Bracelets

A memory of labor, lineage, and the inheritance of being held—and not held.

Prompt: Pick a significant memory and tell the story focused on an adjacent item or minor detail. — Omar El Akkad

It was the jangle of her silver bracelets that unnerved me more than the squeeze of each contraction in my uterus. My mother was always embellished, armored in intricate pieces of turquoise from the Zuni tribe or bones from Spiro birds woven into leather with sacred silver markings etched by Navajo craftsmen. We grew up going to Pow-Wows all over the Bay Area. Watching drum songs with shawl dancers, stomping in handmade moccasins with feathers from head to toe; eating fry bread, and buying things like dream catchers and smoke pipes. She always bought jewelry and adorned herself like a tinseled Christmas tree or a decorative lamp.

Her bracelets jingled like the sound of windchimes in a storm every time she raised her arm to alert the small group of people in my hospital room that another contraction was coming. The funny thing is she thought she was being discreet, for my sake. She had gotten so used to the sound of her own jingling that she forgot it was there as she sat behind me glued to the monitor and waving her musical arms.

Giving birth isn’t easy. My son was low and pressed deep into my back during my labor. The tension of my uterus coupled with the pressure against my spine during each contraction felt like I was an elastic band being stretched to the edge of my snap. Someone always had to press on my back during a contraction to relieve some of the pressure created by my son’s position. My sister and his father alternated between contractions, with someone pushing my back from behind and the other holding my hand at the front. Meanwhile, my mother’s bracelets chimed in the background.

It was at the eleventh hour that the tintinnabular tones of my mother’s bracelets became unbearably distracting. I was tired and my tiny little 20 year old self had become untethered from the Earth. I was in an ethereal realm, doing God’s work with the assistance of ancestors and every woman who had ever come before me; while my mother rang her hands with warning.

I snapped, “Stop waving your fucking hands! I can hear you!”

I couldn’t see her but I could tell that I had hurt her in the echo of my sister’s face as she glanced behind me at my mother before bending down to brace me for the oncoming contraction. I was sorry but I was too busy to give her an apology. So I left her to stew in the self-consciousness of her own sound and her motherhood.

There were no matriarchal rituals around birth that my mother could offer me or my sisters. She came from farm folk back in Utah where she says my great-grandmother would birth a baby in the barn at sunrise, then work the farm all day, and still have dinner prepared for her husband and the other children by nightfall. I always cringed with discomfort at the tone of admiration that rang on her tongue when she told that story. I never met my great-grandmother or my grandmother. My mother left the farm staring at the end of a shotgun that her father aimed at her for loving a Black man and daring to bring him home at 18. “I would rather kill you then see you with a n!***7”. It is a weird blend of anger, pride, and grief that I feel when I think of my mother standing standing about 5 feet nothing in front of the rage of my grandfather with a steadfast clarity about her intentions and her values. It’s the only time I can think of her stubbornness with admiration. She left with the man that was her catalyst and then he left her alone in Los Angeles in 1968 with her sweet, naive, and gullible self to figure it all out.

My mother is the splintered branch from our family tree, driftwood wandering, unrooted, and unheld. That made it hard for her to hold us, my sisters and I. The stories of her childhood are like swiss cheese with deep holes and chasms that will never be filled. But I know this, she tried hard to distance herself from the toxic values of her family and the white culture of her people. Having brown brown babies and buying tribal jewelry was a huge part of her rebellion but in many ways, she brought the farm with her.

My own birth was a violent, near death experience for both of us. After 56 hours of labor I choked and had to be pulled from her body, with an immediate operation, and then incubated for 2 weeks before she ever even got to touch me or lay eyes on my little blue body. This has profoundly shaped our relationship, this traumatizing introduction and startling disconnect. There was no one at my birth pushing my mother’s back or holding her hands. No one watched her monitor with bracelets that chimed in her background.

I didn’t have air in my lungs. I wasn’t held or welcomed by skin or nipples. I was immediately cut and spent my first 2 weeks in an incubator. It is noted that these things probably saved my life but they also shaped the life-long thirst I have for a love and trust that I have a hard time receiving.