When we got Covid I was too embarrassed to tell anyone—except the Super Cool Moms.
Okay, let me back up. At this point in the story, I now have two daughters, Sally and Robyn. I’d reached the level of motherhood where the intensity had gone from cold-shower shocking to “Oh, this? This is just a Saturday.” I’d been a frequent FFPPU poster and sleep-training-advice slanger on the Mamas for nearly three years. Basically, I was a junior in mommy college, over the freshman jitters and pretty confident of my place in the larger hierarchy. My crew ran deep too, made up of all my fellow concerted cultivators who met during our collective new-mom fog and stayed connected despite the stupor. There was even a name for our upper-crust mommy clique—the Super Cool Moms.
Of course, I resisted at first, because, despite getting more comfortable, I was always cautious. But the universe itself seemed to be pushing us together. Approximately twenty months after our freshman orientation as the new moms of Bloomingdale Parenting U, a handful of us showed up to U2 Toddler Soccer with terrible toddlers and nearly identical baby bumps. And guess who I spied, with a belly as big as mine, chasing after her own mini Rapinoe? Meghan, always Meghan. I audibly groaned.
It’d been well over a year and I still hadn’t gotten over that “you can’t compare them” comment from baby music class. It was seared into my brain. Another piece of damning evidence that I would never really belong and probably didn’t want to. So when someone posted in the Mamas about starting an offshoot group for ladies birthing babies that fall, and I saw Meghan’s name among the likes, I got angry excited. It was the kind of “mixed feeling” Daniel Tiger taught Sally (and me) was okay. I knew how crucial a maternity-leave clique was, but I also never forgot that feeling of being lost in the crowd. Plus, since having Sally I’d been collecting all sorts of mom friends—from work Slack groups to random Columbia alumnae events; heck, I had even helped charter a chapter of Mocha Moms, a support group created specifically for Black mothers. (Did I mention I’m a joiner?) But see, how my follow-through is set up, regularly scheduled meetings with agendas and officer elections and dues are just…above me now.
The women in arm’s reach were grab-and-go. Easy and, more important, in seemingly endless supply. Like most of my mommy foibles there’s a name for this geographical pull—the power of proximity. Psychologist Susan Pinker gets into it in her book, The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier, Happier, and Smarter. In short, people need people. Duh. Bloomingdale just kept calling. We were all so fucking fertile. Resistance was futile.
Also booze. Much like the beginning of this entire baby saga, in the end it was the liquor that got me. Someone made the genius suggestion that we switch up the game a little and meet at our local pub for early happy hour with the 2.0 babies—and well, there you go. Deal sealed. We fell into a familiar rhythm, once again becoming more than Facebook comments to one another. During our matched-up maternity leaves we met twice a week, sometimes more, mostly sipping barely alcoholic ciders while nursing new babies and complaining about how insane our toddlers were. I’d finally calmed down enough as a mom—as a Black woman—to just shut up and enjoy my slight buzz.
That’s how I got over myself long enough to truly see Meghan for the unmatched type-A mega-mind that she was. The woman had an article, a study, a policy paper handy for every situation. Her endless repository of logistical solutions to everything from daycare drop-offs to get-out-the-vote drives was motivating. I was still too lazy to do more than send virtual high fives, though. Leah’s family campouts with two kids under two were aspirational. (Hence the trip to REI that made me feel like a success without ever stepping foot on an actual campground.) Carly’s occasional freak-outs over her kid not doing enough “art or whatever” was a reminder to relax (and that my kids needed to do more coloring and shit). Tiffany telling me that irregular bathing for kids was actually good for their health was a warning (nope). Our in-person meetups had once again fallen into a comfortable rhythm; they were an essential part of our lives as Bloomingdale’s moms. We discussed the babies but also politics, the women’s movement, Love Is Blind, and how out of control the housing market was getting. Our weeks together resembled the lazy hazy days of summer camp, where platonic love gets microwaved over deep confessions and contraband candy. We even solidified the pact with the twenty-first-century equivalent of the friendship bracelet, a WhatsApp group called “Super Cool Moms” because we thought of one another that way. Super cool. Don’t laugh.
