whatever image I chose every single day of what’s left of my life? How will it look stationed against the crepes and spots I’ll acquire if I live to a ripe old age? What symbol(s) could possibly be representative enough of who I am to warrant permanent real estate on my skin? 

It wasn’t until I left home—this most recent time, in 2020—that I could finally begin to address those questions. I had to spend real time with my middle-aged self to determine if a tattoo was right for me or merely one more thing to resist and romanticize? 

As a parent, I live within fairly strict confines. I am at home every night. I rarely date, rarely travel alone, rarely spend more money than I should. I make the choices I believe best benefit my daughter, even when they feel counterintuitive to the woman I once hoped I would be. I wait for the years when she and I are both adults, when who and where and how I am are less tethered to her senses of care and security. And I look for small moments of self-assertion. I listen to the parts of myself that say: your daughter is not the only person for whom you are setting examples. 

Motherhood is not my only identity. It’s not even my primary one, now that I’m 13 years into it. It’s receding a little to make space for all my other parts. My experience with motherhood is becoming that much more expansive. So I am giving myself permission to stop putting so many things off. 

In the end, I didn’t think too much about it. I found the tattoo I wanted three days before I got it. I got it so soon because it was my last summer weekend on my own, before my daughter returns from her dad’s. All those years of researching images and placements distilled into a fairly simple decision. 

I chose this, primarily, because it’s pretty. It suits my minimalist sensibilities but it isn’t so fine-lined that I’ll be able to forget it’s there. 

I suspect its meaning will multiply with time. For now, it is me, independent but receptive to company. It is me and my daughter, constantly changing position, coming to sit at each other’s side. It is me and the audience I hope to eventually find, me drawing folks closer with whatever I’ll create. It is the sparrows on whom God keeps His eye. 

A bird at ease and a bird in flight. I exist, at turns, in both states. 

My first tattoo is still healing. It itches a little and the lines look slightly less clean than the day I got it. There’s a bit of ink bleed, a faint and hazy blur of black into brown. It’s making its home just under the skin, and I’m getting used to catching sight of it in the corner of my eye every morning.

More than once in the past four days since I got it, I’ve imagined myself at the end of this life, lying in a bed, looking down. I’ll be waiting for an angel to descend. I’ll be welcoming a new and endless home.

I wonder how much thought we give to them, really, these soft rectangular landings we lie in every night. When we are born into households where beds are a foregone conclusion, we do not need to contemplate their presence. We’ve no reason to consider how they got there or what they may have cost. We do not understand them as amenities deserving of our gratitude. 

But we are not all born into households where we have our own beds. Some share one with their parents, with multiple siblings, a grandparent. Some move from bassinet to sofa, folding a fitted sheet before school every morning so their slumbering place can serve its daytime purpose. Others are pallet people, piling blankets to protect their bodies from an unforgiving floor. Some sleep outdoors or in cars, at shelters, on cots too interchangeable to ever be claimed. 

A bed is a luxury that only feels like one when you’ve lived without it, a privilege it only occurs to you to acknowledge when you’ve watched someone struggle to attain it.

For many, it is simply a matter of mattresses—either with box spring and lifted frame or stacked low on a floor. Beds, the kind with boards at head and foot, trundles underneath, posters at the four corners, canopies and drapes, can be aspirational at best. 

I grew up, mostly, with mattresses. Twin-sized, specifically, until I was in high school, I think. 

But when I was in fourth grade, when we moved to Rockdale Gardens, the apartment complex directly across the street from my new elementary school, Scotts Branch, Nana bought me a bed. 

It had a headboard and footboard, tall white posters, a pink ruffled canopy with delicate white polka dots dappling the fabric. It was deliciously girly, the first and most distinct piece of furniture I ever felt like I owned. Whenever anyone walked into my bedroom, that canopy bed announced itself: fanciful, feminine, mine. That was the year I got my own dressers, too. Matching wooden white ones, trimmed in the same elegant lines as the boards of the bed. 

I can’t remember much about sleeping in my canopy bed—it’s been over 30 years—but I remember how it felt to have one, how different it was to sleep on something intended for a little girl (for me!), something with style and personality, something it would’ve been easy to mistake as magical. Especially after I awoke one morning to the sight and sound of birds singing on my windowsill, like I was a bonafide Disney heroine. 

I slept in that bed as it was originally intended, with its canopy and ruffle intact, for the full two years we spent at Rockdale Gardens. The mattress and frame came with us to our next apartment, but the bed was never fully assembled again. Sometime between the end of fifth grade and high school, I lost the dressers, too. Maybe I looked like I was getting too old for them. Maybe no one bothered to reassemble them once I started middle school because I didn’t seem interested enough in being a girl who still valued frilliness and magic anymore.

In high school, I had a queen. A worn mattress and box spring handed down to me from my mother and her husband. It wasn’t comfortable even when I first inherited it; I don’t think they were its first owners, either. It had the sunken, sighing feel of an ancient and overworked apparatus, a piece whose better days were many moons behind it. I could feel the springs, rigid and jutting, every time I slept, as though I was being elbowed by the bed rather cushioned in it.

When I had particularly painful periods, I’d spend full days writhing with nearly unbearable cramps, trying to find just the right position to earn an hour’s reprieve from the metal coils. 

I spent a lot of time on that bed, in that room, because my mother was married to a man I didn’t like and I’d been teaching myself, since the summer of their wedding when I was ten, that the best way to avoid him was to stay in my bedroom with the door closed. 

That mattress and box spring were the only furniture in the room, so I spent most of my time sprawling on it, writing in a journal I’m now fairly certain he was reading and biding my time until a college acceptance letter offered me a way out. 

My stepfather was rarely home; he always worked multiple jobs. But his specter loomed even in his absence. He wasn’t abusive, but like my bed, he was always needling and prodding. I could never relax into comfort around him. His restrictions were difficult to abide because he changed them at whim. If I were in my room, listening to music and staying out of everyone’s way, as I often did, he might decide on a random day to call out through the walls that I was snapping my fingers too loudly.

He often accused my mother and I of “joining forces against him,” and my mother, in turn, would feel like she had to mediate. She’d tell me to be more mindful of how I interacted with him because he was the head of the household but I suspect she knew as well as I did that the issue was beyond the scope of my behavior.

Above all, he found the amount of time I spent in my bedroom the most objectionable. If I kept the door closed, he occasionally knocked to tell me that I couldn’t cordon myself off every time he came around, that the polite thing to do would be to come out of my room to greet him when he entered the house, that it was disrespectful to pretend that he wasn’t there. 

But I couldn’t help it. Whenever I heard his vintage car pull into the parking lot, the distinctive tick of his vintage car’s engine still, I rushed to my room, leapt on my bad bed and hoped to avoid him. 

I was grateful then, for something to climb onto and wait out the potential knock on my door, demanding a more robust greeting than one I could call out from my refuge of springs and coils. 

The last time I saw that bed was in the winter after I graduated college, when my boyfriend of two months (who I’d go on to date for another 8 years) was hoisting it onto his back the night before my family’s eviction. I remember watching its mysterious stains as they descended the stairs—blood from those unbearable periods, varying yellowed splotches consistent with decades of wear—and how exposed I felt watching him haul the mattress away for us.

I didn’t feel grateful for how dutifully it have served me then. I was too preoccupied with shame. 

I spent my 20s in a series of twin beds, either purchased in frugal haste or issued by college housing or gifted to me as I set out for grad school. Financially, I was about as far as adding headboard or canopy to any of those mattresses as I was from being a fourth grader still capable of pretending herself a princess. 

During the years I spent adjuncting and living with my aunt and uncle in Michigan, I slept on a sofa in the room my aunt used as an office. My uncle kept the overflow of his wardrobe in that room as well. I often woke up before sunrise to the blue light of my aunt’s desktop monitor as she tried to swivel her chair at an angle that blocked bulk of its brightness or to the dim yellow bulb of the flashlight my uncle used to rifle through the closet for work outfits. (I still grin whenever I recall sleepily watching his six-foot-seven frame tiptoe in with that flashlight, doggedly avoiding the use of the room’s actual lamps in hopes not to wake me.)

Between my own teaching anxieties and the awkwardness of being five-foot-nine curled onto couch much shorter, I was often awake before either of them came in. But I pretended not to be. It felt too sweet to be so accommodated. 

The next bed I owned was the one where my daughter was conceived.

It was the first queen bed I bought with my own cash. At 600 hundred dollars on an adjunct’s savings, affording it felt like quite the accomplishment. I bought it soon after I secured the keys to a one-bedroom apartment in downtown Grand Rapids. 

