How To Be An Eldest Daughter

by Meilani Clay

Be born the first of four to a teenage mother, and the only girl child. As a toddler, entertain your younger brothers with games of “school,” which mostly involves assigning coloring pages while your mother naps. In second grade, keep the secret that your mother is not ok. You’re not sure what is happening, won’t actually know for many years what happened, but for now, know you once heard the smack and smash of broken dishes, know that moving this much is not normal, know that your typically vivacious mother has died a little behind the eyes. In fourth grade, steal so many bouquets of clashing flowers from neighboring yards you both: 1. Imagine becoming a florist and 2. Must be told firmly to please stop before people come knocking on the door about their flowers. In sixth grade start your period but tell your older cousin instead of your mom. Something about the way your mother talks about bodies echoes ancient and inaccurate sentiments designed to keep you safe. You wonder why your safety is so squarely in your hands when it seems so easily snatched. Look under the bathroom sink where your cousin assures you everyone keeps their period products. Find a pad and accidentally wad it up trying to take it off the wrapper. Grab another and try again. Hide the stained underwear beneath several layers of tissue in the garbage can. In middle school get assigned the dishes as your chore because the boys won’t do it right. The three boys that make the most dishes, that need a new cup every time they drink water, that put dishes in the kitchen haphazardly and always have one more after you’ve finished cleaning. Develop a hatred for washing dishes that follows you into adulthood. Learn to do more than forget to take the chicken out of the freezer. Learn to take the wet pack of cold meat from its place in the kitchen sink, to tear it open with timid fingertips for transfer to the same glass baking pan; learn to season it. Rain down spices and salts until the meat is a different color than when you started. How do you know it’s enough? Right around when it starts to feel silly how much you’re putting on, your mother advises. More than twenty years later, remain unsure that it’s enough even though you’re now a more confident cook. A cook like the grandmother you miss, mostly because of all the time you did not get to spend together. For now though, do your best to be a helper. A grumpy one, with too many opinions and not enough experience, but a helper nonetheless. Feel terror down in your belly freshman year when you have to tell your mother that if you keep babysitting the youngest, there will be no time for volunteer hours, no time for the extracurriculars college applications crave. Feel relieved when sophomore year rolls around and baby brother is someone else’s job, when you are free to traipse around the Bay Area volunteering for nursing homes and reading programs. Feel joy when you find your people, the young poets like you who are weird and kind and hella smart and hurting for a world without so much pain. Invite your mother to your poetry slams even though you don’t know what she’ll think about the poems you’ve scribbled for years but never shared. Like everything else, every basketball game and track meet, she is there in the audience. Perturbed by the cursing in nearly everyone’s poems, but there. Rejoice (by yourself, because why let her know how much you need her when you can see she needs herself) in having a mother that can be there. Feel guilty senior year for needing to move far away from home for college. To experience a place where your Blackness is not up for debate or derision. To attend a place you’ve learned is referred to as “The Mecca,” the home for Black academics and creatives, entrepreneurs and teachers. Ignore your mother’s husband who wants to be sure you know the real world won’t be dashikis and drums, won’t be full of the expansiveness of being Black that Howard University will expose you to. Watch with held breath as your mother reads the acceptance letter, the one offering you a full scholarship. Feel warmth down to your toes as she cries. Graduate with your cap bobby-pinned in a dozen different places. Take the first of many graduation photos, cheek-to-cheek with the woman who’s mouth and eyes you share, the same features you’ll one day pass on to your own daughter. On move-in day, tell her you’re fine staying in your dorm room even though you haven’t bought bedding or decor yet. Spend a night alone tossing and turning on a thin, plastic covered mattress with a sweatshirt for a pillow. Cry because you’re alone in a strange city on a strange campus in a strange room and you aren’t sure at this moment why you worked so hard to be here. Cry because your mother doesn’t push, doesn’t demand you come back to her hotel room with her even though she knows as well as you do that you’ll be sleeping on a bare mattress. She believes in lessons learned the hard way. She doesn’t know any other way lessons can be learned. Spend your college years missing your family fiercely even as your wingspan flourishes in the nation’s capital. Feel like a shitty big sister for the birthdays, games, heartbreaks, proms and more you miss while following your dreams. Never be as close to your brothers again as you were before you left. In adulthood, the kind that comes with bills and taxes rather than an 18th birthday, become your mother’s best friend in exchange for the childhood interrupted. See her for the woman she is next to and beneath her motherhood and fall in love all over again with this person who still smiles big and laughs loud despite the steep cliffs life repeatedly thrust in front of her. Rejoice in being this woman’s daughter. Feel pride that she rejoices in being your mother. Birth your own eldest daughter. Ensure she does not have to repeat the above steps.