Issue Seventeen

My mom likes to think she was born from a star. When she fell to the earth, she likes to think she became a cocooned butterfly. She said it helps her explain why she feels so separate from a family her birth certificate says is hers. She spent her childhood and a good part of her young adulthood trapped in an iridescent chrysalis, terrified to come out, to speak, to have an opinion.

She loved books though, the way all kids do before they are told what to read. She was first told what to read when her mom and dad snatched her from the classroom and dropped her into a school of their own machinations. Attendance was optional, since they didn’t register with any official homeschooling organizations. Lunch was occasional. Sometimes it was just candy, which is why she never really rewarded my siblings and me with candy growing up.

Her dad taught from his own history books, twisting African traditions and civil rights activist doctrine to serve his own agenda; essentially, women were subservient, i.e. his wife and daughters. English was considered the language of the white devil, so she and her siblings were taught Swahili, at least whenever he was sober enough not to slur the words—so, not that often. They were not to argue that 2 + 2 was actually 4 and not 6. If they did not speak to agree, they did not speak at all.

My mom used to write, used to love writing, painting, creating. Now, she likes numbers. She likes the control, the linear problem solving. She played bank when she was a kid, not with manufactured toy money that came with the cheap plastic cash register; no, she drew and cut out her own bills. She doesn’t draw anymore. But she colors with her children, inside and outside the lines.

She had me, the first of five, when she was nineteen. My dad tried to propose. Her dad forbade the marriage, feeling his position of control was being threatened. It’s amazing how much control her father held, despite his being blind.

Still, she was a kid with a kid, living with her parents, a cocooned butterfly in a nest full of agoraphobic birds. Once the birds tired of doling out their false doctrine, they made her go to school for art, a harmless degree that wouldn’t take her away from them, wouldn’t give her power, autonomy. Then she went to school for hair; she had a little more say in this decision, since we had moved out by then. Finally, she went to college for herself.

She told me she started wanting better because of me. She said after coming home from a late night out clubbing, I, three years old at the time, was still awake. I apparently asked her why she was never there when I needed her. I don’t believe her. I think she’s strong enough to have wanted to change all on her own.

My mom and I kind of attended school together. We compared our math classes, even though her math dealt with money, side by side, struggling together. She let me do all the things she couldn’t do: band, volleyball, chess competitions, debutante programs, and plays. Whenever things would get too hard, whenever I thought I couldn’t balance it all, she’d say, “Always finish what you started.” It made me think longer before I started anything after that. So abundant and free was her support, I actually cried before telling her I didn’t want to play the flute anymore.

The presentations were the worst. For her, not me. I was never afraid to speak in front of people. I never will be. My mom made sure of that. Although my young tongue was too small for my big thoughts, my misspoken musings were never brushed off as childish babbling. Sentences were like nonsensical alphabet blocks stacked by eager hands. Knock them down and build again. She never lashed out at me for the mess.

Her parents weren’t so patient. Her thoughts were treated as nothing more than refuse, washed up on a shore of paternalistic dismissal. She chose not to waste her breath, until she eventually forgot how to breathe. Her lungs felt too large, her tongue too foreign. College asked her what she thought and waited for her to answer; the silence, too great to fill, swallowed her whole. The stones of her youth, tied to her ankles, dragged her down down down back to childhood habits, where she didn’t have to speak, didn’t have to risk being wrong.

But she always finished what she started, so, like everything else in her life, she pushed through it. We later discovered “it” was actually anxiety. We only found out because my own diagnosis reminded her of her own experiences.

Slowly, so slowly, she peeked out of her cocoon, whispering thoughts that used to live and die in her head. Quick little deaths with no eulogies, buried in unmarked graves. These thoughts were different—solid, tangible, loud. She was living her own life now in the big wide world that didn’t fit in the box her dad built. She was learning more than could be held in her head, excess spilling past her nervous lips.

My mom knows what she’s talking about. No one can tell her otherwise now. They can try. I dare them. When I graduated high school, she graduated college, for the fourth time, this time with her masters. She’s put in her 10,000 hours. No one can tell her otherwise now.

I am the product of her labor, her lifelong thesis. I am the river formed from her demolition of mental dams. We are not without flaws. We struggle to rely on others because others have been unreliable. We are strong, black women in the most destructive way possible. But we are not without a drive to be better, she better than her parents, me better than mine. I stand on her shoulders, supported. She’s since laid her burden by my river. I hope I’m enough for her.

Without it, her wings flutter and flex and gain their own strength. It’s a wonder to see. Most grow up thinking their parents are fully formed human beings, incapable of changing, growing, learning, because they’ve already done so. They’ve completed their adult training and reached the plateau, upon which they will spend the rest of their lives. I have the privilege of giving her what she’s given me: comfort, support, and self-confidence.

