I was seventeen the first time I left home—college-bound though the school was not my first choice. It was the choice my mother made for me. I’d been accepted to my first choice, Pratt University, and had dreamed my big New York City dreams: cavorting around Brooklyn, pen, pad, writerly aspirations in hand. My mother, however, was of a different mind. She saw her second child, willful though naïve, in the treacherous big city and decided that state school was the safer, albeit more affordable option. After useless pleading and state grants solidified the funding, my mother, little brother and I packed her red Chrysler minivan and drove the nearly two-hour ride through rural southwestern Pennsylvania to Kutztown University.
It was your typical fish-out-of-water experience: Black girl in white rural America. I was housed in a dorm with two other roommates, white girls, on one of the highest floors, and had yet to make friends with any of the other Black students, of which there was a relatively small minority. On the first holiday weekend after classes started, the campus thinned out, like cows dotting the nearby pastures, and both of my roommates went home. Sitting in my triple occupancy alone, I pictured the stretch of days from Friday to Monday, meandering around the grassy campus pitifully, dining in the hall with the other ‘left behinds’, wilting of boredom and dramatically phoned my mother that night, pleading for her to come and get me. She fussed and abated me reluctantly, too tired to drive to get the child she’d just sent away.
“Why didn’t you call me earlier?” she asked.
I’d thought that I could tough out the long weekend alone.
I cried, my loneliness and brattiness on full display and with a frustrated sigh she relented. My mother drove two hours in the middle of the night and saved me. Through dark single lanes we rode the two hours back, together, so I could spend the long weekend at home.
I’d failed at my first foray at independence and being within my mother’s reach would save me over the years. I’d leave home, only to return to the nurture that dwelled within. There was the apartment I shared with my best friend. The time, much to my Mom’s dismay, I moved in with a boyfriend and finally the apartment with the pastel-colored walls that would eventually become my launching pad to NYC. I’d make it to the big city, my aspirations still firmly in place and I’d stay for seven years. But I would return, however, this time to an empty house, my mother no longer there to receive me, even as it was her death that called me home.
The home I returned to was the first and only house my mother ever nearly owned. We’d moved to the two-story row home when I was in the seventh or eighth grade, too young to understand how important this milestone was for her but old enough to know that housing was our family’s Achilles heel. After my parent’s second and final divorce, we moved here, a home that would come to represent the stability and love my mother strived to create in her life.
We’d spent years moving and there were many other houses I associated with my childhood. Houses where my siblings and I—all seven of us—threw stuffed animals out of the window and had hot sauce drinking competitions. Houses where we had milestone birthdays, reflected in the bins of photos my mother kept, and where we, a Muhammad’s gang, ran the streets with our jubilant Black friends. There were homes with less ardor, homes where we were split up, my sister and I with my Grandmother, my younger siblings with my Mom in a two-room efficiency. Houses where my parents physically fought and where I retreated to the only sanctified space I could find: inside the lines of books. This house, our final residence, was not a childhood house. It was a teenage house, the house of a divorced, single mother of five, fully furnished with everyone’s angst. It was the house where we all came of age, my mother finding her footing, us children making whole of bits and pieces.
When we moved in, it’d been abandoned for years and while I didn’t help clean, maybe I was too young, I remember hearing about the overpowering smell of dog piss and the clumps of pet hair. But like she had alchemized every other bad thing in her life, my mother stripped the walls and painted them. She sewed curtains and draped them from the wooden beams. We couldn’t afford frames so our mattresses sat on the floor and my mother hosted family gatherings, graduations, birthdays in her humble abode. Life was hard but we were getting by. And as life tends to do and needing no deeper explanation than the particulars of our fucked up racialized world, the original owner, a white woman, reemerged after three or four years of us living there.
My mother had been victim to deed theft. The man who rented us the house didn’t own it and had vanished just as we were being threatened to leave. Rendered squatters, for months we resided in my mother’s fears. She asked openly, “would the house be snatched out from under us?” “Not after all the work I’ve done.” I wrote in my diary how helpless I felt, powerless to stop my mother from struggling. On her birthday, I’d given her a card that said I would do everything in life to help her. The owner vanished again and the house went up for Sheriff’s sale. Since my mother couldn’t buy it outright, a realty company did and by sheer capitalism, they let her rent-to-own, an agreement she was three years shy from completing when she died.
