I am a miracle

The image of my 19-year-old mama standing five feet tall, driving across the country in her 1977 Ford Mustang II from Boutte, Louisiana, to Santa Ana, California, in 1978, swaddles me with immense warmth and pride. I am the daughter of a Black American migrant from the rural South, and I recently can’t help but wonder what my life would be like if my mama had stayed.

I was born in San Diego, California, in the late 1980s. But before I share my story, let me tell you a bit about my mother’s background. She was born in the 1950s into a family of thirteen siblings, plus a few more — my grandpa, born in 1912, was a rolling stone and had a whole other family on the side. My mama belongs to the second set of siblings. When I've heard my aunts and uncles talk about the split, they jokingly divide the siblings into plantation kids and house kids. 

My first six aunts and uncles were raised on a plantation in Matthews, Louisiana, except for my oldest uncle (who turned 81 this year!), who my maternal great-grandma raised. I also had an uncle who died at birth, which resulted in a six-year age gap between my favorite uncle and my mama. My mama, who is the oldest among the house kids, grew up in the four-room yellow home I used to visit regularly during my childhood summers in Louisiana. 

My mama is an adventurous, whimsical, curious, thoughtful, and feisty boomer. However, before she became my mama, she was a girl who wanted a better life, and she knew that by staying in Southern Louisiana, she would not get access to it. When I asked her what life was like growing up, I was expecting to hear stories of white violence in the South; instead, she described a childhood surrounded by family, filled with play, and memories of eating pickles, potato chips, and drinking Coca-Cola.

Clearly, I was not buying this rosy picture, so I probed, and she shared how she watched her siblings, cousins, and classmates enter this pipeline: graduate from high school, attend nursing school, get married, and then have children. She was not having that! As she was retelling stories, she said:

 “My high school boyfriend gave me a promise ring, but nobody told me what I was promising him. Once I found out, I broke up with him, but I kept the ring until my mama made me give it back. How am I supposed to marry someone when I don’t even know who I am?”

So, when she saw her opportunity to leave Louisiana, she took it. Having never visited California before, she set out West with her older sister and nephew, loaded into the Mustang II, with a gun in tow. According to my mama, she was out in Los Angeles having some Vanessa Huxtable BIG FUN until she decided to relocate to San Diego in 1982 for better job prospects. This is where I enter the story because she messed around and met my dad at work. If you see a picture of him, you would understand why, he was giving Marvin Gaye, but with a jheri curl. My parents had one of those classic 1980s love stories; they loved and laughed together until addiction not only took him away from her but also from me, not through death but through absence.

My mama always knew she wanted to be a mother, and she brought me into the world at 31 years old with deep intention. Knowing I was planned is one of the most extraordinary acts of love she could have ever shown me, as it allowed me to feel her profound adoration throughout my life. I had the classic San Diego childhood—beach days, flying kites, Disneyland, family cookouts, SeaWorld, the zoo, pumpkin patches in mall parking lots, trips to Tijuana to bring back bottles of tequila, Padres games, and Rally's hamburgers. I also had access to high-quality schools and what felt like unlimited opportunities. I often say that I would have had to work really hard to mess up my life, because she set me up to succeed.   

However, I can’t help but wonder what my life would be like had she stayed in Southern Louisiana. What would have happened if she had let fear or the expectations of others keep her stuck in a place where she was suffocating? How would my life have panned out if that 5-foot-tall skinny 19-year-old girl had never found the courage and made a plan to leave? 

The sacrifices my mother made and continues to make will never be lost on me. I am quite literally her wildest dreams. All the things she wanted for herself come alive in my freedom to choose and, most importantly, my freedom to BE. When I reflect on the current social and political conditions, I view them from the perspective of someone who is part of the first generation in her family to experience free will. I am the daughter of a woman who grew up in the segregated South, who was raised by a mother who lived for more than three decades without constitutionally-protected civil rights, who was raised by a mother who only knew survival, who was raised by a mother whose hands worked the land.

I am a miracle.