My mom, my dad, my younger brother, my three younger sisters, we’re all we got. We’re learning together, jumping the hurdles, evolving, defining and redefining who we want to be, what we want to do, together.

There was a particularly stressful time, when mom and dad were both attending school at night and the four of us kids had to be everywhere all at once and extended family reared their ugly heads as they do during times like these just to make things worse. We all came down for breakfast one morning and Mom slapped a printed piece of paper on the fridge, tacked it up with a magnet. It read: “I will give no negativity any energy. —Dhatnubia Family Motto.” I live by that motto to this day. Mom’s got a thing for mottos and so do I.

If my mom likes to think she was born from a star, I like to think she didn’t fall from the sky. I like to think she’s a supernova. What once was a quiet twinkle is now too bright to ignore, too colorful to comprehend, too powerful to control.

While all of this is true, inside, she is still that same shy, curious butterfly that’s learned to color outside the lines, create her own money, and read her own books again. And all this talk of butterflies and stars helps define how much of a process it is to become who we are.

 

Having won scholarships based on academic merit, Ka’Dia Dhatnubia completes a BFA in writing at the Savannah College of Art and Design. She also writes regularly for the school’s online fashion publication, Manor, and serves as Manor’s head copy editor and associate editor, advancing her expertise in professional editing and project management.

Swan Creek is a special place, twenty five mile east of Sandpoint Idaho, two miles west of Clark Fork. A mixture of dense forest, grass fields, and river delta, it is packed with beaver dams, fish, deer, elk and ducks. A virtual sportsman’s paradise. And then there’s the structure erected on it on it, a “wooden tent” as my father calls it (as it lacked plumbing, and the only power we had came from two solar panels that provides just enough electricity to run a small fridge), though deep down it’s much more than that. It is built on stilts (Swan Creek is considered a flood plain, and all permanent structures had to be above the ground) and we use the space underneath as storage, keeping everything from lumber to clay pigeons. This is where we host barbecues during the summer, where we hunt deer in the fall and winter, where we fish in the spring, and where, in every season, we have late night campfires, lasting into the deep hours of the night, until the stars shine like more than pinpricks, and the milky way cascades across the sky like a silver river. A beautiful, ebony colored, star spotted, silver river. These campfires are exemplary, sometimes holding on into the night in silence, all of us looking up into the sky, or into the fire.

Sometimes, they are filled with stories. Memories. Sometimes fiction, trying to scare ourselves to the relative material comfort of inside. Most of the scary stories seem cheap to me, always ending in blood or death for an overused, commodity thrill. The ones I prefer are the ones leaving the end to the listener, the unknown being much more terrifying than anything told to us explicitly. These stories are most often told my my uncle, and I still try to recreate them when he isn’t there, with much less effect. Everybody has their own nightmare. I like the memories better, losing myself in the past lives of my family, imagining what it was like to be them. I most love the stories about my father’s father. I had met my Bapa Jerry, but had no memory of him. He died of a heart attack when I was two or three, other than my father’s stories, I only have pictures to remember him. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a story is worth a thousand pictures. On the surface, they are stories of laughter, of anger, of decisions good and bad. Deeper down, they are stories of remembrance. They are stories of legacy. And they are stories of love.

One such story my father tells often, was about a dog. Growing up, they had hunting dogs. Dogs that slept outside, dogs that were not for petting, only for flushing out pheasants. One day, one of my grandfather’s friends offered him a purebred blue heeler, one of the better breeds of bird dogs. For free. The dog wouldn’t work for my grandfather’s friend, and he didn’t want to go through the trouble of training it. My grandfather took advantage of this opportunity, and took the dog out with my father to do some pheasant hunting and see how bad the dog really was.

When hunting pheasants, the bird dog is supposed to run out in front of the hunter, scaring the birds up into the air so the hunter can shoot them. This dog would not leave my grandfather’s side, sometimes walking behind him and scaring pheasants in the wrong direction. My grandfather got so furious at the dog’s noncooperation that he picked it up and threw it in front of him, sure that this would send the message that the dog needed to stay out in front. This was in knee deep snow, my father and grandfather were wading through the middle of an asparagus field, for pheasants like to make nests in the mounds of mulch piled over the asparagus plants after they are covered in snow.

The dog ran right back. The entire morning preceded like this, my grandfather throwing the dog out in front of him, the dog running back. My father had been walking above my grandfather on a ridge, and had missed all of this. At one point he looked over the edge, to see my grandfather spitting mad, pitching his purebred bird dog in front of him, only to have it sprint back like some kind of game. My father collapsed on the ground in a fit of laughter, the humor of the situation greatly unappreciated by my grandfather.

“Stop laughing and get the hell down here you son of a bitch!” and after a thought; “I’m not talking about your mother, you son of a bitch!”