It surprised me at first. How your friends who are moms aren’t necessarily your mom friends and how women I used to clown became my confidantes. Our pasts were almost as blank as our babies’, leaving it up to us to fill in our stories how we saw fit, piecing together the best-ish versions of ourselves for one another. It’s like how you go to college and can rebrand, minus whatever embarrassing thing defined you all through high school. I’d never been anything but a mom to these women, and that was in and of itself freeing. I didn’t have to hide from that identity or shrink it down or wave it away with my hand in favor of some better Helena, some other version of me from a zillion years ago without lightning bolts across her stomach. I’d found common ground (if not always cause) with people who knew me without the baggage of Before, despite still being “the only one” in the group.
Which brings up another cool thing about the Super Cool Moms. I was not, in fact, the only one. Not in the most literal sense anyway. I was still the only Black mom, but as the hundreds of women that made up the Mamas simmered down to the more palatable group chat, I started to taste the nuance. They weren’t just “not Black.” I mean, they weren’t Black. But the Super Cool Moms weren’t all white either. Tina and Nancy were Korean American. Angie and Priya were Indian American. The racial makeup of this smaller group was more complex than simply Black versus white, although white always seemed to be the default. In my mind’s eye I still saw all of them as “white girls,” which is a protective thing I think Black women do, lumping all the people not us into one big group so it’s easier to avoid. But, man, did Covid kick through some lines in the sand.
More than former strangers, there was a time when we were practically invisible to one another. Before having babies (and then more babies), most of us had been neighbors in name only, looking past one another in silence on First Street while mentally scrolling through a Whole Foods run or imagining that thing you should’ve said to your husband in that one fight that would’ve ended patriarchy for good this time. The other body on the sidewalk might as well have been an orange safety cone, annoyingly bright and avoidable by design. Now look at us, clinging to one another like life rafts.
When the pandemic dropped like an anvil on our lives and the world subsequently caved in, WhatsApp was like a flashlight. Meghan, of course, was still our resident know-it-all, and I mean that in the best way possible. Have a question and she had the answer, from ever-changing Covid protocols to fact sheets about the faraway possibility of daycare ever opening again. I asked WhatsApp more questions than Google. Leah, whose boss was Mother Nature, had escaped to the mountains with her twins, husband, and a spry mother-in-law in tow. She sent us dispatches from the woods and, bless her, complained about the free childcare—because no one’s life can be that Little House on the Prairie perfect. As usual Carly was still pulling all-nighters at her law firm and driving sixteen hours at a clip to get help from her own mom with her son, a singleton who after those early stressful years of what-ifs (what if he doesn’t latch, doesn’t talk, doesn’t who knows?) was now a babbling chubster with too many teeth. Mira, the dark-haired curmudgeon for whom global panics are made, took it all on the chin. No hand-wringing for her; as soon as daycares opened back up, her kids were going. I took a little bit from each one. I’d quote snippets from threads on the potential vaccine (Dr. Tiffany said it’d be safe), the finale of Indian Matchmaking (Nancy was mad I ruined it with my overexcited typing fingers), and the best fancy takeout (Priya voted for Annabelle) to Rob.
“Well, according to the moms…” I’d start. And he’d roll his eyes but be all ears.
What’s surprising is that at first not much changed once we all went on house arrest. I’d been on maternity leave with our second and last kid, Robyn, until the first week in March. I returned to work (another passionate subject we hashed and rehashed in WhatsApp) on a Monday, settling into the butt dent of my office chair with ease and immediately sending a Slack message to the Postie Moms channel for the code to the pumping room. Two days later my boss made the announcement that we were all headed back home. Just for a few weeks. Just until the country got a handle on things. “What’s the big deal,” I asked my longtime writing partner, Emily, in the bathroom that afternoon. “Shouldn’t we just not be gross and, like, wash our hands.” But secretly I was relieved. Stepping out of the revolving glass doors an hour later with rock hard boobs fit to crack open, I was thrilled. More bra-free quiet time at home? More time to sit idly on the couch scrolling through WhatsApp? Sounded like the perfect panic-room vacation to me. Then the gunshots came.
In those first few weeks home felt almost primal, finally living up to its truest definition as not just the place one lives but the place one survives. Where we could barricade ourselves against everything happening on the other side of our door. Outside bad. Inside good. Caveman shit. But the novelty wore off when we realized the invention of fire was a long way off. Two weeks turned into four and daycares weren’t going to open anytime soon. Our children could not subsist on hours of YouTube yoga and FaceTime with Grandma, who insisted on shouting every syllable as if reaching through the void of the internet. The WhatsApp chat went from daily distraction to postcards from the edge. Four weeks turned to two months and nothing made sense anymore. Nowhere was safe, really. Nothing was constant. Nothing was guaranteed. Save the WhatsApp group.