Being housing insecure as a child, moving a lot due to my parent’s debts and living with the fear of not having a stable place in the world, led me to make things up, stories of characters who traveled a lot, went on adventures. As I got older, I was searching for my own home in the same way my mother was and while she had children to provide for, I only had myself to put some grounding beneath.
Perhaps, it’s that reason why I searched for places away. While Philly was home, it never felt like a sticking place for me. I’d always dreamed of going away. For my mother, it was where her family was from though she’d been born in San Angelo, Texas. She’d tell me stories about watching the heat waves undulate from the front steps of their Air Force housing and how she’d spot green rattlesnakes, one of which bit her as a kid. When my grandparents moved back to Philly, my Mom retained a piece of her southern twang, most distinctly pronouncing “Daddy” as “Di-addy.” It was back home that my great-grandfather, a tailor, taught my Mom to sew and where she attended and dropped out of high school in West Philly. She’d left home at sixteen, not for college but for the Nation of Islam and in escaping her own trauma, she met a young Muslim man, equally in flight, and they had me.
I was midway through my first year in my MFA program when we learned of her ovarian cancer. The day my sister told me, I rode the 1 train in the opposite direction in a mental blur. It was Stage 3 and I remember thinking that we’d caught it and that we were going to fight it and that was going to be it. At one of her earliest visits, the oncologist backlit the X-ray, detailing to us the shadowy white mass. We drove to a nearby diner in silence and over cold cheese eggs and crunchy hash browns, she broke down. “This is what I’m going to die from,” she told me. I had no empty platitudes, so I cocooned my arms around her and inched closer in the booth. If someone had told me that this would be it, I might have come home sooner, rushing to her side, drinking in her love and presence, swallowing and digesting it for the road ahead. But maybe I was naïve. I told myself that this was just a blip and like my mother had saved me countless times before, I rushed to try to save her. Every other weekend I hopped on the bus from New York to help my sister as second caregiver-in-command.
I searched Google, trying to wrap my mind around her prognosis. Sifting through sites full of medical jargon and statistics, everything I read stated that ovarian cancer, typically a white woman’s disease, was a silent killer. While white women accounted for the higher diagnosis, the mortality rate among Black women was disproportionately higher. Socio-economic factors contributed to why Black women didn’t receive earlier diagnosis, adequate care and proper medication. In the annals of the fair, this felt like a sick trick. My mother who had survived childhood trauma and abuse, single parenthood, poverty only to come into her later years and be paid back with cancer. As her child, I naturally believed she deserved the world, all of our mothers do, and to learn that she could give so much to others only to have her body turn in on itself, made me want to light fire to every grace denied, to every system withheld from us.
At one appointment, this exposed fuse showed itself to me. Overwhelmed by information and sensing obfuscation, she told me that she felt her doctor was too quick, had too curt a bedside manner, and wasn’t doing a clear, patient enough job of explaining things.
“Tell her that,” I urged. “Ask her to explain.”
As her advocate, I wanted her to demand what she needed and my sister and I, like two bullish security guards, had a word with her doctor. We asked her to slow down, be a little “gentler,” requests that seemed like obvious standard practice when treating someone terminal but not obvious enough for a Black woman. Because of HIPAA, she told my mother what had been discussed and maybe it was fear, uncertainty, not wanting to cause any trouble, my mother shrank and downplayed her feelings. When the doctor left, I sucked my teeth. “Why didn’t you tell her?” I asked, overly frustrated. Speaking truth to her pain might not have extended our time together, but in my desperate mind it might have. I didn’t stop to think that perhaps she was tired of fighting, of demanding, of navigating the systems that suppressed her, that no Black woman should have to fight, and as I realize it now, there was truly nothing left to do.
And so we let go and over winter break, in her home surrounded by family, my mother passed away. For weeks, I laid on her brown sofa, marathoning reruns, accepting condolences and beating back the unreality. I returned to NY, finished grad school, managed to write parts of a novel, but ultimately the harshness of the last year, all of the latent pain, fear and anger came home to me.
There comes a time when all defenses are rendered useless. Grief made a minion out of me, laying all of my neuroses, regrets, shortcomings at my feet, daring me to cross them lest I step on a shard and slice myself. At first, coming home seemed like the obvious choice. I could grieve close to family and the house was there, with room to shelter me. But quickly, being back under my mother’s roof, without her, stifled me. Every frilly curtain, tribal mask and statue bore the mark of her. Her gold paint warmed the walls. Mud cloth pillows abounded. Our family portrait gallery gazed out at me. However, now her photo at the center filled me with dread.
