The Beauty of Reading for a Motherless Writer

I have spent the better part of my life focused on what I do not have, and not what I do — particularly in the realm of nurture. I was not raised so much as a kind of nurture was sporadically nudged toward me. So, I had to piece together mothering influences without knowing that was what I was doing. This is top of mind, of course, because it is Mother’s Day season.

My mother died in 2012, and in 2013, I marked the anniversary of her death by contributing this piece to Gawker, “I Wish My Mother Would Call.” I include it here because it provides important context of the chaos of my early life, and it unearths some of the pain of not being mothered in ways that I think most people are. I also want to share it to acknowledge those of us who are motherless in this time of hyper marketing to those who are not. Yes, I am still a daughter, but the pain of my mother’s physical absence never fails to sting, even if it stings a little less overtime.

The older I get, the more I can see how my mother, who did not take medicine for the bipolar and borderline personality disorders that warped her life and mine, offered to me what little her mother and aunties were able to offer to her: Suggestions on how to survive a world that has been perpetually hostile to Black women. How to flourish, what to gather for yourself so that the world will not destroy you or your heart.

In the midst of our homelessness in New York City during the 1980s and 1990s, my mother took me to public, free places. A lot…