Then, on a Monday evening in May, four Minneapolis police officers respond to a call about George Floyd, a forty-six-year-old father from Texas who’d lost his job at a restaurant when the pandemic hit. Floyd allegedly purchased cigarettes from a corner store with a fake twenty. After struggling to get him into a patrol car, officers yank Floyd from the backseat onto the street’s pavement, where he ends up facedown with three men shoving their weight into his body. “I can’t breathe, man,” he pleads. “Please.” One of those officers drives his knee into Floyd’s neck for what the world first thinks is an excruciating eight minutes and forty-six seconds but turns out to be an even worse nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds. Floyd begs more than a dozen times for air that never comes. Less than twenty minutes later he is dead. With some of his last breaths Floyd gasps, “Mama. Mama.”
Processing George Floyd’s death was almost out of the question. I couldn’t and neither could Rob. It was too much on top of being on top of one another. Add more to the pile and we’d cave for real. So we grieved separately and silently as the Black Lives Matter movement erupted like a righteous volcano, cheering it on from the supposed safety of our home. Because we live in Washington—America’s front lawn—we expected the protests and the loud justice to drown our city. We welcomed the flood but didn’t want to be there when the dam finally burst. None of us could breathe underwater. And there were the girls to consider. Oh, and the gunshots. Pop pop pop. Pop pop pop. As May gave way to June and the nights got as short as our collective temper, the real start of an urban summer—asking your neighbor, “Was that fireworks or…?”—became much less quaint.
Claustrophobia is one thing. Feeling like a sitting duck is another. Fuck Covid. Fuck the police. Fuck everybody. We had to get out. So, in the bougiest escape plan ever, we drove to the Myrtle Beach condo that Rob’s godmother has owned since the 1980s (yes, they were among the first Black families to buy in the building, and yes, as soon as we pulled up we immediately hopped on Zillow, and yes, our “second house before the first house” dreams were quickly crushed). Despite our unofficial ban on the news, as soon as the four of us stepped through the door I turned the TV to a local station to check the weather. A lady was in front of a map that looked like it’d been used to clean a ketchup spill. Covid cases were spiking. The whole county was red with them. “Great,” I said, just as Sally asked for the fifty-eleventh time when we were going to beach. Yeah, we got Covid.
Honestly, there was no way around it. It was the South (sorry, not sorry) and zero people were wearing masks or social distancing or even thinking. The first time I walked to the pool, with Sally holding my hand and Robyn strapped to my chest, a white-haired man in an unbuttoned Tommy Bahama shirt reached out and stroked my baby’s arm with his finger. “Cute little thing,” he said by way of praise. Can a face look murder-y? I hoped mine did. But he just smiled and headed to the lobby to spread more unsolicited cheer and coronavirus. Also, did I mention that my husband never met a stranger and likes to talk with his mouth open? Exactly. By the time we got back to D.C. and realized we were sick I was ready for a divorce. But then who would take care of the kids after I died alone in an uncontrollable coughing fit on a living room floor strewn with toys my ungrateful children refused to pick up? I was stuck.
To add insult to infection, when Covid came crashing into our lives my body was already worn out. I’d been working like a woman possessed since Sally was born—or perhaps like a woman without rich parents who provided down payments. I took a “break” during my second maternity leave to write a book about Congresswoman Maxine Waters. At one of my first postpartum visits I’d been handed a sheet of paper while dressed in the same. On it was a list of stupid questions meant to assess my mental health, gauging the temperature between one and five of just how anxious, overwhelmed, or whatever I was. I made the mistake of answering honestly. When Dr. Jackson came in to see me twenty minutes later, she dramatically pulled said sheet from her stack of papers and said, “According to this you might be having a breakdown?” I shrugged it off. Who wasn’t?
Motherhood was catching up with me. Motherhood was beating the shit out of me. I wanted to tell her to back up. I wanted to tell her to calm down. I wanted someone to find us in a dark alley going at it and yell, “Stop! Stop! Leave her alone. She’s had enough.” But there was no tap-out. I had to find a way to handle the ring like a pro, because we were only in round one. And did I mention the cancer scare that came before the breakdown diagnosis and the Covid infection?
“Your thyroid is enlarged,” announced my new primary care doctor during a routine physical that I had scheduled only because I wanted a day off.
“I have cancer?!” See how calm I was being?