At the end of the story, my father laughs, tilts his head back slightly. His breath fogging in the mellow light of the campfire. I’m never sure, but whenever he tells this story, I can almost swear I see a reflective flash on the corner of his eye. Like the smallest inkling of a teardrop. But maybe it’s just the firelight.

Such are nighttime campfires at the barn.

Mick Perryman is an 8th grader at Moscow Middle School in Moscow, Idaho. He likes running, playing soccer with friends, and writing. This is his first published piece.

I am fifteen and I take the city bus to school. I am the only one of my friends who lives on the West End of town, so my mornings are lonely, and I am accustomed to that. In fact, I embrace it, opting to take the earlier bus to avoid the 8:30 crowd. Morning after morning I stand in the blistering Saskatchewan cold, hands clasped firmly to my purple thermos, the taste of French vanilla cappuccino staining my tongue. My ear buds, the ones they give you for free when you buy an iPod, are only held in place by my toque. I listen to old OneRepublic songs ripped from YouTube. The quality is terrible. The bus schedule, the coffee, the sound, all of it. But I have never known anything else, so I am at ease.

The sky is a different colour at this time of day. In fact, I’m not convinced it’s a real colour at all but rather a majesty that can only be witnessed by the exhausted hopeful bunch who venture out of their homes at seven in the morning. It’s almost the Crayola pencil crayon that tries to pass for dark purple, but there is a rich royalty as though God Herself plucked the purest blue from a sea untouched by man and smeared it across the barren sky. The sun has yet to rise but the trees are nothing but shadows, so dark that they have been erased from the universe. Only the shell of where they once stood remains. More peculiar is the lack of wind. Wind, always raging in Saskatchewan, has yet to wake up from her slumber. It is just me, the sky, and the sharp chill that never rests.

The bus comes and I am warmer now.

I get to school around eight. Most kids hang out in Sion hall before class, but most kids don’t have the best locker location in the school along with their friends. Second floor, north corner, across from a staircase and a window. From this window, I can see the sunrise. There is no sunrise in Sion Hall.

Derrick will get to school before I do. He lives in South Hill, but also opts to take the early bus. He sits with his back to the adjacent wall; gangly legs sprawled out, drawing notice to his slightly-too-short jeans. His shaggy hair often covers his downcast gaze. Before, my presence would draw that gaze up. We would talk, and joke, and kill time until drama. It’s not like that anymore, and I think perhaps it’s not the sky or the chill that make mornings so cold, but him.

We sit in silence and I try to ignore the way my heart aches. I look at him and he looks at his phone. I divert my gaze to the window, where the sun paints her picture. I lose myself in the blue that fades to lilac that fades to rose that fades to fire. In times of stress my friends and I joke about throwing ourselves from the window, but I would never do that to the sky, and perhaps that’s the only thing that keeps me on the ground.

I am twenty and everything is both different and the same. Alberta air is forgiving enough that my hands can be ungloved as I clutch my to-go cup. The coffee is black. I made it with my Keurig – the first thing I bought when I moved out. The sun doesn’t rise in my neighbourhood and I don’t know how this can be, but every morning at the bus stop I watch the sun turn on like the rising of a dimmer switch. There isn’t light, and then there is. I miss the land of living skies, but there is no point in dwelling on what is different. I have adopted a new favourite view; the city lights at night. They are a manmade wonder, but they’ll do.

I am twenty and I am everything that tenth grade Kendall hoped I would become, except that I am a multitude, and good cannot exist without bad. I am a journalism student, a published writer, I am entering adulthood with a solid group of friends, and I have a part-time barista job that I happen to love. But I am weary. The people I love worry about me. And while it has been half a decade since my first heartbreak I have only recently uncovered the burden of breaking another, and it is so much easier to be sad than to make sad.

I try not to dwell on my shortcomings when I’m doing all I can to make good. I fill my head with music to battle it out with the worry. Everlong, but not the acoustic version. Motown, to remember better times (maybe I’ll tap my foot a bit). Not Imagine Dragons, at least not yet. Arkells; I share this love with new friends. These songs belong to me, and if I’m cold waiting for the bus, I don’t notice.

The ride leading up to my transfer is short and offers my favourite part of the day. The only people on the bus are the driver and I— the exhausted hopeful bunch who venture out of their homes at seven in the morning. We sit in silence. The bus lurches around the corner of Windermere road and there it is:

The sun rises over downtown Calgary. She actually rises. I say hello to my old friends: the blue that fades to lilac that fades to rose that fades to fire, but where there were once blacked-out trees is the skyline of a city that is bigger than my dreams, and in that darkness, there are lights.

Everything is both different and the same. I take the bus to school, and finally, I am warm.

 

Kendall Bistretzan is from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan and resides in Calgary, Alberta, where she studies Journalism at Mount Royal University. She has previous publications with Windscript, Polar Expressions, Local Drop Magazine and Rebelle Society, and also writes for the Calgary Journal. You can find her on Instagram @kendallbistwrites.