Where We Have Met Along the Way

I am seven, and I have never known the exact number of shoes that I own. I have lots. I don't know where they come from. I have never wanted for manufactured warmth in a cold house because the heat never runs out. When I play too hard and my socks develop holes, I throw them away and continue to roll in the dirt. New socks always show up in the morning anyways. I am seven, and I am fortunate. 

My mother is seven plus forty, and she can still recall the number of grass stains that were on her singular pair of pants: fourteen. She can recall a time when her stomach spoke to her, and she didn't have the correct words to respond to it. She would mindfully count her change; a penny was a goldmine. My mother was seven, and now she's forty-seven, and she is lucky to have made it this far.

“You could never understand what it is like to grow up poor,” she periodically spits at me. I am confused. Why would she want me to know?

We cannot relate to each other, and that has been the breakdown in our relationship.

I am twenty-four and graduating with a bachelor's in professional writing this May. I look around the world on my walk to class, and I think about who our new president is. It makes me feel ill. I shed a small tear that I quickly discarded. Feeling my phone buzz in my pocket, I check to see who is calling: it’s my mom. I’m not in the mood to have this conversation, but I don’t exactly have a choice. Dreadfully sliding my thumb across the glowing screen, I muster up a shred of normalcy, “Hey, Mom.” “Hey babe. Just checking in; I feel like you're anxious, and I wanted to tell you everything will be ok.” Anger that I only barely manage to wrangle into an untimely scoff makes its way into my heart. “Babe?” she implores. I hate that she calls me that. Before I can really stop myself, my next words fall out of my mouth as if they are being pulled out with forceps during a tooth extraction: the unwanted feeling of urgency, “I don't think I will be ok, and I don't think you have a right to try and comfort me right now.”

I am mad. Maybe that is not even the right word to describe how I feel, I think. All I can really focus on is the way my body is hot all over, while simultaneously chill bumps consume my arms. The world feels fuzzy, and nothing feels real. I'm furious. Donald Trump is president, and my mother, the woman who got an abortion at 16, grew up working class, has three queer daughters, and always preached to “love everyone,” decided that she would economically vote for him. How could this ever make sense to me?

“Kennedee, I just wanted to call and check on you,” she reiterates. I wish I could remember this moment as one in which I was level-headed and full of wisdom, but I wasn’t; I was rage personified. I was the center of the earth made into a human being, hundreds of years of injustices piled onto one being with the responsibility to change things, and I responded in kind.

“You have chosen your own personal financial gain over other people's right to exist as they are. Over my feeling of safety, over your own safety as a woman. And at the end of the day, you have to contend with that. You have personally contributed to electing a man who is backed by the KKK, has praised Hitler’s regime, and 26 women have reported him for sexual assault. He has given a voice to bigotry all over the country, and you hold responsibility in that truth. And all for what? Money? Because you think you will pay less in taxes? Because you own a business and the president supposedly gives a shit?” I burst out. This is not the time or place for this conversation, and I know that. But where is the disconnect? How can I so clearly see how my privilege has afforded me the opportunity to speak up against these injustices when all she sees is an opportunity to further separate herself from the working class? And I'm frustrated, and it is here that I come back to the realization that there is an immense disconnect in how we see the world. 

She always wanted to be a writer, my mom. She used to write little stories and read them to us before bed. Tilly and Tally was the name. Two heroine sisters who reshaped the world, the irony. She wanted to be a writer, and she imagined characters and then raised her daughters in their likeness, and she dreamed of being published. She never was. She never graduated high school or went to college. She has never studied the power of rhetoric and does not understand how privilege and entitlement differ. And maybe when she looks at me, she resents that we are so similar in dreams yet so opposite in execution. 

“I called you because I am your mother, and I was worried about you. Not because I want to fight: I understand you have strong feelings about the election, but your dad and I did what we thought was best for our family and our business, which you will inherit one day, Kennedee.” 

I flash back to the present. This conversation has been less than five minutes, and I have relived every seemingly meaningless childhood moment, attempting to make sense of what is happening. 

I am full of ire and loathing and hate and disgust, and I am incapable of grappling with my cavernous emotions. “You have chosen your greed over my freedom. You have decided to be complacent in the influence you have. Millions of Americans are afraid to exist, and you hold responsibility for that. This is something that you will need to contend with, and I am not going to placate you or belittle this decision. I don’t have anything else to say to you, and I need to go. We will talk later.”