It wasn’t my first time leasing. I rented my first apartment at 23, a two-bedroom in Owings Mills where my mother and I lived until I left for grad school at 25. The Grand Rapids apartment was the first one I could truly call my own.

Because I couldn’t afford a 600-dollar mattress and a decent sofa, I bought a futon for the living room, along with a floor model chair from TJ Maxx. My own furniture. In my own home. 

I was proud enough of myself that when my boyfriend—the one who’d hauled my old mattress out of my family’s foreclosed townhouse several years before—needed a place to stay, I welcomed him to spend a month with me. 

When he arrived I’d only been living there a month, and I suppose that was my first mistake: inviting someone to live in my home before I’d even finished making it one. 

Upon his arrival we shared my brand new bed and by the end of that tumultuous month we both knew I was expecting. He left and I wouldn’t see him again till the week I was due. The morning I went into labor he left again for a contract job. My mother, who’d also come to town in advance of my due date, drove him to the airport. 

While she was gone, I writhed alone in that bed, experiencing pain as pronounced and persistent as any I’d endured with the worst of my periods. 

I’ll ask her to drive me to the hospital when she comes back, I’d think when I could manage a moment of coherence. I hoped I wasn’t too dilated for the epidural I planned to request. (Spoiler alert: I wasn’t.)

It’s weird to consider now, but that hour or so lying in bed alone was almost a relief. When you are in one alone, knowing you’ll be undisturbed, a bed is an ideal site of meditation. I was grateful for a beat to catch my breath before the unpredictable chaos of a hospital birth, grateful to spend a few quiet moments making peace with the terms of my imminent labor and delivery, grateful I’d invested in a mattress where the coils, at least, could not be felt. 

I was right back to twin beds in Baltimore a year after my daughter was born. Nana had two in her second bedroom. There was one for my mother and another for me to share with the baby. 

Because we lived with her so much longer than I’d planned, because we’d overstayed a full 8 years, my baby was a third grader by the time we left. Tall for her age, she and I truly tested the limits of what a twin bed can accommodate. We were sleeping head to foot, one body pressed against a wall, the other dangling an arm or leg off the opposite edge.

When we were finally able to move, the first thing I put in our North Carolina apartment were mattresses, a twin and a queen purchased at a tiny warehouse that boasted great discounts but probably overcharged us, given what I now know of the merchandise’s quality. 

I brought the beds in even before I brought my daughter, not wanting her to experience floor-sleeping or bed-sharing for a single minute of our time there. But she did wind up sleeping with me for a while, unaccustomed to being in a bedroom of her own alone. She slept with me until the boyfriend I met three months into Covid moved in to quarantine.

During our first year in Durham, I can count on one hand the number of nights I slept on my mattress alone. By the end of the second year, a few coils popped, making visible lumps in the bed. It wasn’t as uncomfortable as my high school bed had been, but it evoked memories of that time I’d long left in the past. For that reason alone, I should’ve been quick to replace it. But I wasn’t. Stubbornly, I thought this mattress should’ve lasted longer, that my investment in it—and in everything else: pulling off the move from Baltimore to Durham, surviving my first serious relationship and breakup in a decade, affording a place big to comfortably accommodate my family of two—should’ve counted for more. 

I replaced my daughter’s perfectly functional twin before I’d even entertain the thought of replacing my own. I bought her her first real bed last summer: a full size mattress, along with the bed itself, a small bookcase built into its headboard. I sprang for the matching six-drawer dresser with a mirror attached, too. I am hoping it all lasts her through high school. I am hoping her bed never feels like a place where she feels the need to banish herself. I hoping she never knows what it’s like to have to dispose of an inner sanctum in a hurry.

Because I’ve started to dream of the same for myself, I replaced my lumpy mattress a few months after Story’s. I had no idea how to dispose of the old one. I’d never lived in any one place of my own long enough to require a replacement. I eventually called a hauling service to come get the old mattress, an added expense of over 100 dollars. 

No matter how much progress I make in this life, it has never escaped me how expensive it is to sleep. 

While my daughter’s been with her dad the past two weeks, I’ve spent far too much time in bed. I’m not working again yet and without the anchoring tasks of parenting to structure my days, I lie down a whole lot instead of leaving home.

My mattress and frame are still the only lounging furniture in my bedroom, so the bed has become the hub of my daily life. It’s where I eat dinner (on the nights when I choose to) in front of a small tv perched atop my dresser. It’s where I’ve spent hours rewatching my favorite k-dramas, where I apply for jobs, where I twist my hair before slipping into my bonnet, where I take my calls and write this newsletter. 

It doesn’t have to be. There are rooms of furniture now: a sofa and loveseat in the living room, folding tables and chairs as frugal placeholders in the dining room and “office”-slash-guest room. Three beds in all. 

I could unfurl my life into the full square footage of this place and I suspect, over time, I will. 

But I still haven’t added the adornments that would amount to a grown woman’s bed. I haven’t invested in a setup that suggests at first glance: This is where the head of this household rests. This is where a queen should luxuriate. 

I am waiting to feel worthy of it, I guess, waiting to prove that I’ll be able to stay here long enough to enjoy it. I should be there by now, at a place of sturdy-enough belief in myself that I can buy a real bed without worrying that I’ll lose it.

All I can say is that I’m closer than I’ve ever been. I have to trust that sooner rather than later, that will feel close enough. 

Hey. Yep. Everything’s okay. Thanks for checking, I typed back. 

He didn’t entirely buy it, I suppose, since he texted again in the morning to see “what was up last night.” I assured him that it really was nothing.

Except that I’d dropped my daughter off in Richmond during the day. 

“Just wanted to talk,” I tacked onto the explanation, hoping it read as casual, knowing it came off as the opposite. 

He called in response, because exes who truly understood you seldom lose the ability.  

We used to make the run to Richmond together, during my first year in Durham, when I was still figuring out far too many things, our fledgling relationship and how to satisfy the obligations of long-distance co-parenting (during a pre-vaccine global pandemic) chief among them.

He’d drive me and Story the two and a half hours up I-85 in his Chrysler 300 and, in the front seat, while I luxuriated both in the leather interior and in a delicious, stress-lightened gratitude that I didn’t have to make the drive alone, we’d trade conspiratorial whispers about how odd it was, this entire practice of passing off a child to their other parent in a mutually-agreed upon parking lot. 

I’d never had to do that in Baltimore. When my daughter’s dad wanted to see her there, he would just pick her up at my grandmother’s apartment, which was awkward in its own way but required minimal exertion on my part. 

I left minimal exertion behind when chose to leave Maryland. Moving five hours south meant cultivating new practices around co-parenting and embracing whatever early tensions they pulled taut.

On those rides to Virginia with my ex, Story sat behind me in his backseat so I couldn’t see her face, couldn’t gauge her expressions or try to predict how she might be feeling. Was she relieved to be leaving us? Was she feeling as uncomfortable with the idea of her mother’s boyfriend interacting with her dad as I was? Did she like the more permanent two-parent arrangement she had at his home better than the fumbling-toward-an-uncertain-future one that we’d sprung on her at ours? 

My ex used to absorb those questions on the drive back home. He knew how closely I carried them, knew I missed my daughter before she even exited the car, had been missing her even before we left home. He knew that part of his role with me then was to distract me from her absence and to do so thoroughly enough that I wouldn’t keep concocting more questions. 

That is not his role with me now. It hasn’t been for over two years. But texting him about Richmond must’ve temporarily resuscitated our emotional shorthand. He knows well how hard those first nights without my daughter can be. And he knows that, if I’m not intentional about the three breaks from hands-on parenting I get in a year, I’m prone to spending the entire time alone in my apartment, passing her empty bedroom multiple times a day and breaking new records for how long I can go without hearing the sound of anyone’s voice, including my own. He always found it a little tragic, how much silence I could withstand. 

So he talked to me on the phone for over an hour the morning after last Thursday’s drop-off. We caught up on how our lives have been in the long time since we last spoke. He has another girlfriend now; he has for a while. It’s one of the reasons we rarely talk. I have boundaries around this that he doesn’t share. “I’m friends with most of my exes,” he’ll often shrug. “I don’t see the issue.”

The issue has always been clear to me. But it was clearer still after I spent 30 minutes confiding in him about how my daughter’s been doing, about our trips to Michigan and Virginia Beach, about my relationships with various relatives he met while we were together. It became crystalline in the second half of the call, when he began to tell me about his new relationship and asked me about any future plans I may have to pursue one. 

“It’s still not a priority for me,” I admitted. 

“It doesn’t need to be a priority but… you should open yourself up more to the possibility.” 

He knows I struggle with openness, though I was always fairly open with him. 

