Nothing is worse than not realizing that there is something underneath this thing called skin that looks like fresh turkey meat but it’s called tissue, but you don’t wipe your nose with it, and then some liquid coming out of it that seeps out to slow, but way too fast for comprehension, and you have to sop it up like thanksgiving bread on gravy, all in 8.5 seconds.
At the age of eight I was when I got my first scrape on my body. I was rushing to get home from an elongated day at school but the ground was too big and fast under my little feet; I missed a step and fell straight to the ground. When I was a little kid this seemed like the worst thing in the world, but it’s funny how I paid so much more attention to the process my knee was going through aside from the fact that I just scraped myself. I understood that there was something underneath my skin and there was something that kept all of this stuff inside. It was kind of scary; the fact that there was something underneath. I don’t know if it was more scary that something was underneath my skin or the fact that my skin was scraped off and the inside was coming out.
The Skin
I’ve lived with my mom for most of my life, so it was at a very young age that I realized that my mom and dad were two separate people. Most kids that have parents that have been together throughout their entire lives almost think of their parents as one entity; but I knew different. They were separated since I can remember so it was just me and my mom at the hospital the day I was born.
I wanted my parents to be together; what kid doesn’t. But as I got older I appreciated them not being together, but until then I was forced to understand why they weren’t. One day I was playing the video games and I reminded me of my dad, because whenever I would go over there that’s one thing we enjoyed doing with each other- well- one thing that we could do without him getting emotional on me. But anyway I asked my mom, “Mom, why don’t you like daddy? He likes playing video games and so do you.” She replied with a hesitant and a comfortable uncomfortable, “I know Nashira, but there’s other things.” I sadly fixed my face back to the television and kept playing the video game while I thought of other things I could ask her that had to do with her and my dad. After my mom not responding the way I wanted her to I kind of gave up and started to take out time to understand why they were not together instead of finding things that may spark up something, in my mom more so than my dad, that would make her want to be with daddy again.
I lived with him for a small portion of my childhood, but mostly with my mom and for a little with my grandparents and my mother in the same house. For the time that I wasn’t with him, my sister and I would go to his house every other weekend. We dreaded it. That’s the front I would put on, because every time we would leave my sister would be ready to walk straight out the door and make a b line to the car. But me, I would cry like a baby coming out of a mother’s womb that was about to be disconnected from the umbilical cord. I couldn’t help it. Just the thought of leaving him and him giving me that last hug before we left made me cry so hard.
Living with my mom was cool but her and I disagreed on what seemed to be quite a few things. I grew up as a grown child knowing more than the average child knew, but not in a bad way. I was very knowledgeable. Our relationship was more like a sister relationship. Some things she would tell me that I shouldn’t have known until I got older. There were some questions I would ask that the average thirteen year old wouldn’t ask. There were certain things she would ask for that a fifteen year old usually wouldn’t give or a mom wouldn’t feel comfortable asking. This is why we were more like sisters because stuff like this was normal for us.
The older I got the more I saw how I wasn’t like my mother. We were two different people. I shared her features but not her personality or traits. In my spare time I liked to write or read when it was time for my mind to want to read. I found it soothing to write because if I was angry or upset about something, the second after my pen and paper knew my secrets I would feel better. It was also during these times when the best stuff came out. I had a certain love for music. I didn’t listen to what everyone heard on the radio; I actually got annoyed by it after a while because nothing new would play. It would be the same songs that meant and said nothing valuable and had no value in the instrumentals either. While I would write my poems or expressions I would doodle on the sides of my paper and they too also represented a piece of me. Most of all I loved to sing. That was another way I got out my feelings. It may have been to myself and to close friends but I held it dear to me along with the songs I would write about things going on in my life. I was more in touch with my creative side and it helped me to see inside of myself. I never really saw this side of my mother. In her spare time she would be working on work, and when it wasn’t her spare time she was doing work. If she did have a journal of some sort, it was in private because she never mentioned it or had any pieces of paper or napkins with notes on it about herself until recently. In this respect she played the mom role; she would work so that we had a roof over our heads and go to sleep. Briefly my mind would reach out to see where I got this love of art from and it had to be my dad, but that’s as far as it would go; no farther than thinking about him or sending out a text, because I didn’t have the right things to say.
Layers of Tissue
Living with my mom, of course I got her side of everything and I didn’t know anything else, but I did have a mind of my own. My dad would always call me or reach out to me in some way asking me if I got the money he sent me and my sister, and I would say no. then he would tell me about how “someone” must have been taking the money because he sent it to me and it was not in the mailbox. I didn’t know what to think. My mom would tell me that there was no money in the mail for me from my father.
My mom was married to my stepfather since I was five, so he was the father figure in my life. I knew that he and my mom were serious when I was in my bed one night before they got married and they both thought I was sleep. They were in the kitchen, which wasn’t too far from my bed since we lived an apartment and I was on the lower half of the bunk bed. My mom wasn’t fully clothed and there he was with his baseball umpire uniform on kissing my mom. I quickly closed my eyes before they saw that I saw them.
My dad wasn’t around too much so he was the closest and fastest thing that came. I started to call him dad and everything, but my sister knew better. She may not have liked our dad but as soon as she heard me call him that she snatched me up and said, “ Don’t call him dad, he is not your dad so do not call him dad!” From them on I called him by his first name, Kelvin.
The Blood Coming Out
I had a conversation with my dad, and he told me that he moved. It was news to me, because evidently he had been there for a while. When I got there it didn’t seem to matter too much because I made myself feel right at home as if it were his old house that I made memories in. I didn’t know that they had two new dogs and that my two dogs that I grew up with were sold. Neither did I know that the little that was “adopted” was my blood little brother born out of his marriage. But that’s beside the point.
We sat at the table and he started to tell me about my family on his side. My grandfather was considered a genius too many. My grandmother used to correct him and his siblings whenever they spoke grammatically incorrectly and she would make them wake up in the morning reciting the eight parts of speech. My aunt Mickey is a lawyer and lives in New York, and he has another brother in Georgia that he wanted me to meet. He told me how I was a intelligent, and how there is a difference between people whom are smart and intelligent. He told me not to waste it. He started talking about how certain things run through me that are on his side of the family and how just because I have lived with my mother for the majority of my life, not to let that get in the way of me not finding out the other half of me. He said, “If you take the time out to really get in touch with my family, you’ll find out some things about yourself that you didn’t know it will make life easier on you because you’ll know where it comes from. It comes from your family.” He goes on to talk about how I show a lot in my eyebrows and how I do have a temper from him. At this point tears started to roll down my cheeks. I tried to cover them up by not looking at him as if he couldn’t see me if I didn’t. I guess I started to cry because I realized I am my father’s child. Things made sense.
It Healed and Scabbed
After the talk I had with my dad, I felt more whole than I had ever been. I felt like a child that went through the adoption process, looked for, and found her real parents.
By me talking to my dad that day, I had fallen and scraped my knee.
Like all soars, I am fine and have a mark on my heart that reminds me every now and then of the things I knew then and what I know now.