“Um, let’s get you checked out,” said Dr. Medley, a Black woman with salt-and-pepper hair like sheep’s wool and a penchant for floral print that made me think she didn’t have time to shop, which was comforting. The woman was busy saving lives!
I had an ultrasound scheduled for the next day and therefore twenty-four hours to get my affairs in order before I died. The step-down diagnosis was hypothyroidism, which after reading the symptom list seemed a lot like a disease called motherhood: exhaustion, dry skin, weight gain, lethargy, brain fog, hair loss, difficulty falling asleep, dry mouth, super PMS, and mood swings toward the dark side. I called my husband.
“You’re killing me, Smalls,” I told Rob. “Like for real for real.” It turns out I did not have cancer, just life. I’d spent the past few years trying to be superhuman without the cool origin story, and my regular ole human body couldn’t take the abuse. So Covid? It was kind of a relief.
The first people I told were the Super Cool Moms, because I knew they wouldn’t judge me. They wouldn’t interrogate me. They’d say the thing they wished someone would say to them, because in that group we led with our motherness. I was on the couch, coughing and scrolling, scrolling and coughing. We’d been having a not-so-random conversation about race, which was becoming increasingly common in the wake of the reckoning. Tina had sent her Trump-loving in-laws a video of HGTV stars Chip and Joanna Gaines talking to their rack of kids about race—because if not them, then who? “Yeah, this was…interesting,” I wrote back after watching the clip. Tina herself was clearly secondhand embarrassed by the video, but she said her conservative Christian in-laws, who loved shouting about God but found talk about racism impolite, were into it. I got it. Something was better than nothing. Then another coughing fit hit me, and I figured it was time to let the cat out of the bag.
“Also, on a completely unrelated note. No one go to Myrtle Beach. Ever,” I pivoted, explaining to the group that we’d gotten “the ’rona” and that, yes, “It was horrible.”
And like I thought, the Super Cool Moms immediately went into mom mode. Not friend mode or my mom’s mode (which included lots of platitudes but no actual help), but just good old-fashioned “Let’s take care of you” mode. Meghan was incensed that no one in South Carolina was taking the virus seriously. She had stats on it. Carly immediately got on the phone with her older sister, who was a doctor, and forwarded me all her recommendations in a bullet-pointed email. Mira had heard of an experimental new treatment and maybe had a connect. She was working the lines. They all just got it. Instead of piling on completely appropriate questions like “What the fuck were you guys thinking?” they sent us two hundred dollars on GrubHub. They asked if they could drop off more food, run to the pharmacy, donate breast milk if mine was waning. I mean, that last one I made up, obviously, but these were the kind of women who’d do it, no doubt. I was at the end of my rope and the WhatsApp moms gave me some slack.
Previously, I’d wasted too much time wondering not only if I fit in but if fitting in was even the goal. But none of the Super Cool Moms gave a damn about any of that. They just wanted to help. That’s when I realized that over the years these women, most of whom I rarely saw IRL once Covid became our reality, were in fact some of my closest friends, my biggest cheerleaders, and my unpaid therapists.
Scrolling through WhatsApp was like flipping through the pages of one of those cheesy one-line-a-day mom diaries. I spilled my guts about work, about being impatient with Sally, annoyed with my husband, and sick of my crying baby. I talked about my anxiety, frustrations, and triumphs without fear or filter, because in the beginning they weren’t quite real, just a nebulous iCloud of moms to bitch to. But they’d become more than that as I became more of me, quietly shedding the fear of becoming someone other than the woman my twenty- and thirty-year-old selves demanded I be.
I keep thinking of the word outlet and what it means for the kind of professional women with pent-up everything that populated my neighborhood, my news feed. The definitions are weirdly spotty and spot on. An outlet is a release, an exit, an escape. They are also the holes in the wall we jam our electrical cords into, shooting us up with energy. Outlets sell us a bunch of discount crap we don’t need. An outlet is a place where we can express ourselves, announce our thoughts. The Super Cool Moms group was all of these things. Appealing to every need at once, online, in person, and in the palm of our hands. I would never just pull the plug. It was life support.
To this day I carry with me four words Mira said during that time. For the most part our family got off unscathed. Rob just felt super tired at first, and then a few days later I got a scratch at the back of my throat, and two days after that Robyn woke up with gunk all over her nose as if she’d smashed her face into a cake made of snot. But Sally remained delightfully and nerve-rackingly three. After a week Rob and Robyn bounced back like champs, whereas I was regularly plagued with coughs that wouldn’t quit and left gasping for breath and clawing at my throat. It was bad, guys.
