By Amber Butts
Female octopuses die from anemia and exhaustion 2-10 months after they give birth. They spend those months protecting and cleaning their eggs. They do not eat.
As my body spread over a cold chair and a doctor said words I did not understand, I shook. I took two pills and waited for an hour. I thought about octopuses. I signed a consent form. I do not remember who drove. I did not eat.
After my abortion, the moon hid for 3 days. I didn’t see my family for two weeks. I sat on a couch and watched each cushion fill with my blood. I told stories to my pads and asked them to absorb (and reabsorb) like they were supposed to. I buried my body in big clothes. I stayed at my ex’s house and pretended not to notice how much it took to get up and bend and wash the cushion covers by hand. I hated how light the couch was and how dark the blood became. How wet it looked.
Once I got home, I threw away each wire hanger. I tried to think through my recovery. Tried to wrap my relationship up with the blood, though I knew it would end soon.
Black women are 4 times more likely to die from pregnancy or childbirth-related causes than white women. Black women die because doctors do not believe we are capable of knowing our bodies more than the technology around us. Black women die because the practices of uncaring, ignoring and not looking fuels our healthcare system. Black women die because our concerns about our bodies are dismissed.
First, Black women’s voices are silenced. Then, our stories are told in someone else’s words.
What words are there for Black folks who have been pregnant, have ended their pregnancies and/or had miscarriages? There are words for other folks who experience familial loss: Widow/er. Motherless/ fatherless child. I’ve searched through them and found none for us almost mothers.
How do we continue carrying mountains and guiding storms away? How is our loss measured and honored? Is it by pounds, climbing, blood, broken tissue? Is it by saying it wasn’t really loss because, in big and small ways, we made it happen? Is it by letting someone else write (or right) this story? Because I cannot lay claim to a body I said no to?
Have we relinquished our right to engage in the conversation, realities and imaginings of motherhood because we decided against it?
In which moment am I no longer a mama? Is it when my child’s body grows cold? Is it when the pill dissolves into me and takes effect? Is it once the vacuum goes in and pulls the fetus out? Is it after their bodies are left on the ground for hours to expand? When they are bloodied and shot because their music is too loud? Is it when they ask for help? Are we then given Mother’s Day gifts? When we are labeled crazy, will someone still visit our homes to check “in”? Do I say the names of the unnamed? Are we all blood orchards? Cabin coffins?
What does ancestor veneration look like when the ancestors are still children? What and how do we bear witness? Is this how the world erases any evidence that we have lived?
“There is a loneliness that can be rocked… Then there is a loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive, on its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one’s own feet going seem to come from a far-off place.” — Toni Morrison, Beloved
My uncle Tim was hit by a drunk driver while crossing the street when he was 8 years old. He went to the store early in the afternoon for snacks and a Snapple for my aunt (who still blames herself). When Tim saw the car coming, he pushed his 6 year old sister out of the way. He did not make it back. We all thought he’d be a preacher. He loved to recite Martin Luther King speeches. On hard days, I still feel him holding my hand.
Bubbie is Tim’s mama and my grandmama. She died on October 4th, 2016. She buried Tim. Buried and resurrected him. Was filled with loneliness. Held him, let him go, picked him up again. Are there words for her, this woman who is now dead and hopefully with her child? And for the 6 children who survived, what now? Is she a mother because she had them? What about the ones she didn’t have? Are there words for my uncle?
Some mamas cannot and/or will not visit their children’s graves because their lives were cut cool and short. Because facing it is too heavy. Because the grave is unmarked. Because our parents didn’t know we had them. Because we are grandmamas now. Because there isn’t a word for it in our language. Because we want as much separation as possible. Because we are already kept up at night.
This is for mamas who are stuck in other lands, who cannot get back, whose bodies have been both fresh sanctuary and old grave. Is there dignity? Rhythm? Respite? Reprieve?
The deaths surrounding our family confounded those dimensions, made them sprout and break and huddle. Made us small. Made each dinner a burial site. Made us not sit at the table. Made us ignore and highlight the loss(es). We didn’t say the words in full because we were holding too much trauma. We knew that if we said what had happened, we’d open a door and in that door things will spill out. We’d then have to wonder out loud, if/when we decide to die, what’s the sound? When we visit our children in the morgue, to confirm that they are not yet dead, is this a historical memory? Is this the bottom of the sea? A refusal? Forgiveness? A moment of madness? Is it payback?
We invoke, evoke and conjure up a type of mad wakefulness that tackles the various forms of violence we experience. These violences, especially after one loses a child are classed, gendered and racialized. Though we are expected to endure everything the world throws at us and are often sources of solidifying cultural and social bonds within and outside of our communities, we are not allowed imperfections.
Where do mothers go to mourn their children? Where do we go to mourn ourselves? How do we locate restlessness and exhaustion? The pains of service? The demands, punishments and dehumanization that’s symptomatic of an anti-Black, anti-mother and anti-poor world?
Is there space to be both mother and unmother?
Doctors and nurses have a long history of experimenting on Black patients. The hospital rooms and risk assessments conducted by these arbiters of violence are intentionally and explicitly anti-black. When it comes to Black mamas “treatment”, we are sliced and prodded open on operating beds that were not made for us. When we bleed uncontrollably, we are told it’s normal. When our heart rates drop, we are threatened and given unsanctioned emergency c-sections. Our requests for attention on these beds are ignored because we are believed to have a higher pain tolerance than that of white women and men.
We are not allowed to be experts of our experience and if we indicate any form of expertise, we are punished.