“I guess it still bothers me that you’re here alone,” he added. “No family and all of two friends. I’m one of those and we don’t even really talk.” 

I try to explain why I can’t talk to him more often and I start to tear up. It comes back to me in that moment, how much I cried when we were together. I felt really safe crying with him.

I was teary now because I couldn’t quite articulate how break-ups dismantle that safety. I couldn't tell him it would feel too dishonest to pretend on a more regular basis that we still care as much as we once did when, each day, we wake up and demonstrate that we don’t. I would’ve been loath to admit that, when we talk—and only when we talk—it still hurts that we don’t. 

He heard the tears and saved me. “I know you well enough to know what you’re trying to say.”

That’s the issue.

The call had gone on too long and we knew it so we ended it. Silence rushed in again, and I was reminded why I want to talk to men when I’m alone. I was reminded, as I reflected on how easy it is to get to the heart of things with someone who once held yours, why it’s not always my brightest idea. 

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On the second night, I texted my Situation. It was a risk because I never know if arbitrary correspondence is welcome between us; we tend only to talk for a singular purpose. We tread lightly with one another, too lightly. It’s a cadence we’ve crafted over an 11-year stretch and one it would be far too late to switch up now.

Ours is not a history I can put to words. Suffice it to say: it started one way—a romantic way—and we’ve ended it, a number of times, in others. Just after I moved here, I stopped talking to him for two full years. It was as long a silence as we’ve ever imposed on one another. It should’ve been longer. But we always manage, no matter how secure or messy the knots we tie off, to loosen the ends again. 

I do not recommend a Situation. Especially not one with someone who’s single nearly as often as you are, whose emotions you cannot gauge even when they’re clearly spoken, who makes you feel, whenever you have his attention, as though you are afflicted with some 19th century fever. But sometimes a single mother who only finds herself alone a few times a year can only sustain a Situation. 

He and I do not often exchange confidences, so texting him was much emptier than texting my ex. I regretted reaching out at all. I should know by now that he rarely reaches back.

I cannot tell him what my ex knew without saying: I do not always know who I am without my daughter. 

Then again, the Situation may know this better than most. I only engage him when I am without my daughter. 

It’s because of the 13 years. At this point, I’ve spent more of my adult life as a mother than as a woman without a child. And now, whenever my daughter is with her father for more than a weekend, all the systems of my body seem to require a hard reset. Too many synapses reroute at once, delivering signals they haven’t in months:

Hands, you will not stroke hair for weeks. Arms, you will not reach for hugs. Eyes, you do not need to scan for your child’s whereabouts. Ears, you needn’t keen toward potential distress. Mouth, you’ve no need to admonish or instruct or joke. Mind, you can loosen your anxious reins a bit (though let’s be honest: the girl does not have to be present to consume your waking thoughts. You’re still going to rouse at 1am wondering if you’ll have readied her enough for adulthood by the time she reaches it. You’ll still startle, open-eyed, at 3, reminding yourself that adulthood is only 7 years away. You won’t know what to do with yourself, then, either, will you? Not if you don’t strategize now. You can’t very well spend your empty nest years texting exes. At 60, you’ll need more than a Situation…).

I spend far too much of my daughter's time away trying to remember who I was before her. Maybe there was something I wanted then that I can still work on now. I take inventory of the things about myself I rarely have time to consider when I’m busy actively parenting: Age is announcing itself, especially under my eyes and in the threading of its spindly fingers through my hair. And it’s curious, too; it’s constantly wondering: Is this it? Are we done with accomplishment? Shouldn’t we reinvent? As what? And when? Can we do it in the week we have left to ourselves, before then another year’s attention back to the growing girl?

Age rarely whispers: You are also a growing girl.

That’s a thing I have to tell myself. When I have time. When I remember. 

After the first two nights, I knew better than to talk to men. I spent the rest of the first week, coming to terms with the fact that I’ll need to make more local friends. I’ll need to connect with my community in ways I’ve resisted since we’ve moved here. I’ll need to find work in a market where the need for what I do seems to be diminishing daily.

I’ve made more than one trip to Target. Unpacked boxes. Experimented with my natural curls. Fallen asleep with a pot on the stove. Scrubbed said scorched pot. Read. Binge-watched seasons and series. Saw Barbie solo. Taken and placed occasional phone calls to relatives. Sang, danced, selfied. 

There is one week left. It’s my hope that by its end, I’ll be better acquainted with my 43-year-old self. This is the last stretch of time I’ll spend alone with her. By the time my child’s away for a week or more again, it will be winter and I’ll be 44. 

We think that who we are as mothers is best defined by how we are with our kids. But it’s the weeks like these that hold up the clearest mirror. That’s why it’s so tempting to spend them texting exes. Or looking for other shiny objects to deflect the stark truths of our own reflection. 

I am facing mine now. She has my full attention.

A quick note of thanks to everyone who’s been reading to the end of these essays. I know they take a commitment of your time and I’m so appreciative that you’re willing to spare a few of your precious minutes to spend with my work. If you’re a paid subscriber, thank you so, so much. I can’t begin to tell you how much that’s inspired and helped during my ongoing job search. If you’re a free subscriber, thank you, too, just for being here and continuing to support. Please tell a friend about this newsletter, if you feel like they might enjoy it. Until next time!

Video Credit: Story J. Brown

The first night, there was a fire. 

This, moments after GPS navigated me to the wrong hotel – or rather the one I wrongly booked: Courtyard at Marriott Virginia Oceanfront South, rather than last year’s far superior Courtyard at Marriott Virginia Oceanfront North. No one else in the car understood why my mood immediately darkened upon realizing my error, so no one else in the car expected the front desk clerk’s announcement that the suite I’d booked—the corner suite with the kitchenette and sitting room—was unavailable for our three-night stay.

“Hopefully the good news will make up for the bad,” the clerk offered. “We’re giving you two double queen rooms – with an adjoining door, so you’ll still be connected. It’s more space; you just lose the kitchenette.” 

It already felt like I’d lost more than the kitchenette.

I’d lost my expectation of an oasis at the end of a five-hour drive. I’d lost the letting-go I’d hoped to do, the vanquishing of certain anxieties I’d anticipated since I booked the trip four months ago. My guard was up now, higher than it always was when I hosted our summer getaway, because now there would be disappointments to mitigate, inconveniences to circumvent. 

Perhaps unnecessarily, during these annual trips, I carry the burden of everyone’s good time on my back, and every bump in the road makes the weight feel heavier. 

No vacation is perfect. But I’d set the bar for seamlessness high last summer—a redemption arc for the summer before that—and this year, I was already falling short of it at check-in. 

The smile I mustered for the front desk clerk was tepid at best. Dourness settled over me as I thanked her, my mind already drifting to predictions of what awaited us upstairs. Though I’d never stayed at this location before, I guessed by its proximity to the older, noisier, more centrally located part of Atlantic Avenue that it would be dingier and less comfortable than its sister hotel, about one mile up, on the redeveloping stretch of the road. 

We decided to go up to the ninth floor to see the adjoining rooms before unloading the car. The elevator was damp, its air thick with the warring scents of sunscreen, over-sprayed cologne, fried foods and chlorine. The carpet in the hall on the ninth floor seemed steeped in years of sand and grime. 

I turned toward the long row of windows overlooking the parking lot and that’s when I first spotted the smoke. Translucent gray clouds at first, though in the short walk from the elevator to our rooms, the clouds seemed to thicken into long, dark, rising plumes. The fog was too dense to decipher the exact location, but a fire was definitely in progress nearer than was comfortable. 

“That can’t be good,” one of us muttered. It might’ve been me. 

We stood there a minute more, watching as cyclists stilled their bikes and pedestrians whipped out their phones to record. We looked down from the windows at my parked Sante Fe. 

“Our clothes are gonna smell like smoke…” Mom predicted. 

I hope it doesn’t spread, was my mental contribution. I knew better than to speak it aloud. If they’re feeling generous, my anxieties alert me when they’re unwise to voice. 

My daughter found the fire thrilling. She’d never witnessed one firsthand. Nana’s expression was inscrutable as she looked on. 

Nana goes quiet more often now. She is two weeks from turning 81. Her age and the changes it’s ushering in require mental adjustments I’ve yet to comprehend, much less implement. 

The rooms were fine. The carpet inside them were as grime-laden as the ones in the hall. An unsightly “no smoking or vaping” sticker affixed to the smudged inner glass obstructed the beachfront view. The bathroom was a bit of a nightmare: a long crack ran sidelong across the wall inside the shower. A low dark ring, clearly resistant to whatever cleansers the hotel used, was visible an inch from the floor of the tub. I admonished myself not to examine any crevice too closely. 

