It was Saturday morning and I was in practice with the junior dance company. I was 11 years old, in a room with girls ranging from 10 to 14 along with my dance teacher, Mark.

I stood with my back to the mirror, a short distance away from the barre. A couple of fellow dancers to my left, Mark to my right. Hands lightly on my hips, I pulsed my ribcage so my chest stuck out and my back curved. Then I showed the girls what the move looked like when I pulsed my ribcage inwards, sucking my belly in to meet my back, chest sinking. Mark laughed, “That’s exactly right.”

It was important that we do that step with the body popping out to the beat, not sinking in. It was a jazz/hip-hop number called “Hit House,” and we were performing in the Florida Show Stoppers competition with it in a few months. There would be several performances first at shopping malls and retirement homes, but we had to stick it in practice on Saturdays so we didn’t look messy.

I loved getting things right. I was never an athlete, but dancing instilled competitiveness in me from age 8 onwards. Getting things right or painfully, awkwardly wrong were the best ways to get attention so I aimed always for the former.

When I got things right, I got to show off for my fellow dancers. When I got things wrong, though, something more valuable happened.

On a Wednesday night, the first class is ballet. Warm up on the barre is grueling. There are stretches that make your calves burn like someone dug into them with a small, blunt hunting knife and wiggled it around between the muscles and the tendons. I’m still correcting bad form learned from a careless teacher my first year of dancing while at a different school. Sometimes, while I hold my arm out during a sequence of pliés, instead of creating the graceful graduated curve from shoulder to fingers, my elbow drops, interrupting the proper slope, ruining the line.

Mark will catch me, every time. Whether I’m being lazy or just negligent. Or, you know, just paying more attention to the burning pain radiating from my heels through my calves as I go into the third set of grand pliés. If my elbow drops for even a moment as I come up and complete the plié, he is on me, yelling, scolding.

Do you know what happens when he corrects me? Even when he is so angry that little bits of spit fly out of his mouth and onto my face as he corrects me? I say, “Thank you.” I say it out loud. “Thank you.”

Then I have his attention in the right way. It’s no longer about how my elbow dropped, or how much my calves are burning. It’s a teacher and his student, learning. I’m learning and paying attention to him, as he has paid attention to me. People who don’t care about you will let you continue to make stupid mistakes. It takes effort to care, effort to take time out to say, “You’re doing it wrong.”

In situations where I respect the people I’m dealing with, I appreciate and seek out their advice and correction. Sometimes I know I’m steering a rough course, making wrong turns. I may not automatically reroute when a friend or colleague says, “You’re doing it wrong,” because I’m stubborn. But I will listen to the people in my life. And a few days, weeks or months later when I take their correction and it makes things right, I say, “Thank you.”

Suicide, murder, abortion. Psychotic episodes, rape and incest. You name it, it’s probably happened within my family. Divorce? Alcoholism? So tame. The sh*t I heard whispered low on the phone after relatives thought I was asleep as little girl, or the shit my Mom has told me when she was angry (which is almost all the time) . . . that shit would make your head spin if you were anyone but me. I keep forgetting this shit isn’t “normal,” – that I have to explain it to people who didn’t grow up like this.

How does it start?

There was so much I was never supposed to know about the people charged with my care.

One summer when I was growing up with my grandparents in Florida, I spent a few weeks with my “Aunt Nora” and her new husband, “Uncle Brett.” They had been together since they were teenagers. Everyone knew they were one of those rare couples who would naturally grow old and wrinkly together, twisting into each other like the roots on the trunk of an old Banyan tree. Their wedding was the first family wedding I was old enough to attend.

They had a pet boa constrictor who ate mice, who in turn ate Captain Crunch. I slept in the same room with the snake that summer and suffered from insomnia the nights she spent shedding her skin. The skin crackled and scratched against the glass of her cage.

Aunt Nora was so cool. She had gone to art school and told me all about how different crystals were filled with different sorts of energy. Clear quartz was just pure energy; if you held it for too long, you wouldn’t be able to get to sleep at all. Amethyst and Tiger’s Eye were protective crystals. Pink quartz were for fertility.

She wasn’t shy about talking about adult stuff, either. As the youngest of my six aunts on my grandmother’s side, she always felt more like a big sister to me. I remember once she was telling me about how she had always wondered what men did when they had to shit and piss at the same time. She asked Uncle Brett, who told her they just sat down to do their business and aimed their junk downwards. Fascinating information, whether you’re a new wife or an 11-year-old.

