Sugarlump
a fall/winter 2020 love/fear letter
I want two boys and a girl, in that order. The baby girl will be named Dahlia Rose or Georgia Vine or Delos (short: Dell) Anaheim or Lottie or Poppy or Ernestine (short: Nesa) or Lorelei or Winn or Esmeralda (short: Esme) or Blake or Maeve or Lula or Noelle. That classic TV family dynamic — big brothers simultaneously bullying and doting on their princess-of-the-family baby sisters all unbeknownst to their loving parents — is a mirage I find so charming.
Throughout childhood, I was obsessed with American Girl dolls (I have four) and learned about puberty primarily through the franchise’s “The Care & Keeping of YOU: The Body Book for Girls” and Judy Blume’s, “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.” I toted both of these books to school and preached to my friends in those years when a sway of your hips in the hallways and knowing what 34B meant made you cool.
“Okay, Mommy, I’m ready.”
“Okay.”
“Mommy?”
“Okay, yes. Imagine you are going to pee. Do you feel that spot? Now imagine the feeling when you have to poo. Okay, so you’re going to slowly find the hole in the middle. Do you see what I’m saying?”
I nodded uncertainly before I realized she couldn’t see me behind the closed bathroom door. “Yes.”
“Okay, did you find it? You’re going to want to aim for a 45-degree angle. It might be hard to feel the first time, but aim it backwards towards the toilet seat. Did you get it?”
“Ah,” I jab and jab at my 12-year-old folds. “No… I don’t think so.”
“That’s okay, baby. Do you want me to come in and help you?”
I answered softly, “No.”
“Okay, it’s normal to take a while to get. We can try again another time.”
Puberty was to come to terms with one’s body, and I, for one, reveled in my growing pains. Growing up wasn’t just about the internal changes, either; presentation was arguably just as important. Until the age of 10, a common Sunday night found me on the floor beneath my mom on the couch (Disney Channel — Hannah Montana at 8, Wizards of Waverly Place at 8:30, Good Luck Charlie at 9 — playing in front of us) as she labored over my 4c locks. Our shared favorite style was “the 3 hour long one,” where my mom would do baby plaits all over my head. The style was treacherous — you couldn’t get through it without a sore bum and a stiff neck — and the sight of the pillow and combs — wide tooth, rat tail — by the couch meant it was time to go to war. But it always came out neat; it lasted the longest. I reminded myself of these facts as the aroma of my mom’s perspiration mixed with the mango butter of Jane Carter ‘Nourish and Shine’ filled my nose.
I do not doubt my mom loved those Sunday nights because she’s never let me question that I am her whole world. She tells me, “Everything I do is for you, sugarlump.” Randomly in the car, she’ll intensely grab my arm and assure me, “You can tell me anything, you know that, sugarlump.” Often, I think I’m confessing something just for her to say, “I already knew because of my Mommy-Magic, sugarlump.” On any birthday or Christmas or Valentine’s Day, she writes, I love you thissssss much, with arrows expanding out from the beginning and ending of the sentence and stretching to the edges of the 4x6 card.
Every time my mom made me brush my hair just right or drove us back home so I could put on earrings, I implicitly understood that I was progressing with golden stars through girlhood. Between 6th and 7th grade, I had at least three accidents when I bled through my khaki uniform skirt. I was embarrassed but never dogged by shame. My skirts only bore the proof that I’d achieved womanhood. That was one step closer to the ultimate reward at the end of the path: rearing a child of my own.
My mom and I never went through those harrowing TV family teenage-daughter-mom fights. Rather, the central tension now, evidenced in small ways, is between her worrying over me and my belief that I can take on the world. She’ll passive aggressively ask, “When are you going to do your hair?” When I finally do, it’s “Can I braid it after you wash it?” Usually, “No.” She’ll sigh, “Are you sure?” I normally answer, “Yes, Mommy,” but sometimes I say, “Actually…” If nothing else, she is the antithesis of carelessness. She knows how to, rat tail to scalp over and over, get a part perfectly straight.
My mother tells me that when she first held me in her arms, she felt a love unparalleled by anything she’d felt before. If the ultimate gift of womanhood is motherhood — and I believe that it is — then the only burden is the fear that, if nothing else, you didn’t — you couldn’t —
So, I want two boys and a girl, in that order. Of course, my classic TV family would look a little different than “normal.” For starters, we’d be black. Secondly, I’m elitist, so my kids won’t be attending a run-of-the-mill public high school. Paradoxically, we will reside in a southern city (see: Ernestine, Lorelei, Lottie, and the three double-names). And when the three kids roll their eyes at their parents still flirting (“Gross, get a room you guys!”) at age forty — age forty can you believe they’re still doing that?! — they’ll be rolling their eyes at me and my wife.
I went through puberty, bled on khakis, moved up cup sizes, learned to comb my curls, and have a running list of baby names on my phone. Though there are a few names on the list here and there for boys, selfishly, my crowning joy would be to bear and protect my own baby girl from the big, bad world. But what if she hates me because, in being gay, I’m inherently doing my job all wrong?