Accept that this experience, as all hotel experiences, will be vaguely unclean. Just hope it does not prove itself indisputably filthy. 

We opened the double doors adjoining our rooms and I scanned my mother and grandmother’s faces. They were being careful not to add to my discontent. I was being careful to temper it with more mental messages:

We still have a balcony. Two, in fact. Two bathrooms. Four beds! One for each of us. It’s good. This is still good. I am grateful. 

But I wasn’t feeling gratitude yet. 

We headed back to the hallway, where just beyond the window glass, we saw a billowing mushroom cloud, double the size of the smoke we saw coming in. 

It made the most sense to retrieve our bags before things got even worse. Given the gathering charcoal gusts, it was impossible to tell how far the fire’s origin was from the hotel parking lot. 

I decided to spend the rest of the first night grappling with acceptance. These were less than ideal circumstances but I couldn’t let this turn into a less than ideal vacation. I’d worked too hard to plan and pull it off. By morning, I’d have to let go of my preconceived hopes and invoke new expectations. 

The summer before Story and I moved to North Carolina, the four of us—us and my mother and hers—rode to Rehoboth one day in July. 

For a few years by then, Nana had been promising Story that she’d take her to the beach one day. 

Nana is a promiser. There are things she finds especially important to impart to children: family, faith, cultural exposure, travel. All her promises to my daughter align with these ideals. I recognize them as the same promises she used to make to me when I was a girl. 

Maybe we’ll go to this place. Maybe we’ll make our way there. One day I’ll have to take you. Maybe in summer. On Christmas break. In a few weeks. Next time you visit. 

When I was young, Nana’s maybes often materialized. She was a young grandmother, only 36 when I was born. I took her youth for granted. While I was growing up, she still had the willful determination of a woman who’d raised a child all on her from the age of 17 and put herself through stenography courses at night while working two jobs by day and attempting to find a decent man to date in her limited time off. 

She kept her word as often as she could and when she couldn’t, it was because the reach of her good intentions exceeded our practical or financial grasp. 

I learned over time to appreciate the intention more than I expected the follow-through. It’s a lesson that still serves me well, discerning the difference between a promise that’s empty and one that might be fulfilled. The latter may prove as fruitless as the former but only the empty promise deserves my ire.  The other can earn my understanding. 

By the time my daughter was born, Nana was not a young grandmother anymore but I had yet to notice. She was in her mid-70s when she began the beach promises to Story and they still sounded as plausible as any of her others. I assumed that, when she was ready, she’d plan the beach day on her own and we’d fall in line with whatever she decided. 

In the end, it was more of a collaborative effort. My mother drove but I can’t recall if we rented a car or used mine or Nana’s. We got a late start and an even later return home. Still, during the long drive back, we chatted about how nice it had been to get away together, the four of us traveling for no reason other than leisure. 

“We should do this again, but longer next time,” my mother mused. 

I looked over at my sun-drunk daughter, barely holding her eyelids open beside me in the backseat, and answered, “Definitely.”

It is hard for single mothers to maintain an annual practice of summer vacationing—especially those of us who are not consistent high-earners. Every penny goes to necessities—food, shelter, clothing. Anything leftover is often eaten up in emergencies and incidentals. 

I didn’t grow up vacationing with my mother and grandmother every year. I can’t remember vacationing with them in any year of my childhood—although maybe the occasional day trip to a local amusement park counts? When we traveled together it was usually to see family back in Michigan. Once or twice all three of us made our way to a family reunion in Mississippi but those were even rarer occasions. 

Family visits don’t quite count as vacation, do they? They cannot be counted as pure recreation. They ask things of us that independent vacations do not. They are meant to maintain our bonds with the relatives we wouldn’t otherwise see. Vacations aren’t meant to exact any toll at all; they’re intended purely to replenish us, to temporarily absolve us of daily obligation, to offer an entirely different view of the world we spend the rest of the year barreling through. 

Family vacations—those we take with our relatives to a neutral destination—exist at the overlap of the Venn diagram: they require something, even as they reinvigorate us. 

My father’s family took many summer trips together. The practice began with my grandparents, who once drove cross country from Muskegon to California. Another time, when I was an infant, they invited my mother to bring me with them on a trip to Toronto. They’re my RV-and-cabin side of the family. My “Up North” side of the family. I only know what the upper peninsula looks like because of them. I’ve only seen Mackinac Island because they took me. Disney World, too. 

Once I was old enough to notice what went into planning those trips—the logistical energy of each, from booking for over a dozen people and hoping for the best when it was time for reimbursement, to scheduling transport to and from the destination via multi-car caravan, to programming the days in such a way that lan hourly itinerary was offered but not overpacked with inflexibly-booked excursions—I realized how unenviable the position of family trip planner can be. 

Everyone loves a vacation except the person tasked with organizing it. 

There are tacit expectations of the planner. She must take care never to view herself as a martyr. Though she is taking on all of the driving, 95% of the expense for four travelers for four days, resistance and defecting from things she’s planned, the occasional muttered complaint and every expectant look that follows the daily (sometimes hourly) question: what will we do next?, she cannot feel put-upon or even too annoyed. 

It was her idea, after all. She did not have to do this. 

The expense must never be mentioned. She would do well to put it out of even her own mind. No one can enjoy a trip where every cost is counted; you must spend what as though you will recoup the cost, spend as though you’ve forgotten how sizable an object money is for women like you, spend as though you haven’t just lost the jobs that paid for the previous years’ trips. 

Spend, because the women who came before you made costly promises and kept them. 

Rudee Tours, Dolphin Watching Boat, 2023

Though the fire was quelled by the second day of our stay on Virginia Beach, it remained the talk of the strip the whole time we were there. Passersby stopped to stare at what remained of a t-shirt factory less than a block from our hotel. We saw cameramen across from it every day that we drove by. A news chopper circled every few hours. 

When news reports began trickling in, we realized that the fire took five hours and 75 firefighters to put out. It destroyed three businesses in total and scorched the corner of what looked like a building of condos behind it. 

It seemed impossible that it didn’t interfere with our trip. Our rooms, despite their age, dinginess and inexplicable accumulation of balcony gnats, served us well, too. 

We spent hours together in the sun, celebrated my mother’s birthday at a seafood buffet, cruised across the beach and watched for dolphins.

“This was a nice day,” Nana said just before the dolphin boat docked. “I enjoyed this.” 

I was tempted to wonder if she remembered the night before, when she and I had a small, confusing, private row that resulted in her deciding to stay in her hotel room while the rest of us went to the birthday buffet. I was tempted to wonder if she would remember the details of this better, nicer day in the week to come. 

But I knew it didn't matter. Forgetfulness is cruel until all the tiny fissures it causes float away as readily as everything else. It’s then that you can almost be grateful for it. 

On vacation, there are always things to forget. Practical things, like which hotel you booked the year before. Existential things like how you’ll afford the decisions you made, just before you knew for sure that you’d be losing your job. Emotional things, like future implications of everyone’s advancing age. Nana is 81. Mom just turned 63. I’ll be 44 in November. Story will embark on her teen years in just two weeks’ time. 

I can’t take it, I think, before slipping out to the balcony the day before our departure. I cue up a song on my laptop and dance. I haven’t danced like this in ages. I used to do it all the time. I’d forgotten how freeing it could be. This was all I wanted. Rejuvenation. A jogging of memory. 

I remember to be proud of the respite I’ve created. I remember all the respites past someone created for me. And there, in the lingering heat of dusk, I am grateful. I can be ready to face the summer’s end, the waiting fall.  

I dance and dance and dance. Just because.

I can.  

Aunt Melita used to live on Hall Street with her husband Ernest in a house where I spent a lot of summertime. Decades later, I don’t remember much of its architecture. I don’t remember the exact address. The house on Hall is instead a film reel. Any thought of it evokes the same, highly specific, hazily rendered scenes:

Cousin Arian in the living room summer after summer, watching and rewatching Stand by Me and The Goonies, two films I cannot say for sure I’ve ever watched, beginning to end, because they bored me so then that I’d wander off whenever he hunkered down in the living room to screen them. His dad, my Uncle Ernie, teaching an overgrown 11-year-old me to ride a bike in the back alley. Dozens of Page 43s torn from issues of Jet magazine arranged as a curated papering of Beauties of the Week on Arian’s bedroom wall. Uncle Ernie’s conversion van in the driveway, with a little TV in the dash. Arian and I in the kitchen, figuring out that this new brand of cookie called Keebler Soft Batch tasted better when heated for 7-10 seconds in a microwave. Uncle E’s face lighting with scary-campfire-story glee as he recounted, scene for scene, the 1980 film, The Elephant Man. Feeling so terrified of what he’d described that I later crawled into Aunt Melita’s bed and snuggled as close as I could in hopes that she’d be able to protect me when the elephantine monster I’d (erroneously) imagined showed up in her bedroom.  

