Allia A. Matta
“THE SEMESTER BEGINS. The planning, the teaching, the grading of papers, the dinners to cook, the homework to check, and the reading to do, and then even more reading. I now use a rolling briefcase bag because of all of the books and papers I have to carry across campus. This is my new life in New England in the academy. I have journeyed far to get here. I open the door to the university’s seminar room. I am the only woman in this small cohort of graduate students. I am also the oldest student. I arrive early, and I am excited. I have new notebooks and pens, and I am thrilled to begin this Ph.D. in Afro-American studies. I am also nervous, single, and in a new town. I now have a roommate and live in a nearby apartment that does not remotely resemble the apartment or the neighborhood I left behind. It is peaceful. I am grateful. I am lost. My children are not with me. I have stripped myself of my mother identity because of the choice to enter this academic door.”
This chapter bears witness to my educational and professional movement through doors that appeared to be shut for a woman like me. The retrospective narrative discusses key shifts in my life history and contributes to the broader conversation of the “black womanist narrative”—that is, the acknowledgment of black women’s testimonies as “grounded in personal histories of racism, classism, and sexism, as well as experiences of marginality and alienation” (Henry 1995, 280). My personal history illustrates the emotional and spatial rhythms, difficulties, and opportunities of shifting work, domestic, and familial spaces as I pursued higher education after marriage, child rearing, and divorce and tried to stay grounded as a woman, mother, and academic. In this chapter, I examine the complexities of focusing on my academic and professional life and the choices that led me to decenter and reprioritize my role as a mother, which has always been crucial to my identity and self-worth as an African American woman. By bearing witness to my own life, I ultimately make a small contribution to challenging how womanhood, motherhood, and mothering are constructed by history and culture. As Andrea O’Reilly notes, scholarship in “motherhood studies” questions the ways in which “motherhood is used to signify the patriarchal institution of motherhood, while mothering refers to women’s lived experiences of childrearing as they both conform to and/or resist the patriarchal institution of motherhood and its oppressive ideology” (2010a, 2). In my examination of my own mothering, I would like to do the same.
Nancy Chodorow’s seminal book The Reproduction of Mothering Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender interrogates and contests the core ideals of “traditional” Western and perhaps Anglo constructions of motherhood as initially defined by the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century ideals of true womanhood. This ideal—that women were innately maternal and would care for the children and exclusively manage the private domestic sphere—is also fostered in the construction of “‘the true black woman’ ideal of the twentieth century[,] [which] recasts the nineteenth-century concept of true (white) womanhood” and reinforces the notion that “black women would advance the race simply by being a good mother and creating a good home life” (Dallow 2004, 90). Those social messages certainly affected me, and as an African American woman, I am further plagued by the historical function and expectations of black mothering. For instance, although education was always the cornerstone of economic upward mobility and communal prosperity for black people, “black women’s educational decisions and career choices [were] not for individualistic gain, but for black community empowerment” (Henry 1995, 288). Thus, the decisions I made for my personhood directly corresponded to my role as a black woman and mother. However, when I chose to pursue higher education later in life and subsequent employment in the academy, my movement away from the traditional mother normative challenged the community space I inhabited; my reinterpretation of black mothering was in fact viewed as contentious. I consciously chose part-time mothering, which was also regarded as a taboo in my community and as conflicting with the socialized ideals of being a mother. Yet my choice was about personhood; my own survival and my children’s survival were at stake.
REDEFINING WOMANHOOD AND MOTHERHOOD IN NEW YORK CITY
“This street will never look the same. I stroll down Fulton Street, cross to Willoughby, and walk down to Flatbush Avenue headed to the job I am leaving in a few days. I am leaving my job as the associate director of the campus Writing Center and my rent stabilized apartment in Queens. I am also leaving my children. I will be entering a Ph.D. program on a fellowship at age forty-two. I am moving to another state, leaving the children with their father because they are not remotely interested in moving to New England from New York City, and leaving a life of certainty for a place and space that seems so foreign to a woman like me—a divorced African American mother of three sons. Yet this is perhaps my last chance. Many in my family thought I was crazy and selfish for supposedly abandoning my children. How dare I, a mother at this age and stage of my life, pursue a Ph.D.? They speak a silence through facial expressions that emote, ‘Why can’t you wait until your boys are older?’ ‘You’re leaving them and moving to go to school?’ ‘What are they going to do without you?’ These family members act as if my boys do not have a very capable, competent, educated father who wants the opportunity to have them full-time and in fact suggested that they live with him.”
