The Invisible Black Woman

Yesterday, I was minding my own LinkedIn business, looking for posts to share on the page. If you’re just joining or missed my previous posts where I talk about this, you can find me on LinkedIn here. Oh, and also, I post content roughly every two hours (between 7 AM and 9 PM) centered around, you guessed it, the premise and focus of this page. Anywho, I came across a post from one of the pages I follow that I highly highly recommend: IKONI Collective. It was a quote from Tracee Ellis Ross that really struck a cord for me:

The childless women have been mothering the world and elevating culture as aunties, godmothers, teachers…you do not need to push out a baby to help push humanity forward.

So I reposted it.

Then I went on to mind my general business by finishing last night’s post and getting ready to shut it down for the day. Usually I like to check the activity feed so I can respond or react to any comments or reposts, so I did that before disconnecting. And I saw the post had reactions in the 400s. The post was only several hours old. I was like, “damn!” I shook my head and called it for the day.

Then this morning, I wake up to 900 reactions. It’s now at over 1,000 and climbing. Based on the comments and reposts, it resonated for a wul heap of people. For most it resonated just like it did for me. For some, not so much. One comment went so far as to boil it down to “only real mothers matter.” In short, some people was out here wildin’. Rather than share my hot take on the comments that had me scratching my head, let me tell you my story. I do not have kids.

But I raised four.

I was seventeen when my sister had her first child. She went on to have three more and for the better part of a decade, she and her kids lived with me. I fed them. I bathed them. I took them to school. I kissed their boo-boos. I disciplined them when they were out of order. I loved on them. I took care of them. And those years they spent under my roof I will treasure until my dying day. Those years are the reasons I did not long to birth my own children. They were the reason I felt full in the motherhood department.

But they very technically were not my children. So, it doesn’t count, I guess? One of these days, when I have the intestinal fortitude to share, I’ll tell you the story of how gutting it is to be told, “you’re not a mother, so you don’t get it.” Or “they’re not your kids.” Or “They’re MY CHILDREN not yours.”

Sadly, I’ve heard it all. And no, I will never literally know what the experience of birthing a child is like. That is a choice I made long before I met my husband for oh so many reasons, least of all the physical, emotional, and mental abuse I endured at the hands of my alcoholic father. It is a choice I made and a choice I have never regretted.

I don’t have children, but I always knew my life would be full of them—and I have fully embraced being an aunt when opportunity has allowed. Not just to the children in my life by blood, but to the children in my life by fate, by the ordainment of the universe. Children brought into my life by marriage through my husband’s sister and now mine. Children in my life through deeply bonding friendships I have made over the years. Through found siblings that allow me the privilege and honor of being auntie to their children.

I get to be a part of incredible milestones, like my now-sister’s niece heading to college, the first in her family. I get to see my grandniece growing up, if even at a distance, through photos sent from her mom, my niece. I get to fly to another state to attend my nephew-son’s graduation from the Air Force and beam from ear to ear in photos and laugh as we go to a celebratory dinner.

But no, I’m not a mother. Not in the true sense of the word. But it doesn’t make my impact in their lives and their impact on mine any less profound. Saying that only traditional mothers can know a mother’s love falls flat for me. I love every child in my life as if it were my own and if any of them were in trouble and called me in the middle of the night for help, I wouldn’t hesitate. I can sense when something is wrong, so I reach out and I text and I let them know I’m here, no matter what, that they can talk to me and I’m there for them. But since I’m not a mother, does that invalidate my knowing or intuition? Does it make it somehow less than because I chose not to bear my own children?

Boy, I sure hope not.

Some of us choose this “motherless” life. For some of us, the choice is made for us. But it doesn’t make the love, care, and nurture we choose to share with the children in our orbit any less valid or valuable.

I had some very rough years before hubby and I met. Mumma and I didn’t see eye to eye for most of them. And if I’m being completely honest, I was doing stuff I had absolutely no business doing. So, we spent a lot of those years talking very little. But I was fortunate enough to have a godmother in my life at the time. One who saw me and didn’t judge me for what I was doing. She just loved me.

TW: I remember one particular occasion, after the relationship I was in that kept my family away imploded, I fell into a deep depression. My family and I were not speaking, and I was living in a city where I had no one to turn to. I was using an excessive amount of alcohol to dull the pain. One particular night, I decided I’d had enough of the hurt and this world. I couldn’t go on. As I entertained some dark thoughts while I rode the train to a hole-in-the-wall, rat infested, illegal basement room I was renting by the week because the supposed “love of my life” waited until I took the Greyhound back to a whole other state to my part-time job I kept because I couldn’t find a job in the new state I had moved to to be with him. The “soulmate” that told me while I was downstate that we should break up, over the phone no less, and when I asked him where I was supposed to go, he didn’t have an answer, but definitely not back to our place. As I rode the train back to the shithole I rented out of shame and desperation, I decided to get off a few stops earlier. I made a beeline for the closest pay phone and called my godmother.

“Hey.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I’m not gonna make it. Please come get me. I can’t go back to that place. I’m afraid if you don’t come, you won’t see me again.”

“Where are you?”

I told her where I was.

“Don’t go anywhere. Stay right where you are and don’t go back to that place. I’m coming to get you.”

Within an hour, she came to get me. She drove me to the place I was staying, I picked up the few things that I kept there, and she took me home.

When she finally met my husband, who my family didn’t accept at all for the first half of our marriage for the goofiest of reasons: he took me away from my sister who believed her and I would live together forever—but again, a story for another day… when my godmother met him, she hugged him, cooked us a meal, and treated him the way I’d always wished he would have been treated from day one: like family.

He never forgot. To this day, hubby still talks fondly about how much her treatment of him stuck with him.

“I was so nervous when you took me to meet her. She’s the only one who never treated me like I didn’t deserve to be in your life.”

I hate that he ever felt this way. And yes, today my relationship with Mumma is worlds away from what it used to be. Same goes for her relationship with hubby.

But for those years when it wasn’t quite where it could have been, I’m grateful I had someone who filled in that gap.

I’d like to invite anyone who believes you have to birth a child to be a mother to reconsider. Short of that, as I’m painfully aware that people will believe what they choose to believe and the likelihood of me swaying anyone who believes that childbearing is a requirement for motherhood or, I don’t know, making an impact on a child’s life, let me turn my attention to those in the audience that are picking up what I’m putting down and have been where I have.

You are not flawed because you do not have kids “of your own.” Whether by choice or circumstance, it don’t matter. You made the best and right choice for you and you shouldn’t be shamed, belittled, judged or dismissed for making it. Even if you have no interest whatsoever in caring for or nurturing a child. Even if the idea of motherhood makes you cringe, you are not less than. You still matter to a whole lot of kids that you didn’t put on this earth. You still make a difference to kids who want to grow up to be just like you. Don’t let someone else’s narrow view of motherhood dictate how you see yourself. Being childless and being a mother are not mutually exclusive. Both things can absolutely positively be true. Please don’t let anyone, certainly not these interwebs, tell you different.

Until next time, I wish you nothing but sunshine, rainbows, and unicorns, which are no less fictitious than the fantastic phenom you are.