By Nadia Mota

it was some eighties relic, with its lavender brake wires and teal candy coating chipped over the rust-filled insides. but it was mine, pulled from junkyard wreckage: scrap metal melted down to silver overwrought river banks, a chained dog’s strained bark in the distance, cars twisted into the bodies of my best friend’s dead friends, so alive and thriving just two years ago. my friend talks about them in the present tense; the way she tells it, they always make it to see Sunday morning. my father told me the other day, this shit makes a man wanna go back to selling drugs. it’s hard out here, he said, all empty pockets and open palms. the bike’s tires used to buzz and whir beneath me, hummingbird wings across cracked pavement, their sprouting weeds growing fertile like my baby cousin’s baby girl, born not long after her fourteenth birthday. she spent all day in a hospital room with pink balloons and somber celebration. i stowed the bike away behind the old YMCA with all my overconfidence, so inconspicuous with its busted frame and slashed seat. 3am and a missing shadow under orange street lamp glow. i took the long walk home, my knuckles white against my keys.

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Nadia Mota is a Chicana writer from southeast Michigan. She is an MFA candidate at the Helen Zell Writers’ Program and the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize. Nadia is an editor at Viscerama, a digital zine devoted to publishing and supporting Lenawee County youth.

By Nadia Mota

ANCESTRY.COM

While sitting in my graduate course on sonnets, I quickly type in Ancestry.com on my browser, careful to push the buttons gently, making as little noise as possible. I look up at the professor while I type—nod, even, to show I’m really engaging with the discussion. A John Donne poem is projected onto the board at the front of the room, casting the faces of my classmates in a white glow. I enter the homepage of the website and glance, almost in embarrassment, at my empty notifications on my laptop screen. If there were a new DNA match, it would be here along with the unearthed records and family tree suggestions. Here among these pieces of myself I store some small hope.

When I begin considering the possibility of finding family through DNA testing, I take to Google for my questions. I confess to my laptop, the landscape of the internet, and my search history the existence of my sister, and this feels almost like a quiet relief—a secret between me and my internet browser. The first search result is a blog post by the Ancestry Team from 2017: “5 Tips for Discovering Biological Family with AncestryDNA.”1

This post walks you through the exploration of your own personal genealogical mystery, step-by-step. To assess the relation of a possible DNA match, the blog tells me, you must first examine the amount of shared DNA, which is measured in centimorgans (abbreviated cM).

Seeing this information on such a sensitive topic laid out so clinically is jarring. It doesn’t all account for what you’d say to a sister you’ve never met; what’s the informational guide on this look like, and might I study it?

Years ago, my mom—face lit up with excitement—placed a gift in my hands. It was wrapped hastily, as all of her presents were—a last-minute concealment. I opened it slowly, carefully unsticking the tape and lifting the snowflake patterned paper. It was still in the small box that it had been mailed in. The return address gave the gift a name, but I saved my surprise until after peeling open the clear packing tape and pulling the package from its cardboard casing. It was a DNA kit, something my mom had expressed interest in since it first came to her attention in an internet ad. And it made sense that she was more excited for my experience with a DNA test than she would be for her own. My mom has always been my biggest advocate—cementing my knowledge of my identity and always, always telling me to correct people when they mispronounce my name. Among many other reasons, I love her for this.

So my mother and I sat at the kitchen table that Christmas morning as I worked to gather my saliva in a plastic tube—this clear, bubbly matter from my mouth that promised an origin. A story. We sealed it away in the return box and she dropped it into the depths of a blue mailbox on her way to work at the auto parts factory, hours before the sun rose the next morning.

It’s always people who don’t know us very well that tell us we look alike. It’s always out of politeness; out of a strange impulse to affirm our mother-daughter relationship, as if looking the same makes us closer, cements our bond. Whenever she posts photos of us together on her Facebook page, the comment section always holds no less than three observations of what we both know to be untrue. The truth is, my mother and I don’t look anything alike. She often jokes, “the only thing you inherited from me is your skin color.”

Once, she followed this up with a story: my paternal grandmother came to visit the hospital the day after I was born. When I was placed in her arms, she examined my tiny, scrunched face.

Bypassing my broad nose, wide set eyes, and tiny, pursed mouth, she later pulled my father into the hallway outside the room in which my mother rested; she looked first down at me, then at him, and asked carefully, “are you sure the baby is yours?” When an inquisitive look came over my dad’s face, she elaborated: “It’s just, she’s so… white.”

Of course, as I grew into a person, it became obvious that my dad was, in fact, my father—we have the exact same face. Once, in the cramped waiting room of a doctor’s office, a small wrinkled woman clutching a giant brown leather purse and a cane asked me “are you a Mota?” Out of the corner of my eye I had seen her glancing over at me for roughly the past ten minutes. When I confirmed her suspicions, she informed me that she once lived down the street from my grandfather and had known various members of my family for years, then said with a laugh, “you all look the same!”