Shores. Ships. Slices. Our bodies have been torn open to hold the lies and secrets of white supremacy. These bodies, both sites and sights of trauma, are informed by the fact that more than 20 percent of Black women are raped in their lifetimes. The violence and violations we experience on operating tables are an amalgamation of medical, state and carceral politics. Our no’s are ignored and dismissed. Doctors place their hands inside of us without considering the non-consensual ways that our bodies have already been interacted with. And, due to the anti-Black and anti-poor world we live in, rarely do Black women have other Black women affirming them in that space.
My nana was one of the first Black registered nurses in Louisiana and she hated hospitals. She, like other women in our family, avoided hospitals at all costs because she knew the evil that Black folks encountered there. She had seven children, struggled with working in hospitals and tried to advocate for folks inside them at every opportunity. We talked about reproductive justice and the ghosts walking around the hospitals. Before she died, she was convinced that the employees in the rehabilitation center she lived at were trying to kill her. I could not look her in the eye and say they weren’t.
Black, Brown and Native women’s coerced and forced sterilization continues to this day. Especially when/ if they are poor, labeled as criminals and/ or in prison. This sterilization also happens with survivors of rape. Black women’s deaths in hospitals are operationalized. Their surviving family members are rarely given an honest assessment of the failures of the doctor. If Black women were listened to on these tables, we would live. We would not be dead.
I had an abortion when I was 22. My grandmama, aunts, mama and cousins have all lost children through abuse, miscarriage, abortion, and ectopic pregnancies.
I don’t know how to reconcile with the fact that if I birth a Black child, there’s a high possibility my child will be killed by police/whiteness. I struggle with the knowledge that even when our children are not killed directly, the state will attempt to interrupt our lives and reinvigorate its hold and commitment to violence. My decision to abort was heavily influenced by these realities.
In the moments leading up to the decision, I pretended it was a kindness. Now, I know it to be a reverberation of anti-blackness, of un-choosing, of placemaking. There’s a new opportunity in this moment for me. The intergenerational wrestling of who gets to decide what happens with Black women’s bodies is not new. I am choosing to engage in the quiet, scared and sacred spaces inside of me by recognizing all the stories who came before, after and during the violence.
Sometimes I think there is a radicalness in not having children. Or of ending a life because you know what happens on the other side of it. I think of mercy killings and the refusal of unliving. Maybe we are demanding something more. And maybe these are different types of births. I don’t know.
I think about the heartbreaking decisions Black mamas have to make every day. I think about the ways they resist, plug into and imagine. We can trust ourselves to inform our own content and communities without devastation. We can trust ourselves to serve and be served. We can refuse a world that does not ask what it can do for us and instead assumes what we can do for it. We can remind this world that we are not scapegoats.
What if, in the process of community building, we increase our capacity for connection and loss by cultivating access points that (in)form alternative approaches to family? What if we refuse the nuclear model that fails us each time?
Can we create a space for all of us to be held in our madness? How might we recognize each other’s mania and calls for support? What would it look like to expand the scope of mother/father/parenthood and taking away our commitments to ownership and possession? When we notice the unexplored violences wielded against mamas, have we built a space beyond, “Your mother does not love you” or “Your mama is an abuser”? Who is there for mamas when we are tired, when our voices are off? Who is there for us when we are lonely?
Sometimes, our only hope in the world is birthing children. Sometimes our dreams of birthing children hit up against the stressors of raising them. Slam against our experiences with trauma. Sometimes, we realize we are not ready.
Sometimes, we are forced to reconcile the reality that children are not “the answer,” that there is work we must do and they are not an opportunity to re-nurture ourselves.
***
If I choose myself because I know that on the other side I will drown
am I still mother?
Or person, worthy of cherishing?
Worthy of breath?
They said I didn’t drown but I did
Still am
You know that moment when the blood
keeps dragging down your legs
and you’re like, “It tickles but I can keep dancing?”
And then it dries and you’re crumbling
Your legs itch
Twice
Each blood splinter
a flower on the floor telling everyone your secrets
Each vein a non-martyr
Each smile, a drag
A pull
You, a misstep
I never said this was a home
I never said I was a home
Never said this feels like home to me
Never claimed access to it
To you.
Church still says they can pray the anxiety away
But they never offered to care for my daughter
Never asked what her breath smelled like
as it burned a fire underneath my belly
Never asked about the pain
Just prayed it away
Never asked how
they also squeezed me into nothing.
If time is not linear, what does this mean in regards to our interactions with our (almost) children? With ourselves? Each other? And when you tell the story of us being hoarders, will you mention what we could not keep? Will you mention how our voices cracked when we realized?
A voice whispers, “murderer” and I do not yell back. Instead I grab the hand of another mama who is struggling to be seen. Another mama who made a choice and has revisited that choice and would still make it or not make it. Another mama with death notes, who wants more space, the right to refuse, reproductive and accessible healthcare for all. Another mama who wants to be able to say the things out loud. To say the words as almost mama to almost child.
This is the prayer my grandmama spoke over us everyday:
“Dear Lord, watch over us as we go to and fro on the highways and byways. Protect us as we journey towards wherever you know we should be. In Christ Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.”
I release you.
Amber Butts is a writer, educator and tenants rights organizer from Oakland, CA. Her work has appeared in Blaqueerflow, KPFA’s Women’s Magazine Radio and 6×8 Press. She is currently at work on an afro-futurist novel focused on themes of intergenerational trauma, imagination, Black survival and environmental racism. Amber’s writing challenges multiple systems of oppression through the use of queer and womanist frameworks. She works to amplify the stories of poor Black folks, with an emphasis on mamas, children and elders. She believes in asking big and small questions that lead to tangible expressions of freedom and liberation.
Amber likes cheese and comic books and sings louder than she needs to.