There was another reason why I loved hanging out with Aunt Nora and Uncle Brett so much. Uncle Brett was a teacher at my middle school, and he was best friends with the man who was going to be my science teacher the following year. Not that many people knew we were related, though, since he was white and I wasn’t.

After the summer weeks with the art and the snake and the crystals, Uncle Brett and I headed back to school. On weeknights during the school year, my ritual went as follows: dance class, dinner, then several rounds Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt. I played Nintendo in the formal living room while my grandparents watched the news in the family room on the other side of the house.

One night, I was playing Duck Hunt when a loud wail came from the family room. It was my grandmother, and it was unlike any other sound I had heard before or have heard since. I couldn’t even distinguish whether she was trying to make words, or whether someone had injured her. I could hear my grandfather speaking in the background, so I stayed put in the family room. I didn’t know what to do.

Eventually, my grandfather came to the living room to tell me in as few words as possible what had happened. My 11-year-old mind scrambled for images to complete his sentence. Only one image could really do it justice.

The next morning, I waited at the bus stop with the image of Uncle Brett hanging from a rope on an old Banyan tree on some land owned by his family nearby. My aunt had read his note and found him there herself.

The three kids who were always there at the bus stop with me spoke in hushed voices, asking each other if they had heard the news. They didn’t know he was my uncle until I told them.

“Is it true?” they asked me. They wanted to know whether he had really had an affair with that pretty blonde student one grade ahead of me. The image of my dead uncle dropped out of mind and was replaced with an image of the girl, physically mature for her age. My grandparents hadn’t mentioned that part to me. I still have the softcover yearbook with her picture in it.

Aunt Nora and my grandparents never did tell me what happened. I found out from rumors at school that my uncle may have been involved with this girl and was either about to get fired or my aunt was about to be made aware of the situation. I’ve always wondered about the truth but the acquiescent little girl inside just won’t let me ask.

This may not be true for most of you, but for us, it’s what we don’t talk about that makes us family. That’s why I’m here. This is my story.

NOTE: The above post was a story I was working on for another project. Names of family members have been changed out of respect for their privacy. It’s also the continuation of the life stories I’ve already posted here. This is a third draft, so if you have some constructive feedback, please leave it along with your comment.

Caption: Christmas with my first foster mother, 1 year old.

Caption: Christmas with my first foster mother, 1 year old.

Twenty years ago this Christmas, I had recently moved to live with my grandparents in Florida. I left my foster home with Pearl in Boston with just the clothes I had on. I arrived at a house on the water with gardenia bushes out back with no toys and nothing to wear. I was starting over in the Sunshine State. I turned eight the month before Christmas.

My grandma and grampa, in their 50s and 60s respectively, had already raised 13 children between them during their first marriages. Can you imagine what it must have been like for them to suddenly have this 48-pound, wild-haired, brown-eyed banshee all of a sudden looking up at them, wondering who I was supposed to play with and why we had so many rooms in our house?

They got married the year I was born and had long-settled into a quiet life together with careers as a nurse and architectural drafting teacher. In fact, they were nearing retirement. What were they going to do with me?

There weren’t many other kids to play with on our street. If you walked through the grass at the end of the cul-de-sac, you could cut over to an orange grove. I’d inhale the scent of orange blossoms and pet the noses of the horses owned by the man in charge of the grove. I kept myself occupied by making mud pies and watching for cormorants in the water.

Then it was Christmastime. Mom always had a few toys under the tree for me, but our budget was tight. It didn’t matter much because the projects were full of little friends to play with. Maybe grandma and grampa would get me a couple toys like Mom did.

On Christmas morning, I was fit to be tied. I wanted to go pee, but I couldn’t leave my room because grandma said to wait for her to come get me. She and grampa were puttering around out there in the living room. I could hear them.

She finally appeared at my door. “Good MORning,” she said, with her usual heavy emphasis on the “MOR” part of the word. She would do with me what she did every Christmas before me with my six aunts. She stood behind me, wrapped her hands over my eyes, and directed me through the hallways, the kitchen, the living room and then my feet felt the Astro Turf-like floor covering on the lanai.

I heard grampa shuffle into position and fiddle with the camera, getting ready to catch my reaction to my first Florida Christmas. What was under that tree? Did Santa eat the cookies? Grandma took her hands away from my eyes. I blinked, and the dream of every little child who had ever seen the Sear’s Big Book Christmas Catalog appeared . . .