Black communal spaces, though historically engaged in antiracist struggles, can also foster conflict when community members challenge the status quo within those spaces. As Patricia Hill Collins indicates, “Rather than seeing family, church, and Black civic organizations through a race-only lens of resisting racism, such institutions may be better understood as complex sites where dominant ideologies [such as gender, sexuality, and class] are [also] simultaneously revisited and reproduced” (2000, 86). Though my decisions and choices as a black woman seem personal, they are part of a larger historical trajectory that has aimed to empower families and communities. My academic studies have helped me realize that I am one of those “Black women [who] learn[ed] skills of independence and self-reliance that [have] enable[d] African American families, churches, and civic organizations to endure” (Collins 2000, 86). I am similarly also affected by those very same communal spaces that perpetuate self-sacrifice and the curtailment of personal aspirations or interests, while foregrounding those of the larger black community (Collins 2000, 86). These social structures impact black women in particular because African American communities have never completely relied on the traditionally nuclear family model to raise children. For many of us, othermothers and the extended community of grandparents, aunties, uncles, and cousins have been active participants in child rearing.
In my case, my children’s daddy (i.e., my former husband) also offered my children emotional support and financial security even though we were no longer a couple. I had been the primary caretaker for many years, and perhaps it was now his turn. Although this positive arrangement complemented my journey into higher education, the communal and extended familial backlash reinforced Nancy Chodorow’s (1978) assertion that women, as opposed to men, are stereotyped as the only possible caretakers. Thus, there is a problematic assumption that mothers are primary, and fathers are not. In my community, the role of the black mother similarly became the primary defining aspect of my identity, yet this definition was directly opposed to the historical realities of the function of black women in the community that extended beyond motherhood. Without a doubt, my desire for graduate studies extended my identity beyond motherhood, and it became increasingly clear I needed to follow my dreams.
In 2000, at the age of thirty-eight, I entered a New York City–based graduate program in English to focus on creative writing. Three years into single parenthood, I was now a graduate student and a working mom. My former husband, a highly educated and professional man who was Latino, was a valuable support during this time because he understood the historical importance of education in our respective black and Latino communities. Twelve years earlier, while we were married, he had watched me attempt a graduate degree in political science, but at the time my second son was only two months old. I worked full-time and attended classes at night. Although my beloved grandmother and othermothers helped care for my baby during the day, and his dad cared for him until I came home, my son cried the entire evening until I arrived. Needless to say, I had to leave the political science program and rethink my dream of attending law school when I became pregnant with son number three.
Yet like many black women, I refused to give up and insisted on my right to define my own reality. The journey to graduate school in creative writing (through the stolen moments of writing poetry) was the important event that circumvented my emotional breakdown and created a pathway to pursue higher education. My former husband knew I was committed to the graduate program as well; he cared for the children every weekend when I had to work as a writing tutor to secure funding while taking graduate courses. When I was offered an opportunity to teach composition as part of my funding, I quit my well-paying job, which was a difficult financial sacrifice. I realized that completing my graduate degree was more urgent. In addition, I was working in a somewhat racially hostile environment, and though economic stability mattered, my health and well-being mattered as well. Collins’s assertion that “African American mothers are complex individuals who often show tremendous strength under adverse conditions” (2000, 75–76) resonated with me and served as a reminder that in a different historical moment I may not have been able to choose.
