Initiatory Orbit: First Meeting Of The Mothers/Brackenridge
Self portrait after a dance lab, 30 October 2021 | This story thread was birthed after dancing and communing with the spirit of Mother Catherine Seals. The calling to deepen into the labors of nurturing the Garden into a congregation, sanctuary, and spiritual center has revealed itself more with every season. In feeling into the depths of my labors as Mother Mother, I was brought back to a simple question: How did I get here? While there are many ways I can begin my story, the mothers are inviting me to experiment with telling a series of stories about how I first came to know them. Here is the initiatory orbit, or first draft, of my first installation of this experimental storytelling series.
textual transmission + voice recording | 31 october 2021
Another initiation looms, this time as a bush woman, bush mother. The soul of the bush permeates all awakened and accepting life forms, even those of us who are flanked by the gray and grit of city living, far away from the wet, majestic, raw earth and its sweet wilderness. Creativity will find its way out, always. Just like the green flickers of once buried plants pushing their might through the slightest crack in the concrete to honor the intelligence of photosynthetic survival, a creator will feel into her powers and sit with the paths toward life and death: embrace her calling in this realm of reality and radiate her light out to the universe or wither away and die slowly from the suffocating drought and inevitable decay of unrealized dreams.
There’s always a choice, the mothers tell me each time I reach another point of activation in the spiral. Every star in this galaxy is a spinning sphere of light that chose to be.
Almost 14 years passed between my first two meetings of the mothers. The initial encounter was when I was barely a month old in late September of 1982 inside the pediatric ward of the Brackenridge Hospital in downtown Austin, Texas. This is not the place where I was born, but it’s where the doctor sent my mother when my infant body was diagnosed with pneumonia. As was the practice then (and absurdly continues today in many hospitals) my mother was not allowed to stay with me overnight. This early separation from my mother—the second unexpected, extended separation in the first few weeks of my earthly life— is how the mothers were able to reach me so early.
My father tells me I looked so tiny in the adult-sized hospital bed with all the tubes hooked into me. In my cellular memories, when I trace my own evolutionary biology as a mother who is wired for the specific intelligence to be with my babies— in constant, physical proximity to my children— I am brought back to the feeling of isolation that surrounded my infant self on that massive hospital bed once visiting hours had ended. Who was with me in the night, I kept asking. Who came to comfort me when I was shrieking inconsolably, every cell in my being longing for my mother?
We did, the mothers say. We came, and we have never left.
Two weeks before when my mother’s appendix had burst, my grandmother flew back to help my father care for me and my 4-year old brother. She had just gotten to DC a few days before after having traveling to Austin to be there for my birth. My father called the house on 34th Street where my grandparents and their five children moved to in my mother’s senior year of high school. My father told them what was going on and that he’d taken me and my brother to the one pair of friends they’d made in Texas in the five months they’d lived there, another black couple with small babies.
Three decades before the Alzheimer’s would unfurl itself around her brain matter, my grandmother Mary Malissa was a keen mindreader. She knew what people wanted before they knew how to ask for it.
“I’ll be on the first flight in the morning,” my grandmother said.
“I’ll be there to pick you up from the airport.” My father breathed a sigh of relief and went back to see about my mother.
I don’t think anyone at the time had the space to fully open up and consider what would have been our family’s story had my father not forgotten something after leaving for his first business trip. The two weeks of paternity leave were over from the publishing company he worked for as a traveling college textbooks salesman. A tie? Some toiletry item? The company ID card? We don’t know what long forgotten thing caused him to turn around, but that was just one miracle that saved my mother’s life, saved all our lives. He came back inside, and saw my mother doubled over in pain. He grabbed my brother, strapped me into the front seat (yeah, no car seat!) of the car, and raced my mother to the hospital.
The questions are abundant. Would my mother have been able to call 911 before her appendix burst? Would she have collapsed on the floor in the room with me in her arms? Would my unanswered cries have eventually moved my brother from his toys or cartoons and led him to find his mother unconscious? Would he have known how to use the phone? How to go get help from a neighbor? Would he have been forever traumatized by the loss of whoever didn’t survive our isolation? Why were we alone so soon after giving birth and being born?
It fascinates me that both my mother and I came close to death in the first month of my life. My story would have been very different if she had transitioned before I grew up. Even now, she is such a central presence in my life. It’s difficult to follow that thread of possibility through.
My own swift life would have been a cosmic tragedy for all sides of the family as well. The world would be a wholly unknown place if I hadn’t healed from the infection in my lungs, survived the separation from my mother, and been able to continue along the spiral pathway set before me when I entered this life on Earth.
There would be no Bloom, or Wonder, or Jubilee, or Revelation. There would be no Fertility Abundance Garden. There would be no Mother Mother. I have asked the mothers if they are in fact the ones who had my father leave that random essential piece of something so that he’d have to come back home. The doctors said my mother got to the hospital just in time before the appendix ruptured. Her recovery was several weeks long and she couldn’t even pick me up. Mary Malissa cared for me, and then for my mother when she came home from the hospital.
As my mother was still healing from the appendicitis, it was actually Mary Malissa’s attentiveness that noticed I wasn’t doing well a week after my mother was home. My father had just arrived to the hotel lobby for his next business trip when he got a note left by my mother that she’d taken me to Brackenridge. He was surprised that I wasn’t at the nicer, newer hospital, St. David’s where I was born. He said he never finished checking in. He turned around and got back in the car.
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