I'm Not Ready to be a Father

...and like Augustine I tell God: Not yet.

Now I’ll die knowing now what human flesh tastes like. Because I eat what I kill. It’s a dangerous delicacy as we’re bitter and revolting at first, but the taste for blood becomes an addiction. Now when I look at my hands in the dark I see blood in my nails the color of spilled wine and broken glass. When I look in the mirror and see the eyes of my grandmother which my child might have inherited, it’s to all of the dead women that birthed me whom I ask: Would you die for me? And my answer I already know too, because of the fact that I’m still here, living and breathing and using my hands to channel their prayers and their revelations.

I know already that I’m lacking, working hard still just to take care of myself, not yet considerate enough of others. Sacrificial, but still selfish. There are others more mature than me, more materially prepared to fund a life, even some who are more at peace with yielding their time and attention to self. Meanwhile I’m still climbing up the mountain of me, not for the first time, but it feels like it; I’ve forgotten the intricacies of the way. There’s a new path I’m taking now that no one’s ever tread before. Above all I want to take you and so many others up to the heights with me, I want to spread my arms over the horizon and proclaim: look, all this is ours; but I’m still stumbling, glancing at my own feet; and like Augustine I tell God, not yet.

My last client on Sundays is new. Newly 18, a new mom too, and new to New York. She dropped out before high school. Her husband is in his 30s, he used to be her boss, he convinced her to move away from her family in Florida and drop all her friends. She’d convinced herself it was fine until she heard her daughter screaming and saw how her man didn’t stir in his sleep. All of a sudden she was inundated with regrets, anxieties, shame, guilt, etc. And now she sees me. It’s a horrible and heavy case. She doesn’t have a lot of options. She has almost no one to rely on. But God do I love working with her. Because she wants to be here. She wants to learn. She wants to grow, to change, to become better. With my help. She trusts me and I trust her to do what she needs to do for herself, to listen to me. Tears came to her eyes today when I explained why her daughter’s moods mirror her own: Because you two are still connected. No one knows the inside of you better than she does. And she won’t be peaceful until your inner peace radiates from you.

It’s a blessing to be able to work with such a willing client at such a pivotal time of her life. To be the sole person that repeatedly asserts that there is nothing wrong with her, that she has unimaginable power, and that her circumstances can change. But I wish I could meet with her husband, too. I wish I could have spent this Father’s Day session looking into his eyes and asking: What happened to you? To make you this way? Don’t you have a heart and ears and eyes? Don’t you see what you’ve done? Where are you when they need you? Don’t you understand you’re responsible now for writing the story of another generation of life?

He frustrates me so much — because I want a family. I want a son I can give my name to, whom I can guide into both strength and graciousness, whom I can hold up as an example of how to be Black and proud and kind and and and. I want daughters I can dance with in the living room, whom I can let paint my nails and dress me up, whom I can teach the meanings of beauty, of trust, of how they should be treated by the world. And I want a wife that can rely on me, a partner to go with me into the huge and gaping unknown, who can hold my hand and smile with me as we watch our creations conquer. But I don’t have any of that yet because I’m not ready and I know it and I made the choice not to make that happen before I could be reasonably certain I could navigate it into prosperity, not disaster. I know, no one knows when they are ready, and often, as with my own parents, things must be rocky before they go right. I know, my time will come, and all my gold and my jewels will be passed on, when they should.

But what do I do if I want to hand down my rings but they’re encrusted by blood? Very early on in my life I held an older child’s face in the sandbox until he stopped moving. I knew then and never forgot that I have the potential to kill in order to live. Self-defense is still a kind of offense. Now I keep my fangs filed down and my hands empty so I do not come across as a threat anymore, but the aura must still emanate me, for danger avoids me, fortune follows me.¹

And who do you forgive when the conditions around you are never ideal? As I write I try to ignore the world but the news are loud, the rage is palpable. We do not accept a king over this empire — or so we say. We resent the world-state that turns on an axis of capital, so we proclaim. But someone has to die for a new life to emerge. Everything we know must change to birth a world we will not recognize. Blood must be shed, and to be effective, it must be done in silence.²

There is nothing to do but become. And who can be born without a tearing and a ripping, auto-alchemy, the transmutation of the known into the unrevealed?

The other night the girls and I shivered in the cold as we waited to enter the club. Earlier this week I educated two clients on how it could be that temperatures are lowering despite the oxymoronic effects of global warming. One of my newer clients is a revolutionary in words and deeds, she shivers as she tells me stories her mother shared about COINTELPRO, two weeks in and she’s regaled me personal tales of being brought up around multiple notable people killed off by the state. Our state, the prison we’ve been raised to see as home. The truth is that we are not isolated from our environment, there is a relationship between our blood and our vessel, and the smoking and the building and the burning have all been rotting our teeth out for generations now. We aren’t going to listen until we don’t have the strength to chew our food anymore. Until bodies drop faster than our pants in the heat of passion. Until the stars flicker and threaten to extinguish.

We’re changing still, but into what? What will we be able to see in the dark once our eyes acclimate to the obsidian unknown?

It’s hypocritical coming from me (though we all contradict ourselves, as we should) — but you must abandon your image in order to grow. In order to transform yourself and the world around you. We cannot cling to the familiar or the easy. These bodies we have are beautiful and they are vulnerable. State troopers and pensioned guns have gone on live record boasting about how ready they are to kill us in order to preserve their order. In the end it comes down to who wants to live more: the survival instinct; you have to be ready to exterminate your predators before it is safe to propagate, after all.

Despite his absences and our differences, I’m grateful to my father for imbuing me with a warrior’s spirit and the ability to endure the uncertain, the difficult, the frustrating. I’m glad for the history he’s gifted me with his blood. My mother gave me my powers and my father gave me the certainty I need to wield it. The sacrifices I saw him make, the silences I’ve seen him hold onto for too long. I am him and more, I’m different, and what comes after me will be different too. We go where we do because of where we came from.

What I’ve also learned from him, from myself too, is that I’m not yet ready to make another life. Because I’m still figuring out mine. I’m still dissolving the ego I developed in order to survive. I’m still learning what I need to do and have in my life in order to thrive. I always will be. There will come a time when a fusion of me and someone else is born and I know I won’t feel perfectly prepared. No one ever is. Nor will I recognize myself when I’ve reached that point. My abuela said she didn’t recognize my father the first time he came to her with me in his arms. He’d become someone else. Mitosis, metamorphosis, the me we knew will be here no longer. Who I will be has yet to come.³

A life, I think, is the answer to all of the questions we don’t know how to form with our words.

1. Where am I following myself to? Prosperity? Abundance? My father had to be absent for most of my childhood in order for us to live well, to eat regularly, to be warmed in the winter. Would I say it was worth it? Would he?

2. Who are we helping when we take and share pictures of the protesting we do? When we continue to vote in the same broken system holding us shackled? It is aesthetics we champion, or change?

3. What I know now is that I can never be fully killed. I have already touched too many hearts. And I am (not) my body. Childhood won’t ever come back but it can be made again and done better this time. If I trust myself to resemble my parents. If I trust that love can catch me when I let go and fall.