Death has a way of distorting things. This house had always been our house, filled with the laughter and good times my mother brought to it. It had always been a soft spot to land but now in her absence, the walls were no longer jubilant, no elation rising to the ceiling. Foundation-wise, it was the same—same cracks and holes, same address—but spiritually it had changed. The essence that was my mother had been stripped, her physical void leaving us and her den robbed of the joys of home.
It was the thing she willed to us. What she had to leave us was the home that she’d made for herself and us: a safe, less soft space to land now. Returning home felt like a defeat and not for the usual reasons. By all accounts, I’d made it in New York, had the apartment, the job, the friends. Leaving was sad but the city had given me enough. The defeat hid in the why. I was returning home because I was severely depressed, grieving and having a difficult time coping with my mother’s death. The life I’d had, the person I was, the dreams I possessed were rendered virtually unrecognizable and so I found myself a new person in a new place.
In “The Year of Magical Thinking,” Joan Didion wrote how after her husband Gregory Dunne suddenly passed away, while their only daughter was in a coma, she couldn’t bring herself to throw away his shoes. Shouldn’t he need them when he returns and then it hit her: he was not returning. I’d read this book and many more on grief in the months after and I too felt that to preserve was too long and too long was to love. I didn’t want to move anything in my Mom’s house but at the same time, living with her belongings, those shards of glass, I kept cutting myself on her loss.
In life, I wouldn’t have dared touch her things. She’d scold us at any misplacement or loss of her comb, her TV remote, her arts and crafts. Her dominion was sacred and so it felt weird to try and broach that, so we mostly left the house as she’d made it. And yet, I had a life to live too. One that took an abrupt stop, where I had to trudge each day to even want to live but it was mine nonetheless and there was no longer a mother in it to rescue me.
One day, as I wrote on the sunned-in porch cum home office, there was a knock at the door. Standing on the stoop was one of my mother’s long-time friends, a Muslim woman who used to live down the street. She and my mother raised their children together and had become fast friends, trading Surahs and Hadith teachings, back before my mother stopped practicing. She’d moved away but here she was now and I had to break the news.
There were more visits like these. People who knew her from her many walks of life, driving by as I sat on the stoop.
“Is Karima home?”
“No, I’m sorry. My mother passed away.”
Each time, I’d watch the news seize them, gripping them as it had done me. One guy, who knew her from high school, was too happy. I, regrettably, couldn’t bring myself to even say it.
I had drawn the curtains and shut myself in but her friends were letting in light.
My new-old neighborhood called me back to itself and I resisted because of what it meant. Being back home was a result of her death and I didn’t want to accept either. So I resisted, pushed back at my city, shoved it on the shoulders and turned away. But familiar haunts have a way of mothering you and there was comfort in the dependability of it. The 47 bus that I used to ride in high school still ran the same route. Seeing the Muslimas garbed up everywhere bought back the years my family had spent heavy in the mosque. I had stepped into a time machine, taking me back to my youth, the tender young woman I once was. On Fifth Street were the sneaker stores where I proudly spent my first summer job paycheck on Air Maxes. Just beyond the bridge underpass, was the storefront my Mom used to rent for her clothing store. It’s now an African braiding shop but I see the days when I was small enough to fall asleep in the makeshift dressing room.
Not all memories are fond. Under that same bridge, I saw someone shot for the first time: a boy who appeared no older than 16 or 17. It was almost as if I dreamed it and had to check with my sister that it really happened. I see his bicycle laid on its side, his friends shouting in his ear for him to wake up and I see myself, no more than 11 or 12, coming in close proximity with the precarity of life.
All along these streets, were not only remnants of my mother but remnants of me. I’d come home to grieve and get through the agony and what I found was that my life was being reborn. Subtlety and sneakily. I met old versions of myself along the way and like all the best Black mothers, I gave those old selves immense, abundant and furious love. It’s what my mother had done with me, telling me to tough out the long weekend at college and finally, when she realized that I was more afraid than simply lonely, she came to my aid. She’d had my back when it mattered most and maybe like our house had been a rebirth for her—stepping into an ownership of her new life—it was by divine design that it would be a healing place for me, a continued refuge beyond her womb and her grave. I’ve always wanted my first choice, in colleges and life, but mother’s intuition, while not foolproof, is made of something greater than accuracy. It’s made of wisdom. She knew that I’d be okay, no matter what school I attended, and in her passing she left the only physical shelter she had to cover me. While none of it was my first choice, it’s been the one that’s been made and she knew I’d make the best of it.
