Serving

A text from my aunt this morning, from the family that blamed me for my parents' problems and exiled me from their consideration as a problem child, in the process nearly condemning me to die of pre-eclampsia and leaving me begging for a ride to the hospital, arguing, nauseous, swollen, whisked into emergency surgery and left alone in the hospital to face "the consequences of my sin" in the form of my daughter and recovery from surgery.

I could write these sorts of stories all day, one incident after the next where I nearly died, or where I was done serious damage of one kind or the other by family, by my nearest and hypothetically dearest.

My papa calls me an angry person, and he's right, but I think he underestimates my anger. Or perhaps I overestimate it, here in my isolation, in the safe and sterile space where I hide from the rest of humanity.

Does it matter if that anger was justified?

A text, a Christian meme about Christmas from someone who is... in their way, trying to reach out. My aunt is never, I suspect, going to want more than these little texts and their response.

I can't blame her. It's abundantly clear, dealing with me, that I forgive little and that my heart, if it is warm (and I know it is), is not to be reached by people who disappoint me. Or hurt my feelings. Or harm me.

A low risk strategy, texting me for major holidays. Just as low risk as my isolated little home.

I do not want to forgive. Or to be more precise, in my prayers I tell the lwa--you will have to help me, because I do not know how to be other.

And yet... and yet. A holiday text back, to ease my aunt. A conversation long into the night with someone quietly suffering, whom I've already talked out of suicide in previous conversations. A renewed resolution to give the people of my spiritual family another chance.

What mercy can we expect of heaven in our spite?

Sadly, truly, the mercy of heaven is not strained. Even for the spiteful, no less for the sinner or every member of my family, no matter what they have done.

Even for me.

I hope that, when you read this, you turn your face up to the mercy that pours on us, unstinting. I hope you know, even if for a moment, the overwhelming might of the love that motivates it, that sends us out into the world to let us learn, perhaps, to love each other in this or any other life.

I am doing a magical work with my papa on my poor, beleaguered heart--and that word, "papa", I suppose will get less weird over time. I've been treating it like a title to avoid the implications, which very definitely make me want to get the fuck back.

It has been made clear to me, via the lwa, that there will be room in my heart for these people, the people of my temple, my spiritual family, whether I like it or not.

Spoiler alert: I don't like it.

Spoiler addendum: Yet, beneath the urge to fight someone, I know I will need them when I stop frothing at the mouth when I think about closeness. I know it will be a richness, and even pleasant on occasion.

This is not criticism of them as individuals. They're a likeable bunch, and I appreciate how blunt they can be, while getting the urge to run screaming from how entangled they are with each other.

And to be real with the reader, their not-whiteness (culturally speaking) is very much something I am confronting here.

My urge is less offensive with them, for the most part, and more... guarded. There's so much sharing in this culture that, again deep in the instincts, makes me want to climb a wall to get away.

And sadly, some part of me sneers at the messiness of it all, at the people who would include me, something I'm told was very visible during the ceremony.

In ceremony, they move together, a intangible thing which manifests as physical movement but has roots somewhere else. The mood, the air, the energy of the place is difficult for me to join. It is difficult for me to encounter it at all.

There is no "place" in me for that (no previous encounters with that closeness).

There are a lot of bad associations (again, my instinctual response to closeness is to crawl the wall to get away).

Emotionally speaking, there's a LOT of baggage there ranging from feelings of being bereft and inferior to rage at the loss and time passed.

It's hard not to envy the protection that comes of it, to listen to them talk about the casual things they do for one another and not think of how many of those things I have done alone, from giving birth alone and raising children alone, to defending myself against bad teachers or adults of poor intent as a child, to defending others.

Ya girl actually did physically throw down with adults as a very small child. Not well, mind you, but I will defend with everything in me.

I simply cannot imagine being able to call someone who would come and help me, cannot imagine the closeness with which they live. It's taken my best friend four years to convince me that it's okay to call him and talk when bad things happen, and that even if he doesn't answer, it's okay. That this is normal for people.

The lwa didn't call me to feel positive about everything, of course, just to do.

One of the things blowing my mind the hardest is his completely sincere belief that all the things people tend to reject about me--assertiveness, diligence, competence, straightforwardness--are desirable qualities and have always been that way, naturally.

I had not known just how often, in my dealings with men, that I receive the message they suppose they're willing to put up with me, despite those qualities. How often men have viewed me as being the sort of thing they'd have to "fix" or the soft contempt of their comments: "You'd be so pretty if...."

That man looks at me like a lioness, not a defective woman. I have never been talked to like this. It's not even in what he says, directly. He's not being particularly smooth. We're too busy astounding each other into silence, punctuated by both of us frantically searching our vocabulary to figure out how to respond. It's in every assumption he makes, in the way he frames his thoughts and the reasons beneath them. It's in his surprised inhale when I tell him that the things he praises are the things people tell me they dislike about me.

Even if tomorrow, we cease to talk, I have been exposed to something that I won't accept less than for the entirety of Elon Musk's net worth, with Bezos' net worth as a chaser. Good god. I wouldn't go back for any amount. Life is way too short to put up with that shit.

Our conversations are also making me look at how I understand race in ways so profound that I almost want to tell him that I need a week of meditation after every conversation just to keep up. In listening to him talk, I confront the things I've spent my whole life being told: that black cultures are evil, ruin women and wreck their value, and that any (especially non-black) woman who dates black men ends up dead and diseased.

I'm starting to see why so much of that shit gets repeated to white girls and women. Unlike the white cultures I grew up in, the culture he's talking about actually treasures women. It's got to be hard to compete for the kind of white men I grew up with, because I can tell you right now, if I had really understood that my culture wasn't the only alternative when I was younger, I would not have touched almost any men of my own ethnicity with a ten foot pole.

He's talking about a culture in which women who stand up for themselves, women who are self-determining, who found their own business or have extensive education, who can take care of themselves, who are decisive, have value.

I know, I know. Not everyone will be this way. And he is human, not flawless. I don't expect anything else.

He does not criticize directly, because he does not want to insult me or my feelings about my own culture, though on occasion he sighs when we talk about the US.

He did not know, he says, that he was "black" until he moved here and had to put it on a form. He did not know it mattered the way it does to us. He'd only ever been a person, in Nigeria.

He does not have to criticize. The warmth I have not found in my culture is everywhere in the way he talks about his family, his sisters, his cousins. In the warmth with which he discusses them, in the discussion of their aspirations, everywhere in the background. There is a genuine desire to cherish and the expectation of decency everywhere in his voice. A wry, sweet understanding of human nature, and a remarkable ability to observe.

I listen to him talk and compare it to my memories. Compare it to what I've been told, what I've seen, what I'm hearing.

It's funny, because I've run into people who were friendly before, and people who were family-oriented. It's probably the working that lets me hear it, but man--my mind keeps getting blown in ways that are small but profound. There's such extraordinary richness in the family he discusses, the lives that they're trying to live, their connectedness. They live all over the world, still in contact.