Aunt Melita and Uncle Ernie’s house on Hall was the first of the two they would own over the course of their life together. It was there where I first began to understand that, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, home would always be with them… even though the city also housed my father.

Aunt Melita and Uncle Ernie moved crosstown in the early ‘90s. The new house was in the northeast part of the city where, for at least a decade, they were the only Black homeowners on their block. It was a far cry from where Uncle Ernie was raised, in the historically Black part of Grand Rapids closer to downtown. A far cry, too, from Hall Street, which was also predominantly Black. 

The outside of the house took some getting used to. Unlike Hall Street, where people who knew my uncle—a lifelong Grand Rapidian and former U of M championship-winning basketball star—would cruise by slowly and yell greetings from their car windows, the new neighborhood was eerily quiet.

Neighbors stared as they stood on their front porches, peeked out at us from behind their living room curtains and glared or ignored us while walking their dogs. 

There was little community among lawns, though to the extent that any neighborly affinity could be found, Uncle Ernie cultivated it. He was fastidious about mowing in summer and shoveling in winter, dogged about raising a cool hand of greeting at grown folks in their yards as he cruised by in his black Caddy and affable with their kids, who craned their necks 6 feet and 7 inches to spot the smile on his face. 

Inside, the new house felt far more akin to the old one. Its walls were painted in warm shades of peach or brushed with soft strokes of gray. Its rooms hosted years of family gatherings, namely Kwanzaa celebrations where our little ones lit the kinara and recited the seven-day principles. Every surface seemed to reflect the themes of Black love, Black family and Black art that had been present on Hall—and in Aunt Melita and Uncle Ernie’s hearts, lifelong. They were a couple who carried the full, lush power of their personalities into every room they entered, unfurling them like imported rugs and sleeping bags, ever making space for others to sprawl and rest, to be welcomed and warmed.  

My father has lived in Grand Rapids for nearly as long as his sister and brother-in-law. He has lived in apartments of various types—rental house, basement-floor, duplex—in sundry parts of the city. Usually, he moved around with a large-breed dog of some sort. He has always favored Great Danes. 

I was terrified of dogs when I was a kid. That became a convenient reason for us not to spend much time together at any of his homes. If I stayed over for a night or two, he’d have to board his dog elsewhere and taking time away from the dog for more than a few days, in order to spend time with me while I was visiting from out-of-state, always seemed like too high an expectation. 

I still don’t care much for dogs, but I’m no longer very afraid of them. Still, when I pet one in front of my father, there’s always a moment of vocal surprise. “Oh, look who’s petting the dog,” someone will say, as though I’m not a 43-year-old fully woman capable of regulating her discomfort around animals. Intended or not, in those moments, it always feels to me like a reaffirmation of our distance: we cannot possibly be close if I’ll barely engage with what he most adores.

In truth, I moved past the worst of my cynophobia in my early teens. By then, though, Dad and I had made Aunt Melita and Uncle Ernie’s house our visitation hub. We watched movies together in their basement or Dad arrived on their front porch to take me to lunch and a theater then dropped me back there soon after a movie ended. 

I’m grateful for the time he’s spared me. I’ve gotten more of it than some kids do, when they spend most of the year living hundreds of miles from their fathers. But I’m more grateful for the space my aunt and uncle gave us in their home to grow our relationship into what it’s become. Without the involvement of my father’s family, without the times he was able to visit me at his mother’s and sisters’ homes, we would not be even who we are to each other now: a father and child who share an interest in film, an aversion to conflict and an inability to clear whatever hurdles compel us to keep each other at arm’s length. 

When I was 27, I was offered a teaching job in Grand Rapids. It was the end of the summer I matriculated grad school, two weeks before the start of the fall college semester and, because I’d long harbored fantasies of being a professor, I would’ve moved anywhere for the adjunct work a college might’ve given me. 

I didn’t think much about my dad when I accepted the gig. I didn’t consider what it would be like to live year-round in the same city where we barely visited with each other during summers when I was a kid. It didn’t occur to me, the emotional chaos that had the potential to cause.

The first call I placed was to my aunt and uncle, who immediately invited me to stay with them until I could afford a place of my own. My next call, the one to my dad, came with congratulations and a question: “Who will you stay with, Melita and Ernie?” 

When I moved in with them, none of us understood how little adjunct work paid or how long it would take me to build enough savings to make rent every month. 

I was with Aunt Melita and Uncle Ernie for three years before I got my own apartment. While I was there, they drove me to bus stops in the dark when I was teaching an early-morning class. They drove me all the way to Allendale when it was too frigid or icy to ride the bus. They treated me to countless restaurant meals, because they maintained a ritual of eating out at restaurants and wouldn’t dream of excluding me, even though I couldn’t afford the extravagance. They taught me to drive (along with my dad) and recommended the dealership where I got my first car. They helped me organize that apartment when I finally got it. And when I got pregnant one month after moving in, they accompanied me to months of prenatal appointments so I wouldn’t have to attend them all alone. 

I’d always felt close to my aunt and uncle but never so much as when we shared their home. Living with relatives as an adult is always an education. It is an observation in intimacy, a negotiation of resources that are not your own, a calculus that must account for when you’ve overstayed your welcome. For all three years, I felt the dull ache of discomfort that comes from knowing that you’re living in space that doesn’t belong to you, that you aren’t contributing nearly as much as you should to the household’s upkeep, that you should be a self-sustaining adult by now. But they never made me feel like I’d been with them too long (even though I very clearly had). Instead, they made me feel like I belonged with them. 

When Uncle Ernie died suddenly five years ago, I was living back in Baltimore. My father was the one who called to tell me. When I hung up, I let out a sound unlike any I’ve heard before, a hollow yelp that strangled itself in my throat, as if attempting to suppress the sound would make the reality causing it go away. I flew out with my daughter the next day and was back at the house in Grand Rapids by the next sundown. 

Our whole family seemed to be crowded there, trying to keep Aunt Melita reassured that she would somehow be able to walk through a world that didn’t include the husband with whom she’d shared 37 years.

But we knew our reassurances were inadequate, because we’d tried them out first on ourselves. We were all unsure that we’d ever figure out how to do it. The panic and pain—emotions their home rarely caused or carried—were palpable. 

I am in Grand Rapids now. I’ve been here nearly a week. It’s the first time I’ve been able to return since 2019, just before the pandemic. My daughter and I are here, in part because Aunt Melita had a hospital procedure scheduled and we wanted to be here to support her. 

Every time I’ve returned here after Uncle Ernie passed, I’ve done it with him in mind. I try to show up in ways that reflect him. I try to be for my aunt who he was for me. I try to reflect his love back to her, along with my own. Because I knew. I saw up close and I knew how carefully he loved her.

I think most, whenever I visit, of those three years their home was also mine. 

Whenever we’re back now, my daughter walks through every room, itemizing and voicing aloud the observations of change I also quietly track; the house looks a lot different than it did when a couple lived together in it. Now, it is the abode of a woman who lives on her own. The man-cave the basement once was has become what my aunt calls a “she-den.” The kitchen has been remodeled. Several rooms of the house have been restyled.

But it’s clear that Aunt Melita left room here for her husband; even with all the renovations, his presence is still felt in every corner of their house. 

When you make a home of a person, they will remain, as long as you do, in the home you made with that person. 

I haven’t seen much of my dad this week. He hosted a picnic in a park the day after my daughter and I arrived. We spoke and hugged and I took two beautiful photos of him and my daughter. It was good to see family; it was a balm. But it was bittersweet, too, in ways I can’t yet describe.

I saw my father for about five minutes the next day, too, and I’ll see him again when we leave for the airport, as he’ll be driving us there. 

I don’t know whether we’ll spend a moment of one-on-one time together. I don’t know whether or not it will be another four years before we lay eyes on one another in person again. And I am not as resigned about either of those things as I am working hard to appear to be. 

But every day that I’ve been here, I’ve felt entirely at home. Every day that I’ve been here, I’ve been with my aunt in the home she (and I, for a series of magical summers and a generous pocket of years) once shared with my uncle.

It’s hard to imagine any outcome more fitting than that.

Bonus Photo:

My maternal great-grandparents, George and Verlia, lived in a house with yellowish-tan siding on a sleepy street in the small town of Jackson. The house always looked small from the outside, with its front lawn consisting of two patches of grass and a lone pear tree on its right side (I think there were more trees in the back). 