During the third or fourth such “attack” I thought calmly, This is it, as I crawled my way to the kitchen from the living room to get a glass of water that my brain told me would make it all better. This was where and when I ended and left my little family to their own devices, hoping I’d instilled a love of lotion at least. It’d been a great job while I had it—mother. I made it as far as the refrigerator door when Rob came up from the basement to find me hacking up useless air on the linoleum. We called my doctor again. The one who had previously prescribed the parents of a wobbly walking baby and a threenager “rest.” She told us to get to the ER immediately, but we knew that could be a death sentence, so instead we went to a private urgent care. Turns out I had pneumonia on top of Covid (and motherhood)—oh, and also some recurring asthma thing from when I was kid (who knew?). The antibiotics and inhaler were a godsend. I was breathing again and slightly less prone to flights of morbidity. Slightly. After I spent ten minutes typing all that out for the WhatsApp group, Mira responded thusly: “You didn’t deserve this.”
Corrine packs away her ukulele; class is over. The kids are cranky and phones are buzzing with reminders of Zooms that should’ve been emails. In short, it’s time to slink back to our respective hothouses of Magna-Tiles and Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. But no one wants to—obviously. Not yet. So we’re doing that awkward “pretending to go but really wanna stay” dance. There are six of us; we’re trying to keep our toddlers from licking each other, but we’re also throwing additions to the conversation over a shoulder: “Yep, Yu Ying is going hybrid” and “These were on sale!” and “She’s not walking yet.” Nothing earth-shattering but somehow crucial, even life-affirming, as the kids like to say.
Once the first and second waves died down, the Super Cool Moms were dying to see each other. We hired a music teacher to meet us at Crispus Attucks Park once a week at 9 a.m. to sing to our toddlers. It was ridiculous, obviously. But it was also so necessary. We even had a Halloween-themed class where all the kids dressed up and spent the next hour tugging at tutus and, in Robyn’s case, antennas.
“Full on. Suburban. White lady,” jokes Rob as I hustle Robyn out the door to another class with her “friends,” okay, mine. I was this. This was a part of who I was. Momming with the rest of them. Yes, fine, I was the only Black girl in the bunch. Me, a card-carrying “strong Black woman” (apologies) in the overlapping ages of Donald Trump, racial reckonings (apologies again), and biblical plagues. With all those circles tightening around me, why on earth would I volunteer to wrap myself up in a group of mothers made up almost entirely of women I used to roll my eyes at—white women in the era of Karen? But I did. And weren’t they different from those hysterical ladies who lived on our phones? At least to me they were. But perhaps that wasn’t enough. Or perhaps it was.
The night Kamala Harris (oh, and Joe Biden) won the presidential election, WhatsApp was abuzz with girl power and whatnot. But I wanted to point out the Blackness of it all, making sure to claim Kamala for myself. She was more mine, right? Black, in a sorority, went to undergrad at the school down the street from me. Yes and no. Angie and Priya had their hands raised too. A mixed-race Indian American woman their kids could look up to. A high-achieving South Asian daughter of an exacting mom. Nancy pointed out that Kamala was the daughter of immigrants. So she was hers too. Well after the kids had gone to bed, we were still typing back and forth about colorism, the one-drop rule, being a double minority, social hierarchies, and cultural taboos. Priya lamented the fact that her daughter had gone to sleep too early to get a picture in front of the TV with Kamala. However, Priya wasn’t coming down from cloud nine, because “I’m the daughter!!! As are all of us,” she added. But I felt that first part in my chest. I’m the daughter. We’re all the daughters.
See, I really did like these women. And yet I always felt the need to mentally defend that fact to myself, because the truth was nobody else really cared. I mean, my other friends clowned me for my mom-group evangelism, but the anxiety was all my own. Really it was about authenticity, a frustrating word that has the power to define while also skirting definition. What did it mean? Who was my authentic self? Why place so much mental stock in some chick I didn’t even know like that? A version of me that wasn’t fully realized yet. Because if hiding behind every potential interaction, relationship, or group is some feared “fakeness” no one can pinpoint, then we’re all just running scared from the very thing that might help us understand ourselves. Right? At least that’s what I kept telling myself when I was caught laughing hysterically, nodding silently in agreement, or parroting some nugget from the Super Cool Moms.