POETRY INTERLUDE

I’ve been thinking a lot about a prompt I received in my poetry workshop and its requirement to write with an intimately personal document and from an autobiographical place. At first, I figured this prompt might be easier to manage than previous ones—most of my poetry is already autobiographical. The deeper I got into the prompt and my research, however, the more discomfort I began to feel.

Last semester, I looked out into the small crowd of my documentary poetry class and explained my family history, projecting baby photos and old family portraits onto the screen without a second thought. My grandfather, Santos, cradling me with his calloused hands and darkened skin, souvenirs from working scorching summer days out in the fields. My grandmother, Elsie, her coarse black hair curling over her collarbones. Her fingers laced together, holding her shaven knees close. I stand at the front of the classroom presenting these pictures of my family, gesturing to their grainy faces lit by the bulb of the projector. So why is this work I’m doing invoking this strange feeling of intrusiveness, of shame?

I think I’ve been having a difficult time seeing this project as one that’s centered around myself. The more I write, the more I realize that fact. I’m trying to write about my sister, yes—but what’s on paper is only what I imagine of her; the rest is my own experience in relation to the idea of her existence. Fundamentally, I’m writing about myself. I think I’m beginning to feel selfish for this. I think maybe that’s what can happen when you’re speaking to a voice that can’t speak back. I’ve been feeling like I’m living inside an echo chamber in my work.

The first time I wrote about her was so brief, you could have missed it. Just two lines, but still, that word that I’d been avoiding forever: sister.

“i wonder if i would’ve showed my little sister how to zip up her coat. how to tie her shoes. i wonder who taught her the things i would’ve.”

The poem was titled “i wonder” and moved through a series of loosely connected contemplations. I wrote it as a response to a prompt I received in a poetry workshop that I was in during the fall of my sophomore year of college. My professor was unlike any other I’d had so far—she wore pastel pink Adidas sneakers to class most days, along with a nose ring and a lipstick so fuchsia it toed the border of red. I didn’t visit T’s office hours until two months into the term, entirely out of anxiety. What would we even talk about? Should I schedule an appointment? Would I just be wasting her time? Once I did venture out to talk with her, however, I found myself in the small, white-walled space of her office almost every Wednesday afternoon.

When I wrote those two lines confessing what I’d been keeping in for over ten years, I felt so immensely exposed. My class was composed of only seven people including T and myself, but my voice still wavered as I stuttered my way through each line; my hands still trembled with the sheet of paper in my hands as I read the poem out loud to my peers.

T broached the subject of my poem as I sat cross-legged in a chair next to her office desk the next day. She began the conversation with asking if I’d scheduled my first therapy appointment yet. I had been tentatively updating her on my steadily declining mental health, and she’d gently pushed me in the direction of counselling; first, she’d hosted a one-on-one Q&A on the entire process of finding a therapist, scheduling an appointment, and even dealing with health insurance.

When she pulled my poem out of a folder full of papers, I caught a glance at the edits and comments written in purple sparkle gel pen. Instead of referencing those comments in her feedback, she surprised me by setting the poem aside. She then asked me in her wonderfully blunt way the meaning behind that line. I knew, of course, that the line would prompt questions as a result of its vagueness. So I tentatively began the story, starting with my father and ending with an absence.

When I left the office over an hour later, far past the end of her office hours, I rubbed at my face to flake off any residual tear salt as I walked to the elevator. After winding my way through my knowledge of the existence of my sister, T explained the story of her own sister who had passed away when they both were young. Together we grieved for ourselves, each other, and for the people our sisters could be.

MARIO’S MEXICAN RESTAURANT

After not hearing from him for around two weeks, I texted my dad and told him that I’d be coming into town for a visit. He replied almost immediately: “Hi mjia. Lunch?” We planned to meet at our favorite Mexican restaurant in Adrian, a tiny white and green cinderblock building nestled between thickets of trees and foliage, tucked back from the broken pavement of East Beecher.

I pulled into the parking lot behind the restaurant and noticed my dad’s car already parked in the very back. I parked a couple spots away and exited my car to the warm scent of fried corn tortillas and roasted chilies mingling with the light rain and wet soil smell. I knocked on his window though I knew he had already seen me approaching in his rearview mirror. He got out and wrapped me in a quick hug. We walked into the restaurant and, abiding by the “please seat yourself” sign, chose a small table close to the kitchen.

We made small talk for a while, asking how each other had been. He’d just come from the YMCA where he jogged on a treadmill three days a week. He’d been drinking a lot more water lately. He told me that he’d lost nearly forty pounds since moving back to Michigan from Texas. I’d been enjoying my classes lately and the creative freedom they allowed me. I’d been decorating my apartment more and making meals in my new slow cooker. I’d gained about fifteen pounds over the past few months.