Yeah. My grandparents went a little buck wild with the Christmas shopping. That there’s the picture of “an embarrassment of riches,” for a kid coming from the projects. (The first picture was taken after I had opened almost everything. When I first saw all that stuff, it was wrapped and under the tree next to the Barbie house.) My grampa and grandma still tell me how much fun they had shopping that first year and setting up the Barbie house and everything else.

Look at the Barbie mansion. They had even arranged all the little furniture and put one of the Barbies in there, with her remote-control Corvette parked right outside (it was joined by a pink Corvette the following year because Barbie made lots of friends and they needed to drive to hang out with her). Speaking of pink (and purple), you can see where my obsession started here. Pink slippers, purple Popple roller skates . . . even the My Little Pony had hot pink hair.

I also received classics like the Hungry, Hungry Hippo game (LOVED that), a Cabbage Patch doll, a little boom box and a whole mess of Play-Doh. I didn’t even know how to roller skate yet, but my grandparents took care of that too.

I’ll never forget that first Christmas with them. That they would go and figure out what a little girl would want decades after they should have been done with child-rearing is still so touching to me. And what I really love is that they continued traditions like leading me to the tree and making me wait to open my eyes.

The true joy of life resides in these moments of unexpected bliss. Isn’t anticipation the best part of any surprise?

For me, it’s not quite like that. I hate to skip over chapters in the story to give you this piece, but it’s timely because it’s October and this month depresses the sh*t out of me for a number of reasons. This is even more weird to write about because, as I type this, my very best friend in the world is going into labor with her first child.

I don’t usually enjoy talking to my Mom. It sucks. I say,”I love my Mom,” like most people say, “I love long weekends,” or “I love Sam Adams beer.” Just doesn’t have that emotional ring to it. If you haven’t read up on previous chapters of my life, I suggest starting with “Slow Piroutte for the Dancing Girl,” and perhaps check out my conversation on Mother’s Day.

I didn’t have that chemical bond a child forms with his/her mother those first few seconds, hours and days. I was taken away at birth and placed in another woman’s care for three years. Four years after my mother got me back, I was “taken away” again, this time to live with my grandparents – who I view as my true parental figures because they were my custodians for longer than anyone else.

This thing with my grandparents taking care of me caused a great deal of pain for my mother. She thought that they’d have me for a year until she got well again and then maybe she could get the mommy thing right. Problem was, I wasn’t having it.

At seven years old, I knew I never wanted to live with her again. She didn’t understand that for years, until I was 14, actually . . . but we’ll get to that story later. I haven’t seen her since I was 14. And she thought it was my grandparents’ fault that I didn’t want to live with her anymore.

So ever since I was seven, Mom and I have had to rely on a series of phone calls and the annual two-week visit during summer months to cultivate some sort of closeness. This is just fucking weird to talk about – but that experiment never really worked. I listen to her talk about all of her problems and it’s just . . . click . . . disconnect. I can’t feel anything.

If anything, I’m proud of her. People have gone through less than she has and backed out of life. She’s lost both her kids, received not a whole lot of support from my family and has fought tooth and nail to gain some sort of education in Jamestown.

She’s also the source of so many things about my character that I treasure. Her ability to speak her mind, regardless of the consequences, is inspiring. I care about hurting certain people, but for the most part I let people have it – and bluntly – when I am not happy with something they’ve done. My mother has been arrested because of her mouth several times. She refuses to become a kinder, gentler version of herself because that’s just not who she is. I love her for that, too. And without her DNA, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be a writer. My brother writes, I wrote poetry before anything else, and that’s what she’s been doing since before I was in the womb. If our story makes us rich some day, God bless her, but keep her far away from me.

But so many of her problems, like anyone’s problems, have been of her own making. My grandfather has tried and continues to try to help her. It’s hard for me not to be biased towards him because he helped to shelter me and give me the environment I needed to become who I am today. I haven’t talked about him here a whole lot, but I absolutely adore him. He didn’t owe me a single thing, yet he took me in as his own flesh and blood and raised me. I know what he’s done to reach out to her, and he is repaid by my mother lashing out at him and his wife because they are the Evil Ones Who Took Me and Wouldn’t Give Me Back.

Consider this though: Every holiday after I was seven years old (the year I moved to live with my grandparents), I played the dutiful child and talked to my Mom. Every holiday, she is the one who told me that it wasn’t fair that both of her children should be taken away and that I should come back to live with her. Every holiday, my grandparents were the bad guys, and who were we to enjoy the family and the love and the warmth that everyone should have on holidays? Who were we? Why should we be happy, and not her? And why did I get to be close to her father when she never really got to because her parents got divorced? Why? Answer that, Emily.