After quitting my full-time job, I worked part-time and lived on child support, fellowship awards, and student loans. I was able to maintain a solid graduate school record and devote more time to my children’s growth and development. The situation wasn’t always smooth, but it was calm and relaxed. I was adapting to this new rhythm and could breathe a little easier. As a single parent and full-time graduate student, I was ironically able to manage successfully the duties that are ascribed to the traditional mother-normative role. I graduated with my master’s degree and took a position at the same university as the associate director of the Writing Center. The shift I made to my dreams paid off. For two years I thrived as an administrator and writing teacher, but my journey needed to continue, and so I decided to aim for a doctorate degree.
NEW BEGINNINGS IN NEW ENGLAND
“I open the seminar room door, but after the first session, I am in shock. The seminar was good, and I think I will love the program, yet I am lost. I have classes two days per week, and that’s it. No cooking for anyone, no homework to check, no one to clean up after except for myself. I decide to go food shopping on the way home from class. After unpacking the groceries, I open the refrigerator door and stare inside. There is so much going on in there, so much, juice, milk, fruit, and fresh vegetables. I close the door of the fridge and open the cabinet door. It occurs to me that I am in the apartment alone. My children are not due to visit for weeks, yet I have stocked the place as if they are still living with me. I close the cabinet door and retire to my room. I am a mess. A moment later I have a flashback. I’m at home in New York. I blow cigarette smoke out of the bathroom window, and I write poems. My youngest son is two years old and a very active and vibrant boy. He knocks on the door screaming for me to come out; I promise to do so but stay in the bathroom longer. When my second cigarette is extinguished and the whole poem is on the page, I exit the bathroom, fix dinner, bathe the boy, set the other two up for their respective showers, and put everyone to bed. Flash forward …”
My admittance into a doctoral program causes me to redefine myself as a mother and as a woman. This is the first time in my adult life that I have the luxury of thinking about myself first. My core identity has been defined by fulltime motherhood, and now that I am the part-time parent, I am lost. I feel the sentiments expressed in Joanna Clark’s “Motherhood” when she decides that she needs a break from her children to save herself from physical exhaustion and an emotional breakdown. At every institutional turn, she is reminded that she is a mother and that she is abandoning her children, even when she tries to leave them with their father (1970, 80). Clark points to the circumstantial difficulties of mothering when one is not emotionally or financially intact and the negative societal response when a mother decides to give up her children, nervous breakdown notwithstanding. I circumvented my emotional breakdown by writing poems in the bathroom, on the train, and any other time that I could steal to write, which led to my access to higher education. Perhaps if I had exhibited an obvious emotional breakdown—wearing no clothes and shouting incoherent words in the street—my leaving the children with their father would make more sense to other people.
The black community unfortunately exists within the larger societal narrative that has created negative images of black women and perpetuated problematic stereotypes such as the mammy (the “good” black mother in white homes) and the black matriarch (the “bad” mother figure in black homes) (Collins 2000, 75). These figures still plague the societal positioning of black women and impact the social messages and symbolism around black motherhood. Furthermore, the backdrop of these images directly influences how some of us subscribe to traditional mother-normative behavior as a means of debunking the mammy and black matriarch images even when in reality we should opt for an alternative model that better suits our particular families. Such alternatives are indeed possible despite “the fundamental injustice of a system that routinely and from one generation to the next relegates U.S. Black women to the bottom of the social hierarchy” (Collins 2000, 72). In that case, what do we have to lose?
MAKING IT WORK, TRYING TO THRIVE
“My oldest son is in crisis. If he doesn’t come to live with me in New England, I am not sure what his life will look like. Therefore, he moves in with my roommate and me, and I enroll him in the local community college. We are sharing my room. This is my last year of coursework, and I can barely afford to pay his tuition. My adjunct salary pays his tuition, and he looks for work. I am struck by the difficulty of my current predicament. He is with me because I am his mother and must rescue him or lose him to an unproductive life or perhaps even the street. It is a difficult road. My roommate understands that I am a mother and does her best to support me, though this move is somewhat of an infringement on her life and space. We all make it through this very tense period, and my son moves in with a roommate and continues to go to school. He works part-time, but I am still financially responsible for his tuition and his rent. At the end of his second year at the community college, he decides that he is done with school and wants to return to New York City and work full-time. He returns to his father’s house. He is now twenty-two years old. He is grateful for my support and understands the sacrifice that I have made. I realize that because I am his mother, I did not have a choice.”