How do we define our own me-ness? Is it always drawn outside the lines of others? Measuring myself up against all the alleged “good mom tropes” strolling through the neighborhood obviously wasn’t working. It had stressed me out so much that my thyroid, an organ (?) I previously wasn’t sure I even had, was basically telling me, “Bitch, you need to pump the brakes.” Add to that mental breakdowns, Covid, pneumonia. Girl, if anyone needed an Rx for a chill pill, it was me. Instead of running myself ragged about what kind of mother I was, why not just admit there was no blueprint? I was becoming whatever mother, whatever person, I was supposed to be. Your authentic self doesn’t arrive via stork, you have to search it out yourself.
Once, the godmother of Becoming and mom-in-chiefing, the Michelle Obama, personally gave me some advice that I promptly ignored.
This was right before Rob and I got married. I was covering a fancy-pants event at a super swank house in Washington. My plan was to get in, take some notes, and then get out with enough time to watch an Angel rerun. When I got wanded by Secret Service in the garage I figured maybe Valerie Jarrett was there, or even Second Lady Jill Biden, whom I’d met before. That is not a humblebrag, promise. Once I got inside and had a glass of champagne, the gorgeous and tall Black woman with the perfect bounce to her hair didn’t immediately register as the woman whose entire existence served as my vision board. I just thought, I have to ask that lady where she got that haircut. And that dress. And that nail color. And that general aura of amazingness.
“Can you believe she came,” whispered my friend Aba, who sidled up to me with her iPhone already in camera mode.
“Who?” I was still feverishly taking notes in my own phone and barely looking up.
“The first lady, girl!”
I played it cool for the next hour and a half, because who wants to be the yokel who gets gunned down while attempting to hug Michelle Obama. The plan was to look normal by taking more notes, while secretly recording everything Mrs. Obama did. 8:20: FLOTUS laughs like a human being. 8:22: FLOTUS’s arms are not a myth. 8:27: FLOTUS continues to walk on earth and has yet to ascend to the heavens. And so on.
It was Aba who made me actually talk to her. I was trying to blend in near a sofa, ready to sneak a picture for her, when I looked up and was suddenly being introduced.
“…and this is Helena Andrews,” Aba said, graciously pulling me into the conversation.
“You look familiar,” said the First Freaking Lady of these United States to yours truly. “I think we’ve met before.”
After recovering from a mild seizure, I managed to say something like, “Ah, no, um, I don’t think so. I write for The Post so maybe…”
She looked suspicious when I mentioned I was a reporter (damn it!), but her smile came back almost immediately. She then rubbed my arm, which I immediately vowed to smell later. The only thing I could think to ask her about was my impending marriage. I figured whatever advice she gave me would last a lifetime; plus if anything went wrong, I could always say, “Well, Michelle Obama made me do it” and all would be forgiven.
“Hmmm, that’s a longer conversation over cocktails,” said Mrs. Obama (if she had invited me to cosmos on my actual wedding day, I would have canceled the whole damn thing). “But most important, make sure you’re always your authentic self. If you try too hard to be someone you’re not, it won’t work. That’s what’s sustained Barack and I for all these years.”
I nodded like an idiot and listened more as she told me not to “trip on the wedding” even if one of my girlfriends showed up in the wrong thing. “It’s just one day.”
What stuck was her commandment to be my authentic self. This was a direct command from the forever first lady. To ignore it would be treason. But just who the heck was she, my authentic self, that is? I noodled the question for years after that night. In the years since, I’d become a wife and a mother. I was a daughter and friend. Did I know exactly what those versions of me looked like or had the mugshots changed over time? Perhaps all the exhaustive work I was doing to raise perfect children and be the perfect mother was just another way to hide that authentic self, to bury her under expectations that didn’t matter to anyone, not even me when I really thought about it. If that was the case then the Mamas, the Super Cool Moms, all of them, weren’t women to necessarily emulate or even be embarrassed by. We held up mirrors to each other even if the reflections weren’t always the same.
Maya Angelou once said, “We have to confront ourselves.” Me, myself, and I were due for a face-to-face-to-face. What I realized eventually is that the fantasy that fueled my twenties? I’d needed that. We all do. I needed to feel like the invincible heroine in a silk headscarf fighting off evil questions about why I hadn’t found a man. As the years stacked up, I had dreamt up another fantasy to pull me through the next decade. This one filled with babies and momming so hard. And now that picture needed some serious retouching, somehow reconciling it with the old ones. To really confront who I was as a mother, a Black mother, I’d have to give birth yet again. The emotional labor pains were the worst but my authentic self was in there somewhere.