I don’t know the answer to most of those questions. All I know is that she made me miserable every f*cking time. Take that one bitter, manipulative, mentally-ill character away, and I had a fucking made-for-TV family. After all the turkey and the mashed potatoes and the Christmas cookies, I’d be there in the dark in the formal living room talking to Mom, listening to her literally sob on the end of the line . . . while the sounds of my cousins opening presents and aunts and uncles clinking glasses of wine came floating in from the family room and the kitchen. No one else had to deal with her. She had shut all of them out and I was the only one she was concerned with winning back to her “side.” I fought those battles alone.

If anyone wonders where my diplomacy and stupid sense of loyalty come from, it’s from those years tethered to phone calls in the dark.

I searched out words that wouldn’t unravel Mom’s sense of entitlement to technical maternity while at the same time struggling to explain that I was doing the right thing by living with my grandparents. Diplomatic to Mom, loyal to Grandma and Grampa. Diplomacy. Loyalty. My out-of-whack feeling meters for those two emotions color everything, and I’ve had a hell of a time trying to wrestle free.

Why should I feel ashamed of my detachment when it wasn’t my fault she couldn’t mother me? It’s not that I do feel ashamed; it’s that every time I hear her cry when I call her on her birthday, my birthday or some other happy day, I feel like I should feel ashamed. Like I’m feeling nothing where there should be some weighty sense of grief for what I lost.

But what did I lose? I step back and then the anger comes, because I realize she has put me in the middle of so many battles with her own father. For one to use one’s daughter as a pawn against one’s father is a type of behavior I can’t really stomach. So, I’ll leave you with this:

From Mom, postmarked May 9, 2003. Addressed to me, my brother, Grandma L. (not the one who raised me, but my Grampa’s first wife) and Grampa. (Ellipsis are hers, not mine.)

“Hello Everybody!!!

The time for celebration has come, at least for me.

For my Em who might not be able to make it to my graduation, I love you and just think of me walking up to get my diploma, just as I thought of you getting yours. I forfeited seeing you graduate so I could buy a computer to help me do the work it would take to get to this point. I’m almost there.

To Corey, my son, I love you . . . keep this memento so you can look back and see what a struggle life can be and what is actually worth fighting for. You and I and Em have accomplished great things . . . and better things to come . . .

Mom . . .hope you can be here for my graduation . . . but if you can’t I’ll be thinking of you and how you started college so long ago and decided to raise all seven of us kids . . . I’ll be graduating and trying to find employment just as you did when dad left and you were on your own still taking care of me, Steve and Tom.

Dad . . . I am getting my diploma from College just as [my aunt/her sister] did . . . I don’t think she had any family around to share in her accomplishments . . . You may not be there for my graduation but you were there for Em’s . . . you raised her? You raised me? Where did your heart go? I love you . . . your love is displaced. I have been on my own . . . now I’m on the road and in the running as far as what are deemed accomplishments in life . . . I am outspoken and honest . . . I’ll never change for the worse.”

Caption: Aunt Marianne, 2005.

I was raised by beauty queens. Living, breathing, pageanting beauty queens. I was put into modeling school in 4th grade. If you don’t believe me, I will call my aunt and have her dig up the footage and photos from the Crest Commercial I screen tested for. I sang, danced, did the 1/4 and full angel turns and learned the proper way to exit a car while wearing a skirt. I will say please and thank you, even if you are mean to me, because that is the proper thing for a lady to do.

When I moved to Florida, it was to live with my Grampa and his second wife, who I call my Grandma and who welcomed me into her side of the family like I was born into it. Grampa had seven kids (5 sons, 2 daughters), Grandma had six kids (all daughters), and besides my Mom and “real” grandmother, my entire family lived in Florida.

I had lots and lots and lots of cousins, but only on my Grandma’s side. My Grampa’s children didn’t produce a lot of grandkids, and when they did get married and have children, they moved away.

Of the cousins that came together on the holidays, I was the oldest. Looking at family photos is so funny, because I was surrounded by a bunch of blue-eyed Irish towheads. All those blondes and then there was me, a little chocolate chip muffin with shining brown eyes and hair bigger than Alfalfa from Little Rascals.

Caption: One of these things is not like the others. Seriously, look at my hair.

Caption: My Gramps and my uncles, back in the 80s.

My Irish aunts, their husbands and their children are some of the most loving and welcoming people you will ever meet.

Caption:Grandma and some of my aunts on Mother's Day 2000. That's Aunt Marianne in front.

I was so lucky to grow up so close (geographically and emotionally) to my extended family. Every family has its quirks though, and with one as large as mine the quirks are many.