My lack of choice when it came to saving my son reflects the truth about the difficult of mothering children, especially African American children, in the twenty-first century. According to Audre Lorde, “Raising Black children—female and male—in the mouth of a racist, sexist, suicidal dragon is perilous and chancy. If they cannot love and resist at the same time, they will probably not survive.… [M]others teach—love, survival—that is self-definition and letting go” (1984, 74). Though my son was twenty years old, I knew that I still needed to teach him self-love and how to survive the plight of being an African American man in a society that has placed a bull’s eye on his back. My son had been raised well; he was not a negative black male statistic (incarcerated, on drugs, or dead), but he was fading fast. However, college was not part of his agenda, and he was unable to keep a service job, which was the only job he could secure. He was becoming disillusioned by the realities of racism and capitalism and muted by alcohol. He didn’t love himself, and I was increasingly concerned that he would not make it. This is why I had no choice but to love my adult son unconditionally and have him live with me.
The dilemma of making sure a male child does not become a negative statistic is nothing new for mothers of color, including black mothers. Despite differences in class backgrounds, many black mothers fear that their sons will not make it. When faced with the possibility of this dilemma, they choose to privilege the needs of the family and community and forgo their own personal choices. I was no different. The community needs thriving black men who can flourish in society and contribute to the community’s empowerment and prosperity. I understood the urgency of my choice. I knew black women who had used their life savings or homes to post bail and to pay for a good lawyer, visited their incarcerated sons in upstate New York, and were putting money in jail commissary accounts for luxuries such as toothpaste, candy, cigarettes, notebooks, and pencils. These women were dealing on a daily basis with the racial and class injustices of the legal system and attempting to remain whole in the midst of trying saving their sons from getting hemmed up on charges that would destroy their lives even if they were not living a criminal life.
My son was getting used to being stopped and searched on the street in front of his father’s middle-class suburban home, and I was afraid that he would make the wrong choices if further humiliated and pushed to the edge. He needed to be loved by me, up close. He needed to understand that he was entitled to the time to grow into a mature and positive man. He needed to understand that he could not only survive, but also thrive. Like Lorde, “I wish[ed] to raise a Black man who will not be destroyed by or settle for, those corruptions called power by the white fathers who mean his destruction as surely as they mean mine” (1984, 74). My son needed his mother, and I reached out to him. In the time that he was with me, I thought about Lorde’s comment that, “for survival, Black children in America must be raised to recognize the enemy’s many faces” (1984, 75). My son survived, and he now recognizes the “enemy” as well as those of us who have his back.
Again, I have shifted to another stage of motherhood and mothering while pursuing higher education and, more specifically, my doctorate. I assisted in the recovery of my oldest son’s humility, productivity, and self-love; I am working full-time to put my middle son through college; and my youngest son is moving to New England to live with me in order to tackle his high school academic underachievement. The journey has once again changed, and it is tiresome. In three years, I have gone from being a single-parent mother of three to a full-time graduate student and then again to being a single parent navigating work responsibilities, school obligations, my youngest son’s life, and my life. I have struggled as a woman to maintain my personhood and be a good mother. At times, the struggle for personhood trumped motherhood or at least mothering in a conventional way. Yet I am a better mother when I am in touch with myself and my emotions. I was not a good mother when I compromised my happiness, creativity, and personal development. I equated motherhood with the sacrifice of one’s desires. Many of the women in my circles were unable to consider their personal selves because motherhood overwhelmed personhood. I have watched folks fall into the challenges of parenthood because they were missing some crucial pieces of themselves.