But somewhere on the short walk from the graveled driveway to the enclosed front porch, between the creak of the outer screen door and echoing trill of the bell at other other (if it wasn’t unlocked or open already), I’d remember: Grandma and Grandpa's house was a kind of Narnia, opening into an ethereal expanse where there was, somehow, always just enough room for whoever might show up and need it. 

There were three bedrooms crowded at the top of the narrow stairs, and another just off the dining room on the first floor. The living room comfortably sat about five people but there tended to be many more, perched on several steps of the staircase, leaned against the arm of the LazyBoy, piled two per cushion on the couch, with folks gingerly positioned on each other’s laps. The TV rarely left whichever channels were broadcasting baseball or the local news.

Grandma’s kitchen could hold 12 people or more people—and often did, between the extra chairs pushed in at the long dining table, folks prepping hot plates at the oven, aunts washing an endless queue of dishes at the sink, uncles pulling French vanilla ice cream from the upright deep freezer, cousins slicing liberal chunks of pound cake from a tiny dessert table, Grandma grabbing fresh butter from the fridge. 

Grandma Verlia was tiny, a diminutive 5-feet-even, if that. It could be hard to believe she’d borne 11 babies and raised the 10 who lived. It was when I crossed the threshold of her kitchen, where activity was efficient and supply seemed unending, that it became entirely plausible. 

Most of my summer visits to Michigan began at Grandma and Grandpa’s. I’d be the only kid staying there. My great-uncle Warren lived upstairs. Grandpa stayed on the first floor. Grandma and I slept upstairs. Sometimes they’d let me have cousins over. Other times, they’d let me sleep over at their houses. But they were generally understood as my custodians for as long as I was in town. Theirs was the number my mother dialed when she wanted to reach me. Theirs was the door I was delivered back to when it was time to go visit my father’s family. 

Like Grandpa and Grandma Verlia, G-Mom, my dad’s mother, had come to Michigan from Mississippi. The former had come from French Camp and thereabouts in Choctaw County. G-Mom, the only girl of several brothers, had come from Natchez. Where the former settled near the bottom of the Mitt, the Travises, my dad’s family, managed to find themselves in Muskegon. 

For decades before I was born, G-Mom had a husband who looked a bit like a movie star. All old photos suggest they cut a handsome figure, with their four cherubic children, immaculately manicured lawn and frequent family trips to do outdoorsy things like camping and fishing. 

G-Mom’s husband, my grandfather, died a month after I was born. Perhaps because of that timing, I spent a lot of time at G-Mom’s house in my earliest summers. She let me sleep in her bed until she remarried and then, because I was afraid to be alone upstairs, I’d sleep in her living room. Of Muskegon, I remember the milkman. G-Mom was still having her milk delivered in the ‘80s, a practice I’d never seen outside of black-and-white sitcoms on Nick at Nite. I remember the hammy smell of the paper mill, the almond extract G-Mom used in her poundcake, fresh-baked blueberry pies. Shared baths with cousins. Wheat bran sprinkled onto everything (for regularity). The astringent sting of Dr. Tichenor’s for cuts. Birdwatching in the backyard. Ping-pong in the basement. Boxing matches on TV at night. Bedding down while the sun was still up. 

To combat my potential loneliness, G-Mom tried to coordinate visits from my cousin Joe in Chicago to coincide with the weeks I spent with her. From there, I’d fan out to Grand Rapids or Kalamazoo, where my aunts lived with their husbands. In Kalamazoo, there were Aunt Bonnie and Uncle Bob’s four kids to play with. In Grand Rapids, there was my cousin Arian who, like me, lived in the northeast and only traveled to the Midwest in the summer. He looked exactly like his dad, my uncle Ernie: tall and lanky and elegant in every movement. 

Perhaps the most consistent peer socialization I had, outside of the eight childhood years I spent attending church with mostly the same set of kids, was during those summer months with my cousins of similar age. I learned from them that conflict could not be avoided, that reconciliation could be easy, that colorism, texturism and featurism exist (though the names for each would come to us much later), that in families, there will always be favoritism, whether openly acknowledged or denied, that I would benefit from some of those -isms and suffer for others. From them, I learned that, for as long as you’re together, you don’t leave each other alone.

Adult summers have been different. I stopped regularly showing up in Michigan when I graduated from high school, the necessity to keep me occupied and supervised without summer camps having disappeared with the advent of college. Grandpa and Grandma Verlia passed long ago. G-Mom’s also been gone for over a decade and, before her passing, she spent her last 8 years living with Alzheimer’s, so it has always felt like I lost her much earlier. I can’t say that my cousins and I know each other very well as adults. My daughter hasn’t barely knows their kids at all. 

School dismissed for her two weeks ago. She tends to spend her summers with me and with her father. We put her in summer camps sometimes, but often she’s at home with one of us. 

Yesterday, we left our half-unpacked new apartment, shoved a few suitcases in the back of my Santa Fe and headed up to Maryland. I dropped her off with her dad before continuing on to Baltimore. I’m writing this from my Nana’s couch, still tangled in the bedding she made up for me here. 

I’m struck this morning by how different her summers have been from the ones I spent up north as a child, how different her experience of home must be. I worry over what she’s missing, even as I understand that what I had in those varied summer homes—the love, the longing, the lessons—doesn’t exist anymore. It cannot be replicated for her and I’m not sure that I’d want that, even if it could. The airlines I flew have folded. Milkmen are extinct. The elders have long been ancestors. 

And for her, a mother isn’t someone you fly away from in June. A father isn’t someone you hope to find in the homes of his sisters and mother in July. For her, parents are people you run to. They take you to their Narnias, help you navigate dynamics there that long predate you, boost you up the labyrinthine branches of your family trees, bring you back home with ancient answers to all your new questions. 

I hope that we are home for her, that wherever we are, she feels emboldened to explore more of who she is, and that when she is old enough to go it alone, she understands that she will never have to. 

In two days, I’m taking her to visit my dad’s family for the first time in about 4 years, our first foray into post-pandemic air travel. We will see aunts, uncles, some cousins. I’ll help her keep everyone’s names and she’s straight (likely by asking someone else to help). We’ll fly back, and I’ll drop her off again with her dad. Before long, he’ll return her to me. Between the two of us, all summer, she will have never left home.

I was raised in a series of apartments—eight in total from birth till the age of 17. (Add two brief stints in townhomes for a total of 10 different living spaces by the time I graduated high school.)

When I enumerate them that way, they present on paper as indicators of an unstable early life, a childhood spent bouncing from building to burg, never staying anywhere long enough to make or maintain any meaningful connections. In retrospect, that was the truth of it. But it never felt that way in the moment.

Despite my family’s frequent bouts of relocation, we were careful to replicate a single experience: living on the third floor.

Third-floor apartments were the highest and so, of course, the most coveted. They were the quietest, as the only four apartments in any 12-unit building where no one could be heard stomping, running, or arguing overhead. They were a haven for women without protectors, women tasked with devoting time, technique and strategy to protecting their own selves.

For us, it was simple calculation: an unwelcome encroacher—intruder, solicitor, neighborhood gossip masquerading as new confidante—had to climb two flights of stairs, past more than a handful of other homes to reach ours. The distance from the ground could offer a scant advantage, a potential 10-second lead on preventing what might’ve been coming.

And if anyone could bend that sliver of time to her will, it was a woman who had learned that she could only rely on God and herself.

I picked all of this up from my nana. Hers was the third-floor apartment I was born into. She’d moved into it just as my mother was starting high school; I was born a year after Mom graduated.

Nana never married. She’d had my mother a month after her own high school graduation in 1960. While my mother was young, she and Nana lived with her parents in Michigan, then with Nana’s brother in Connecticut, where she worked two jobs and attended night classes to learn court stenography. It was there that she started to live in apartments on her own, though I’m not sure if she knew right away which floor made her feel most secure. Maybe she’d come to that realization by trial and error, maybe by dint of bad experience.

She moved to Baltimore when I was three and landed a job in her new field fairly quickly. My mother and I followed Nana to Baltimore a year later and lived in her third-floor apartment there, as well as in the one she rented a year or two later—where she still lives today.

When Mom found her own place, I was 7. She’d also chosen a third floor apartment.

She must’ve inherited the same notion: a woman living alone, a single woman, particularly one with a little girl, should make a home that is high and away. She does well to live at the height of a building that is highest to scale, on the backside of building, facing lawn and green rather than a parking lot. She does well to live where the noise nearby needn’t be one more thing that keeps her up at night.

Three-floor apartment buildings rose to American prominence in the mid-20th century, compromises of construction existing somewhere between the tenement high-rise with its intentional overcrowding and the single-family home with its twin lures of individualism and privacy.