I hung up the phone with haste. Any thoughts I had of actually making it to my classes today are gone. I just want to scream and cry, and I don't want to feel the emotions that are creeping up on me, but they didn't ask for permission to consume my mind, so I go home and feel them for a little bit, cry about all the things I can’t change, curse my lack of power in this world, and think about how I have never understood my mom.

After I graduated high school, I didn’t want to go to college. I wanted to travel and figure things out as I went. But like I said, my mom didn't graduate high school, and she made it very clear that I would not be wasting the opportunity to explore higher education. I went, and I learned how to critically think, and I have taken many classes on the power of rhetoric, and I took full advantage of my experience. All the while, knowing that I am privileged to do so, and if I momentarily forgot about my lot in life, she was there to remind me, because God forbid I don't know what it is like to “grow up poor.” I am ungrateful for complaining about something so coveted by so many.

I have never understood why the word “privilege” rolls off her tongue with such ire. Or why she seems to resent the position I hold in life that she afforded me.

As the months drain from my life, I only find it in me to be more and more scared about the state of our country. It was January. I remember because the cold was so intense I was unable to move a limb without my skin cracking. I'm snuggled up in bed, decompressing from the long day I just had. My phone dings, rustling the sheets; in search of the noise, I finally find it amongst the pillows. It's a text from my mom. She has made a new family group chat and the one and only text: “Trump signed an order for NO TAX ON TIPS… that's good news.” My sisters and I are servers; she thinks this will change things for me. We also haven’t really made up since our last big fight; rather, we have simply maintained a respectable distance from each other. 

My mom and I have never had a good relationship, and in many ways, these small interactions were the catalyst for our fracturing relationship. The third wall has dropped. I am unable to pretend and make myself agreeable.

Refusing to praise Trump or celebrate any win when the costs have been so high, I quickly type out a response: “He also denied the existence of gender fluid and transgendered individuals.”

Mom: “He also is getting illegal violent criminals off the street & back out of our country. Sorry about gender fluidity…if we aren’t alive we can’t fight so…that battle is for another day.” 

I know I shouldn’t be shocked; we have been fighting about politics for months, but I cannot believe she wrote that. That she thinks that. It is a privilege in itself.

Me: “He is also eliminating the Green New Deal, which is a call to address climate change. There is no ‘another day,’ and to prioritize one man's existence above others is a privileged approach that not everyone has.”

I threw my phone back down and rolled over and went to sleep.

A week later. January twenty-first at 9:28am: “Just dropped $500 at Coach,” my mom texted.

We had our fight, and since then I haven’t said anything to resolve it. Neither has she. Considering I just woke up, I have little patience to have a conversation with her, especially one that highlights exactly how much disposable income she has. Choosing to address her ridiculousness after class, I yet again shove my phone in my pocket and crank my music up a few dials to try and drown out the noise in my brain.

Text message at 11:28am: “I don’t appreciate you ignoring me all the time Kennedee… just bc we don't see things the same… I am still your Mother..  & for the record... I have never been privileged... I grew up basically dirt poor... I'm talking 2 pairs of jeans & 4 shirts poor... so my viewpoint is humble... love you.”

God, why does she use so many ellipsis? They are not periods. Is this yet another example of how we are separated in our education?

It is in this sense of separation that you will see the head of my argument. My mom grew up working class; she knows what it's like to go without basic necessities. At times, she has needed the support of her community to simply have enough food. But somewhere between the ages of seven and forty-seven, she lost what it means to be a part of something bigger. My mom is now upper-class. She hasn't worked a job since her early twenties, and that's fine because my dad makes more than enough for the both of them. She spends her days roaming the city and buying luxury items. I have always belonged to the middle class, and I have never truly known the struggles of so many other Americans, yet I find that empathy is not something you have because of shared experiences; rather, it is an active decision always. I am finding that in my mom’s quest to climb classes, she has lost her empathy. She cannot see how contradictory she is when she boasts about her extravagant lifestyle one moment and then humbles her viewpoints with past experiences the next. I think my mom’s and my differences are a compound of things stuck together to create two humans who were placed together but never truly meant to see each other.

This is my aim: to address my anger towards my mom, her selective disdain for my life, our gap in education, and the privilege she both exploits and abuses. I wish I could turn all this anger into something productive. Maybe this will be it, the thing that shifts my feelings from bitterness to resignation.