The way in which my life has shifted and transformed is evidence of what I see as an important truth: when one’s sense of personhood and the self are intact, parenting is pleasurable even when difficult. We must consider ourselves first, and it is important that as mothers we don’t self-judge, self-critique or self-condemn. It is the striving for whole personhood that has in fact made me the best mother that I can be regardless of what it looks like to the community or larger society. I know that I am a good, solid mother. My now grown-up children have character, believe in humanity, and are creative and critical thinkers. They supported my personal and academic journeys. They understood the importance of my life choices and realized that they benefitted from these shifts as well. They witnessed the evolution of their mother. My sons’ love and support are why I was a solid graduate student in both programs in New York and in New England. Although the evolution wasn’t easy, they eventually understood what was at stake! These traumatic and life-affirming moments taught me (and my sons) the value of self-definition and resilience—in particular, educational resilience. My mothering bears witness to the importance of stepping out of prescribed boxes in order to make things work and of not compromising one’s sense of self.
FINAL MEDITATION
“I open my office door. I now fully understand that my life as a woman, mother, graduate student, and teacher has been fully enriched by the emotional trauma of my experiences. Had I been completely comfortable in one space, I would not have been able to move, enter, or exit through the many doors that have brought me to where I now stand. The journey has been difficult, funny, painful, and ridiculous. I have achieved many things—earned a master’s degree, sent two sons to college, published a few poems, established a pretty solid teaching record, and started writing a dissertation. Though I consider myself a budding scholar, I am a solid woman-mother. I have been fortunate to come out on this side of my personal womanhood and mothering.”
My positionality as an African American, working-class yet educated female poet fostered my journey into higher education. I come from a long line of African American women (my grandmothers, aunties, cousins, and even my mother) who were not able to reshape their lives because they could not fully satisfy their inner desires. I know many of them could actively contribute to this reflection on mothering, although they never complained about the sacrifices of motherhood that impeded their dreams and desires. They did not have the educational luxury to contemplate on their multiple spaces, but I luckily do, and in so doing I bear witness to their lives as mothers, too. Many of us honor the privilege of mothering but have a harder time acknowledging the ways in which motherhood can take over personhood and identity (Brown and Amankwaa 2007). As women, we often dwell in the emotional flux and in-between spaces of motherhood and mothering and the social politics surrounding these spaces, but we do better for our children and the communities we live in when we emphasize loving ourselves. I am a first-generation doctoral student and the first in my family to have the drive, opportunity, resilience, and resources to fully realize both mothering and personhood without forever compromising my identity. My presence in the academy as a mother is important because it represents a journey that challenges the status quo and is an embodiment of knowledge instilled by my familial foremothers and othermothers that I should not sacrifice my inner desires.
Nevertheless, I am still challenged by the pressure to (re)prioritize mothering, especially because I am fully engaged in the academy. After a long day of teaching and trying to work on my dissertation, I am often very exhausted. Yet when I come home, I must give the time and energy to my teenage son, who is navigating life and high school. In addition, when my two adult sons call and want to talk, I listen, encourage, and advise with an open heart. In many ways, my children are still competing with my academic responsibilities as a teacher and graduate student as well as with my creative and personal worlds. Some days I do it well, others days I do not, but I am largely happy trying to manage adequately all of my multiple rhythmic spaces as a woman, mother, teacher, and graduate student. In essence, I am becoming a whole person.
Many of the women in my family and community unfortunately could not do the same because of a lack of resources and space. They may have worked, but they often did not choose the types of work they were doing. They had dreams that were extinguished by motherhood just as I extinguished cigarettes in the bathroom. I offer my story as a way to think about the ways in which motherhood can challenge personhood for some women and as a prescription for the possibility of creating or re-creating spaces and new rhythms. I am a stronger woman and teacher because I am an experienced mother. I do not mother my students, but mothering influences my interactions with them, my listening skills and ability to read facial expressions and body language. Watching my own children grow up has also helped me develop a keen interest in students’ intellectual growth and development. The lesson I learned by way of my experiences is that as a woman, mother, teacher, graduate student, and person, I decide which doors I will enter and which spaces I will shift. None of them has to be extinguished for the other to exist. The mother-woman rhythm I want in my life is finally contingent on me.