The best three-floor buildings often sit at the edges of suburbs, close enough to cul de sacs and quiet streets of homeowners to ensure that the surrounding grocery stores are well stocked, the public schools are relatively decent and those more permanent neighbors— the homeowners—have vested interest in keeping the community relatively safe.

Three-floor complexes are for strivers. They are designed for transition, for impermanence, for never forming lasting bonds with neighbors. The newer ones, especially, thrown up quickly to accommodate a rapid residential growth or redevelopment, are not invented for long-term living. They are meant to be turned over every 2-5 years, for older carpet to be ripped up and relaid, for fixtures and amenities to be updated, for rent to have new reasons for increase.

In apartments, as early as on lease-signing day, there is ever the expectation that you will leave.

I have done lots of leaving. So much that I don’t really know how to stay. I can’t imagine a more logical outcome for someone who spent her formative years at a dense cluster of pins on a Baltimore map.

I still do not quite know how to conceive of domestic permanence.

The apartment we’ve just moved into is my fourth. Like my mother and grandmother before me, I also live on the highest floor I can. But in this latest home, the highest floor is only the second. I’m told it’s because of the building layout and the size of the unit I’ve rented. It is strange to look out the windows here and find myself so close to the ground. It is strange to live in a space this large and low, to feel like there’s a little more home than I know what to do with. Only one set of stairs to climb, any lead time on potential calamity halved.

My daughter says this feels almost like a house. She would know. She lives in one, from time to time, with her father. She intends to own one when she grows up.

“I want to live in a cottage,” she says. “Or a house like Daddy-and-[Wife]. Not in an apartment like you and Nana.”

I tell her that’s a great aspiration. I also try to explain the concepts of credit and mortgage. I note that she’ll need a career with a salary that can pay for that cottage (and, ideally, a money-earning someone-she-loves to live with and share in its expense).

She tells me I can live with her there. I tell her she can live with me, wherever I am, whenever she needs to.

But I leave out the part about that brief bit of time earlier this year when I began to harbor a then-realistic hope of homeownership. I’d just started my second consecutive six-figure job and had not yet learned that my current one would end after only 4 months. The 8-month stint I’d spent in my last position, before that it ended in layoffs, had allowed me to save more money than I’ve ever saved in my life. Not an overly impressive amount to some, but a considerable amount for a third-generation single parent with no generational wealth.

It would’ve been enough for the down payment on a house and I’d quietly started looking for one.

I’ve never been someone who bothered aspiring to homeownership. It was too intangible a goal and, in some ways, an undesirable one for someone unaccustomed to sticking around.

But I have always wanted a less transient life for my daughter. It was why I was so reluctant to leave my nana’s apartment after being priced out of my own when my daughter was 1. I wanted to give her a sense of family and roots and familiarity.

We didn’t leave Nana’s for North Carolina until she was 9. We stayed in our old place in Durham for nearly 3.5 full years, extending my last lease renewal long enough for her to wrap up her school year without interruption.

It would’ve been nice if I could’ve made this most recent move into a single-family home, where she and I might’ve been able to spend the rest of her childhood.

As it stands, I don’t know where we’ll move next. But I can predict that we’ll move again soon. This new place—while lovely—is, for now, but a pricey experiment, and North Carolina has never felt like a final nesting place.

Still, it’s given me one thing I’ve not had anywhere else: a different perspective on what is safe to call a home, a beckoning up to my balcony, an urging to come down from the clouds.

I am constantly reminded here that there are other ways to live and to mother. Less fearful ways, less aloof. It’s become a clearer to me here what kind of room my imagination requires and how much higher it still may be able to fly than the height of an apartment’s third floor.

I used to find both of the Parent Days difficult. Mother’s, because I worried over disappointing mine, worried that my money would run too low that year and we wouldn’t be able to brunch or I wouldn’t be able to buy gifts I found worthy of them, worried that without those overtures I’d never quite quantify with mere word or feeling the unfathomable breadth of our relationships. Mother’s Day is an adult only-daughter’s day to acknowledge her debt with grand gestures. It is a declaration in material form: I am able to provide you with this experience, because you raised me well. 

My mom and nana are not especially affectionate women—at least not with me or with each other. Our triad is not one of easy embraces or ample affirmation. We express our love best through provision: I give, therefore I care. I take, therefore I love. What, then, if there were a year when I couldn’t give? What, then, if my resources were so scant that I began to resent the taking?

Despite those constant undercurrents of implication, Mother’s Day is the easier one to manage. 

It’s Father’s Day that always sort of winds me. If on Mother’s Day I feel too much, then on Father’s Day I feel too little. 

I do not know how to function when I feel too little. 

I forget this holiday often, my attention to it as negligible as my experiences with fathers have been. 

I am the only reason my own father is one. This hit me hard this morning, and it’s the first time it has in 43 years. 

He has no other children. Unless he counts his dogs—and he might. But I do not know how he spends this day, whether the dogs acknowledge it, relying on his wife as their proxy, whether he receives gifts from them on this day or any others than the ones I occasionally send. 

It is June. He and I have spoken once this year. This is typical of us. He will call or I will. We will talk in animated tones. You will never hear my voice spoken in as breathy or high or propulsive an octave as the one I use to power through conversations with my dad. It is as though the skittering rush of words must outrun the realities of our relationship, which are so much shallower than they should be after all this time. Talking to my dad is like walking on water: a miracle on a surface. 

My father and I are too much alike, you see. He thinks I would not welcome anything other than what he’s given, so he is loath to approach with the promise of more. I think what he’s given is all he has for me, so I am loath to appear as though I may need more. We remain on the edges of one another’s worlds so as not to disturb these boundaries. It is this only daddy-daughter dance we’ve ever been able to do. 

I love him. I love him enough to know that he would be hurt if he read this. I love him enough to hurt as I write it. 

It is just that we express our love by withholding. That was always the hardest part of his holiday.

That is, of course, until I made another man a father. 

I would not recommend this unless you intend to remain committed to the man. This was not the case with my daughter’s dad—not at first and not in the ways one might think.

We broke up when I found out I was pregnant, after 8 years dating—albeit mostly long-distance, and did not see each other again until the week before our daughter was born. Spending a first pregnancy without a partner impacts your ability to perceive him as a parent. For a long time, he can only be someone who left you when you needed him, someone you will expect to keep doing so, as your needs increase… though I suppose, for some of us, that has always been a fairly familiar form of parenting. 

I was deeply unfair to my daughter’s dad in those early years, unable to bear the beam in my own eye for focusing on the mote in his. He was around when I didn’t want him around. He was around far less than I needed him around. He rarely showed up in the ways I hoped he would. He was always seeing me at my worst: my most hurt, my most vulnerable, my most seething with barely checked rage. 

I would try to celebrate him on Father’s Day but any gesture I mustered was brittle. It could not come from a peaceful place. Every present was wrapped in tumult. 

I did not notice then that the only way this man could witness me at my worst was because he kept showing up for his daughter. He moved cross-country to be closer to her. He came by. He carried her. He held her. He talked to her. He walked back to the operating room for her first surgery when I couldn’t bear to be the one to watch and hold her hand while she was anesthetized. He took her to actual daddy-daughter dances. And Disney World, with his wife. 

And that may be the most significant way that he’s shown up to date: he married well. I think marrying has made him a better father to our daughter. And I think having a daughter before marrying has shaped the way he’s raising the ones he’s had since. 

I believe he can show up differently for them than he has for us, because our experience gave him a context for what showing up can and should look like. And I know our daughter is happy enough when she is with them to appreciate, rather than fear, those differences. 

That is a miracle of far greater depth. 

Now I do not know how my daughter's father spends his holiday, either. It is not for me to know. I help my daughter send him a gift on the years that it occurs to me. I would like to think it occurs to me more often than not. Usually we send a dad-themed t-shirt; unfortunately, the years have not granted me much originality around this.  Fortunately, my daughter will soon be able to take over the task of Father’s Day gift-giving altogether. She knows him better than I do at this point, and that is worthy of celebration. 

Sometimes I am given a glimpse of his holiday. If it falls on a weekend of visitation and our kid comes home bearing anecdotes. And there have been times when I‘ve heard hints of it wafting into my home via their FaceTime calls. 

I am always careful to stay out of the frame of their FaceTime calls. I tend to pretend I’m not at home, so that she can create an unbroken sense of home with him when she is away from the one he and his family share with her on holidays and in summers. She prefers to keep us in compartments. Mom’s home. Dad’s home. Separate whenever possible. Having been raised by married parents, her dad doesn’t really get why that might feel necessary. But I do. 

Mine is an absence I am more than happy to honor for her. On Father’s Day or any other.

