“None for the Birds,” by Shabnam Nadiya

Mothering didn’t come easy to us—not to my mother, not to me. Surely there are women who slip into that role with the ease of sword into sheath. Surely there are women for whom discarding their earlier selves was a battle early won. Not us though. Perhaps it is wrong of me to say that. Perhaps it is more accurate to say we discovered, in our own ways, that lullabies were just one kind of song.

To become a mother was expected; less so for me than for her. The leniency afforded by a later time was not much, but it did grant me a few more moments to breathe. Her vision of what her life should be was halted again and again by marriage, war, childbirth, migration. Obstruction (?b?str?kSH(?)n,äb?str?kSH(?)n/, noun) : a thing that impedes or prevents passage or progress. Sometimes you have to choose to let an obstruction merely ‘impede’ and not ‘prevent.’ Tenacity became my mother’s religion; she fed it to me straight and raw through the umbilical cord.

I broke my world apart, once, and put it back together. It’s not your world anymore, friends and family told me, You’re a mother now; it’s your daughter’s. I disagreed. If I didn’t learn how to hold on to my own world, how could I tell my daughter that the real question isn’t whether gravity can push you down or pull you up, it’s whether gravity can pull you apart? Continue reading →