Thank you, Mama

Thank you for that drive to the liquor store in Briar back when we lived in a dry county in Texas. I believe I was in the 6th grade. Yes, definitely the 6th grade. Here’s how I know: In the 5th grade, I came home from a “family.”

You know them; the ones that taught at my school. The ones with the mom and the dad in the home. They were the normative-nuclear-2.5-children-family-dream, or so I thought at the age of eleven. They asked me to go home one night because they were going to have “The Talk” with the girls.

I had no clue what that meant and asked them to be more specific. Not because I was delaying going home to an empty house after a long walk, but because I was envious of this “Talk.” Envious of knowledge the Walker girls would have as they passed me in the halls, sat next to me in class, played with me outside. I wanted that wisdom too.

I came home that evening to our empty house. To be fair, you were probably somewhere stuck in traffic. When you arrived I asked you: “What are the birds and the bees?”

You scoffed in a way that made me feel inferior as a child - and used to replicate when I felt othered or imposter syndrome as an adult. I asked again. You told me you would “show” me tomorrow. I didn’t question it.

The next morning we met your friend at their house and caravanned to the lesson you were about to teach me regarding “The Talk.'' We arrived at a stud farm (knowing it’s the place where you take horses to either impregnate or get impregnated, I still didn’t foresee how this lesson would unfold).

You sat me on an iron fence and told me to watch: “This is the birds and the bees.”

They cattle prodded the stud until he mounted the filly. It was aggressive and uncomfortable and scared the shit out of me. I was a kid lost in the National Geographic of life, confused and repulsed.

Flashforward to that drive to Briar when I was in the 6th grade. Do you remember? It was close to break and we drove with the windows down and the radio blaring songs off Full Moon Fever. The flora and fauna of farm-to-market-highway fields streamed past us in blurs of vivid green, mixed with patches of wildflowers, as the sun started to create its evening silhouette behind the tree line.

The cyclical nature of oppression had reared its head (yet again) in Texas, and I was being curious with my conversation topic. I made a statement to the effect of “I just don’t think I could ever have an abortion.”

Without missing a beat, you turned down the radio, looked at me, and said: “My dad died. I got pregnant at the same time. I had an abortion. I knew, your father and I knew, we couldn’t do it. He had just lost someone he loved too. A few months later, I was pregnant again. Now, here you are.”

You said nothing else, just calmly turned Tom Petty back up, and proceeded to the county line. I was astonished at your cavalier delivery, simultaneously gripped in revelation and washed with a wave of complexity. Guilt and gratitude saturated my being. I realized there was a choice made that would’ve prevented the human sitting in the passenger side of our sandstone Camry from existing, and I was that human.

Thank you for your honesty at that moment. Because of it, I made the same decision in my life. I know you don’t know, but I too chose my health, sanity, future - me - over that of a potential other.

My immediate urge is to qualify and quantify why the ability and privilege to make that decision as a woman is crucial, but I’ll refrain. Because that choice is a right, qualifying and quantifying isn’t worth my energy. I wouldn’t take a single decision back. It’s a gift to hold my head high in that truth.

Thank you for the gift of teaching and allowing me to be unflinchingly true to self. It may have not been the way the normative-nuclear-2.5-children-family-dream down the block found appropriate, but it was authentic. It made me the type of person who helps and loves and creates for the sake of right - for self and others - not the performance of what seems appropriate.

Thank you, Mama. I love you.