I’m moving in less than a week—an inevitability still not apparent to my daughter, who casually asked last night: “What day are we moving anyway?”

“Monday,” I answered just as casually.

I watched her eyes grow comically wide and braced for what was coming.

“Monday?! MON-day?!”

She paraded in a circle of semi-feigned panic, while I waited — with what I hope amounted to patience — for the shock, awe and outrage to hit their histrionic heights.

“Then why does it still look like this?” She flung her arms wide and waved them at the as-yet-to-be-deconstructed rooms around her.

There were boxes, sure. Taped under, half-full, top flaps still unfolded. But only a few. The built-in bookcase just outside my bedroom has been mostly emptied, but there are still too many odds and ends I don’t know what to do with: opened mail, picture books my daughter has long outgrown that I’m not quite ready to part with and, inexplicably, a few pairs of earrings still on the edges of the second and third shelves, where I’d always taken to storing them. (I don’t own enough jewelry to invest in a jewelry box; I barely even wear the earrings.)

I have cleared the kitchen counters of appliances. But five clear, empty containers are still lined against the backsplash, remnants from that the first year I spent here — the one where a man lived with us and purchased several kitchen items I probably never would’ve. He was a kitchen person. He likely cooked more hot meals during his brief stay than I have in in the pair of years since. These clear containers he brought in were intended to store pasta, sugar, flour. There are three more, meant for cereal, in a low cabinet beside the stove. I do not eat cereal. I do not store my pasta, sugar or flour in clear containers. I didn’t even when he was here.

So what of those? Should I keep them and try to become the kind of person who keeps an aesthetic kitchen?

The spices are still brimming from the bottom shelf of an upper cupboard. Should those be boxed in cardboard? Should I purchase yet another lidded plastic bin? Should I store them now and eat out for the next few days? Should I wait till the night before the move?

I have culled about half my closest, mostly of shameful fast fashion purchases made over the course of the pandemic. Clothes I bought just to try on, just to spend fifteen minutes bending and leaning and twirling in front of my phone’s ten-second timer. Outfits I bought as aspiration. When I moved here, I thought I might become a woman who attends summer festivals in backless maxi-dresses with the sides cut out. I thought I might be asked on actual dates with men whose breath I’d hear catch when I opened my front door. There is lingerie, too. Cheap, scratchy lace sets I found on Amazon. I wore each just once for the man who lived here. I find them among his single, errant sock or small stack of discarded t-shirts that also tumble from the corners of my walk-in as I continue to gut it for the move.

There are unopened canvases in there. And in my bedroom, there’s one on which I’ve (poorly) painted the head and shoulders of a woman. It still sits on an easel, a monument to my indecision. Do I take this? Or just take a photo of it and let it go? It is not nice enough to hang and too cumbersome to pointlessly store.

A stack of smaller canvases are in my daughter’s closet, early-pandemic experiments I painted in which I immediately lost interest. “Can I have them?” she asked when she saw me shoving them under my bed two and half years ago. Sure. They are waiting to be pulled from her top shelf, where they’ve been sitting, dusty and undisturbed.

I’ve made two trips to Walmart for boxes. Crisp, flat cardboard boxes, marked on the side as small, medium or large. Growing up, my mom always collected our moving boxes from grocery stores. She’d asked a worker if they had any to spare and they’d tell her to come back on inventory day — which always differed, depending on the store. When we’d return, they’d load us up with a mishmash of broken down paper goods, stained, water-warped, torn.

I never liked packing my things in those boxes, their brands still somewhat legible on the unripped bits of surface. Boxes that once held stacks of Wheaties, bunches of Chiquita bananas, jugs of Tropicana orange juice, Lean Cuisine or Toaster Strudel. It was hard to imagine starting fresh when we were storing our belongings in some corporation’s cast-offs.

When I can afford to, I buy unused moving boxes. The kind sold in the aisle of a big-box store entirely devoted to moving supplies, with lines on their tops meant to be filled in with a list of contents. I buy rolls of tape, too. Fresh Sharpies. Bubble wrap.

This is the first move where I’ve been able to truly afford to. This is the first move where I’ve had time to let the apartment look like I may or may not be moving in a few days.

All my other moves have been under duress, the contents of every prior dwelling hastily dumped into huge garbage bags, to be either trashed, hauled or stored. The sorting that determined which was always dubious at best. In prior moves, I sold all the pieces too large to carry or fit into the back of a rented van.

Whenever I’ve moved before, I’ve been outrunning something.

This dates back to 2001, the year I graduated college. Like most recent grads who haven’t landed jobs by the time they need to leave campus for good, I figured I’d move back home for a few months, completely unaware of how long a job search could potentially stretch. Two months into summer, I found out that the house I’d come back to was already in foreclosure.

I’d known my mother and her husband were having problems. They’d always had problems. They’d been married since I was 10 and I’d never known them to be happy about it. Tolerant at best, but mostly resigned. My stepfather had apparently grown weary of resignation. He’d quietly stopped paying the mortgage and hadn’t disclosed that fairly important fact to my mom until it was too late to do much about it other than pack — something she put off until about 48 hours before the sheriff was due to dump the contents of the two-story townhouse on the front lawn. Contents that contained more than a few things that her husband had left behind when he vacated the house on his own a few months before.

I know now that my mother waited so long because she didn’t know where we would go — or rather, she didn’t want to return to the only place we could go: her mother’s. Figuring out an alternative felt as insurmountable as the effort of artful and unhurried packing must’ve. At the time, I didn’t understand the delay or how I could’ve intervened earlier to prevent the disorganization and panic. In the years since, I’ve developed a near-paranoic practice of trying to outmaneuver that level of disorganization and panic.

That move — that staying-up-all-night, driving around to housing complexes with strategically-placed open dumpsters and throwing in everything we couldn’t afford to haul, despite the huge stickers warning that “outside dumping” was prohibited — is something I’d consider to be one of my canon events. It shaped my entire approach to adulthood because it happened at the precipice of it, and most of the decisions I’ve made since can be traced, in part or whole, to its impact.

My next major move was from the post-foreclosure two-bedroom apartment I rented for my mother and me to an alcove in a basement in Yonkers, where I attended grad school. I tell anyone who asks that I got an MFA because I wanted to be a better writer. But the real reason was that I wanted to leave that apartment, one I wouldn’t haven chosen to rent, if I’d been on my own. It was too expensive for me to maintain on my own, too far removed from the goals I’d set for myself — all of which included leaving home and living alone.

When I left, I only took my own belongings — whichever of them would fit in my then-boyfriend’s car. My mother contended with the rest, which went into a storage unit I paid for until I couldn’t afford to anymore. Those items —whatever they were — wound up in foreclosure, too.

I am an entirely unsentimental person when it comes to leaving things behind. I have lost cherished books, mementos gifted with all the care or romance or sincerity the giver could muster, important documents, unopened appliances, far more material goods that I’ll ever be able to remember or miss.

I am not precious about reducing the things I’ve managed to accumulate in any home to Moving Day trash.

What I am precious about — or rather, what has become most precious to me — is having and keeping my own housing. Every dwelling where I’ve been the leaseholder has been hard-fought. I don’t think I’ve spent a single night in any place where I’ve paid rent on time and not been quite consciously grateful that I’ve somehow continued to do so. As a freelance writer, occasional paid podcaster and breadwinner for at least one other person (and often two) for most of my adult life, I rarely had stable income. There were always long stretches of time when I couldn’t afford to make my own home.

This apartment — the one we are leaving in less than a week — was mine for three years and four months. I chose it, signed the lease and paid the rent alone (including the year where a man was here; he was paying his own rent elsewhere, while quarantining with us).

This was the longest lease I’ve held to date, the longest time I’ve spent in one place trying to make it feel like a home, trying to domesticate that feral, peripatetic part of myself that never feels truly at home anywhere. It is where that part of me has been as tamed as she can be.

We are moving into something bigger. Three bedrooms, a few neighborhoods over, in a school district I hope will be better for my daughter. Renting there feels both practical and impractical. Strategic for its highly touted public school benefits. And potentially foolhardy, as I’ll be officially laid off just two weeks after we move in. I don’t know what my next job will be or how much it will pay or how the quality of life I’ve gradually improved during my time here will be impacted by whatever’s to come. I don’t know if, once we get there, I’ll face that familiar, near-paranoic urge to get ahead of what I cannot get ahold.

Those are questions for other days. The movers are what matter now, the three men arriving in six days to heft whatever we’ve packed and stickered in a truck large enough to preserve our current semblance of home.

I’ve procrastinated enough. Back to figuring out what-all can fit in a freshly-assembled box marked “large.”