this little one came over for brunch.

...you'll come to appreciate the woman who always answers

mothers have the daunting task of protecting their young in a hurtful world, and yet they do it without anyone ever seeing their tears. 

Mothers

At the foot of her bed, I sat with my curls released from a tight bun spilling onto her knees. She stroked my hair and asked if I had a good time at the party with my father's side of the family. It had been one of those rare times when I made an exception to see them (one of the six times had been Kevin's wedding two years ago). It was my cousin's one year birthday party, and I had been told that it would be mostly children.

I hoped for pizza and prayed for kindness. I told my mother about the yummy cake, about the hugs and kisses I gave to my little cousins, and about all of the people who had been there. Only one of them had been a stranger, a younger woman with light eyes and a baby bump. Not wanting to make a scene and wanting to present myself well, I told her my name and gave her a standard Cape Verdean greeting with a kiss on her cheek. I attributed her shyness to her inability to speak English. My cousin told me, "she knows your father very well." I exchanged polite conversation with her and exited the tiny kitchen and its cheap linoleum floors to sit with the other children.

I told my mother about the thin woman with straggly hair and she asked without a trace of anger in her voice, "what was her name?" I told her. My mother brushed my hair out of my face and said, "Melinda, do you know who that was?" My mother then began to wipe the tears aware from my face and all of the pieces had come together.

She knew my father very well. My cousin had said it to light a bulb in my thirteen year old brain, but the joy of being reunited with the family allowed me to dodge that bite of venom.

I cried and cursed. My mother asked me what I wanted to do. I wanted to yell at my father. She handed me the phone without counsel, nor objection.

The phone rang and rang. For twenty minutes I pressed the redial button, until the anger tuckered me out and I fell asleep on my mother's hips. My father returned my thirty eight phone calls in the morning with defensiveness and "I told them not to go to the party." I refused to speak to him (the start date of five years of muteness in the presence of my father) and so my mother took on my wrath and let him have it.

Beyond the mistress and the unborn baby in the belly, my mother was infuriated that my father took so long to call back. I remember her saying this over and over again: "When your daughter calls you, you answer the phone. NO MATTER WHAT, YOU ANSWER THE PHONE."

My mother is not a superhero, nor can she turn water into wine. She isn't a miracle worker (unless you're talking about her cooking). She is a woman with bones that ache and skin that wrinkles. Yet she has always found a way to be my voice, my tears, and the courage when they had escaped me. She has always told me the truth, even when it would hurt.

Every little girl needs just one woman who will answer and listen when the world has suffocated and squeezed the love out of our tiny hearts. And for those who have been blessed enough to have that woman be their mother, well, lucky us. 

...you'll slow down.

medium boiled egg on white toast with arugula tossed in avocado oil 

Maybe it's because you left the pep in your step on the nightstand or that you can't recover from that third glass of red wine like you used to, but you'll be slower in the morning. You'll bury your face in the pillow a few times and then sprint to the shower. Even one more snooze button  in the warm folds of your sheets will send you back into another cycle of sleep. You'll turn the knob all the way up, your toes will be cold against the clean white tiles and you'll jump in, burning off a layer of skin on your chest and the bottom of your feet. It'll feel good. You'll feel alive. Or better yet, awake.

You'll wash all over, just the way your mother taught you so many years ago. Ten minutes later, you'll stare in the mirror with black smudges beneath your eyelids. That expensive mascara just won't come off, no matter how hard you scrub. You'll turn on Morning Joe in the background and deeper in the background Rihanna will be playing. You'll moisturize, throw on a pair of jeans and t-shirt you won't leave the house with, and put two eggs to boil on the stove. You'll do this strange thing called ironing to smooth out the creases that will be back in your clothes once you sit down at your desk.

The eggs will be hard to peel, but you'll be smashing them. You'll sit at the kitchen table. You will eat. It will be silent. You won't miss anyone. You won't need anything. You won't check your emails, facebook, twitter, instagram, tumblr, etc. There will be no guilt. There will be no rush. There will be no shoulda, coulda, woulda's.

You maybe slower than you were before, but you will be as you are; as you were meant to be: slow.

...you'll love your feet.

I used to hide them beneath socks and Adidas Shelltoes even on the hottest of days in the New England summer where the humidity made sweat drip down the middle of your back. Size 10's and too wide to fit into strappy sandals, I deemed my feet too ugly for public consumption.

With a big toe and little piglets standing by its side; they were too fat, too white, and too scary. They finally came out to play around the same time that I stopped wearing a thick t-shirt underneath my basketball jersey. If my fat arms could be seen in public, so could my toes.

In high school, they televised our basketball games on local access television. During my freshman year, I avoided watching myself. In the sea of lanky white bodies, my yellow skin, dark bushy hair with matching eyebrows and shorts riding up my crotch felt like I was watching National Geographic and I was a one woman stampede. Even if I felt good about my body in real life and in real time, there was something that made me very uncomfortable to see it on a tv screen.

There has always been this sense of acceptance that let me know that my body was good enough to be used in a public space. I didn't mind running down the street or riding my bike around the block. Yet, there was always something unnerving about my body being on display as a sign of beauty or attraction.

When I chose to become a blogger, it was for the sole purpose of sharing my story (read: long ramblings about important moments in my past). However, in an image conscious society, in that, we love pictures of people doing even the simplest of things (i.e. the phenomena of instagram), folks weren't interested in only words. Writing wasn't enough. If I was writing about eating oatmeal and blueberries, I had to attach a picture of myself eating the goop. And then the comments were usually about what I looked like (I love your hair! So cute!).

Through my body's work (awkward picture poses AND shooting bricks), I have found that there is a place for my physical self as more than just a vehicle towards something. My body, in itself, has the unearned right to exist.

In my second year of high school and varsity basketball, I stopped caring so much about what I looked like when playing basketball and redirected my energy in comfort. Wearing sandals did not come from the yearning to be pretty or fashionable, but realizing that no one cared what your toes looked like after two hours of running. Your toes were supposed to be ugly. At that time, I thought I had earned the right to spread out my stinky toes in a pair of Nike flip-flops.

More than ten years later, I'm sitting on my couch with my feet pressed against my thighs, still too fat, too white, and too wide, and think about how much I have come to love them. I love the way they hurt after a long day of walking. I love the way they callus. I love that they look like Fred Flintsone feet.

My feet exist. They still aren't beautiful to me, but their purpose is functionality. Yet, I still can't believe that I have to come a place where I can take a picture of my toes and post them in a public forum. My feet have the right to just be and that is something that I love and cherish more than anything.