We discussed our ranking of the best Mexican restaurant salsa in Adrian, with Mario’s topping the list and Fiesta Ranchera taking the bottom spot. We discussed how much Adrian had changed while we’d both been gone; how, despite these changes, it still felt exactly the same as we’d left it. He, sixteen years ago when his girlfriend was stationed at Fort Hood. Me, four and a half years ago when I left for Ann Arbor to attend college.

When she came to our table to take our order, the waitress called me mija and conversed with my dad in Spanish without a second thought. I relished this vague warmth, this distant familiarity.

My daughter. How often older Mexican women, someone else’s mother, could so easily claim me, a stranger, as her own. When the waitress brought us our food (cheese enchilada lunch special, no onions please, side of rice and beans, and for my dad, carne asada tacos, always), my dad—with his already soft voice—said to me gently, “her birthday is next week.” Without saying her name, he placed it into the air between us, let it float out and mingle with the steam rising from our plates. This thing we shared, this almost-secret: his daughter, my sister.

THERAPY

The summer before I entered my first semester of grad school, I figured it was time to again seek out a therapist. I had seen a couple therapists before, most through my university’s counseling and psychological services. Most of my contact with these counselors didn’t move past the initial consultation. After being prompted to speak of my story, my background, and my family, I would always leave the office feeling as if I were overflowing. I felt as if my stomach was cut open and my guts were all spilling out as I desperately tried to stuff them back inside my hollowed stomach. My relationship with therapy was weird at best, tormenting at worst. Following my prescription of Lexapro, however, my doctor repeatedly encouraged me to try out talk therapy again as a supplement to my medication.

First checking that I wasn’t overzealous with the exclamation points and didn’t type “thank you” more than twice, I copied and pasted the same short sentences into a couple inquiry boxes on Psychology Today’s “Find a Therapist” feature. It wasn’t until the fifth inquiry I sent out that I realized I’d typed “consolation” instead of “consultation.” Despite this, a few days later I received an email response from a counselor. Her name was K, and in addition to her master’s degree in social work, she held the exact degree in the program that I’d soon be going into.

During our initial phone consultation, she reassured me multiple times that I deserved to be going into this graduate program, that the admissions committee made no mistake in letting me in. She spoke in a deep voice, smoothing out my insecurities. If I’d done yoga like one of my previous therapists suggested, I could imagine K standing at the front of a class, gently coaxing my brain into a mental lotus position. I was stuck in a delicate balance between telling myself that she only gave me these kind assurances because it was her job and becoming as comfortable as I could be. We scheduled my first appointment for the following week.

Every therapist I see circles back to our non-relationship. They halt me after my brief acknowledgement of you—my quick mention and even quicker migration to a different topic—and immediately prompt me to elaborate, to exude emotions, to be, I guess, more visibly affected by your absence—by the could-have-been, the maybe-never-will-be.

BATHROOM STALL

After the class in which I’m writing our story, I walk across campus in slow motion, letting streams of people bustle and chatter around me. Everyone is on their way to somewhere else, and quickly. I let myself breathe; remind myself that I’m in no rush. Let my steps fall slowly on the pavement. Let my eyes float slowly around the fields of snow, the specks of color moving against it—a red hat topped with a blur of tan colored fluff. A puffed pink coat, almost iridescent. Black boots shining like oil-slicked tar.

My wandering carries me into a building I’ve never been into before, the large archway beckoning me, a welcome. Inside, the lights are almost alarmingly dim. Paired with the long hallways and empty quiet, it could be horror movie-esque if I let my imagination run too far. I slip into the bathroom, hoping not to pass by anyone. I feel painfully out of place here—is this how you might feel thrown across a white background? Did your mother fumble her fingers through your hair, not quite knowing what to do with the abundance of it? Have you stood in the makeup aisle at Walmart trying to find a shade to match you in a sea of pink undertones? Do you have his nose too, his eyes, like mine?

This bathroom is different from all of the others I’ve found solace in on this campus. It’s not the kind of bathroom I’d unravel inside—but perhaps find myself wandering into, both body and mind. The stall walls are speckled, yellow ochre and forest green over a landscape of seafoam—painter’s apron camouflage. Sections are blurred like trees in the peripheral, branches flying by in brushstrokes across car windows.

Reaching up to run my fingers through, I expect some sort of texture; some indent to leave in my skin, a reminder of what once lived flush against it. But there’s nothing but smooth surface—no grit, no rise and fall, no indication of life. Just this encasement, an indifferent panel of protection. Here, speckled. What does it look like where you are?

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Nadia Mota is a Chicana writer from southeast Michigan. She is an MFA
candidate at the Helen Zell Writers’ Program and the recipient of an
Academy of American Poets Prize. Nadia is an editor at Viscerama, a digital
zine devoted to publishing and supporting Lenawee County youth.