Out of all my aunts and uncles, I spent the most time with my Aunt Marianne, my Uncle Joe and their three daughters. Their eldest, Katy, was the third-oldest in our group of cousins, so she and I did the most hanging out when we were growing up. We played with our barbies together and she came to me first when she found out Aunt Marianne and Uncle Joe were getting divorced. She didn’t even want to say the word, “divorce.” I was only 10 or so, but I told her I knew everything would be okay. Grandma and Grampa had both gotten divorced, I told her, but they loved all their kids just the same. We focused on quietly making outfits for our barbies that day. I always chopped their hair off. Don’t ask me why. Maybe it’s because Uncle Steve burned off a bunch of my hair with relaxer at his salon. That’s why I do it myself now. But I digress.

Fast forward quite a few years, and Aunt Marianne has been Mrs. Florida twice (with two different husbands), as well as Mrs. International and little cousin Katy was Miss Florida 2002.

The world of pageantry is ridiculous. I was in modeling school probably for 3 months before I had to make a decision about whether I wanted to pursue that as a career. Make no mistake about it, pageantry is a career and Aunt Marianne thought I would be very good at it. I hated it. There was no way I was going to miss hanging out with my friends. I was in 4th grade and I wanted to start dancing again. I left modeling school behind and began my pre-professional career in dance.

The thing about pageant contestants is that in general they are so pretty, but you only see the surface. The contests are superficial for a reason. Once you start digging, sometimes you find ugly things. Katy is probably one of the few exceptions to this rule. She is sweet, eager and naive.

Aunt Marianne kept her very sheltered, most likely because she knew what succeeding in pageantry meant for many girls and Katy wasn’t to follow that route. Katy got married the same weekend I got engaged in 2005, and that white dress actually meant what it was supposed to on that day. You know many other virgin beauty queens from Florida? Yeah, I didn’t think so. This is what my family is like.

But in her efforts to shield my cousins from the big, bad world of Central Florida, Aunt Marianne sometimes went too far.

One day after the divorce, Katy and I were sitting at the counter and eating cookies. She and I were talking about what kind of men we wanted to marry when we grew up. I said I didn’t know whether I’d marry a Black man or a White man, and I kind of wished I had a crystal ball so I could see what my kids would look like.

Aunt Marianne was listening to the conversation and decided to pipe in.

“The girls aren’t to date or marry Black men,” she said. “If Katy married a black man, she would not have my blessing and I would not attend the wedding.”

I was just in shock. I’m 10, for Christ’s sake. I argued with her for a minute about it, but it wasn’t really my place. I was a young lady and ladies don’t argue. I remember crying that afternoon and being so sad and angry. I thought it wasn’t very fair that Katy wouldn’t be able to marry whomever she wanted. I didn’t even think of the implications Aunt Marianne’s comment had regarding my very own parents and my race.

I’ll put it out here that the two sides of my family don’t usually hang out together. I always assume it’s because we wouldn’t all fit in a mansion, let alone my grandparents’ lanai. Another reason might have been a little back and forth on race relations.

The Italian side had dropped an “i” off of our last name due to prejudice against Italian-Americans in Buffalo, NY (where my family is originally from). Some of my uncles and my aunt later put the “i” back on the surname when they turned 18. I always thought I would, too, but I began getting published at age 18 and I wanted to keep my byline.

My mom got knocked up by two different Black guys. Her sister also married a Black man. My Aunt Patty Jo (on the Irish side, and she’s no longer called this since she moved up north), moved to Boston and later married a biracial man. I lived with them when I moved back to New England.

I’ve been told joining my extended family at the age of 7 changed how my relatives saw Black people. I was a sweet little kid, smart and kind. I had good manners. There was nothing scary about me, save my Alfalfa hair. My Aunt Patty Jo said it was because of me that she could marry a mixed man. My grampa hadn’t been such a fan of Black people before me. Maybe because they kept getting his daughters pregnant? I don’t know.

The best part of all of this came when my Aunt Marianne remarried and wanted to adopt. She wanted a biracial baby boy, but they didn’t want to place him with two White parents. Willing to do what it took to get that baby, my Aunt Marianne pulled out childhood photos of me and Katy, little brown and White beauty queens in training.

“I always loved Emily like she was my own,” is what my Grandma tells me Aunt Marianne said when she gave me the news.

I laughed, perhaps a little bitterly. Aunt Marianne is now raising two gorgeous little boys, one of them biracial, the other one White, with her third husband. I hope she lets them marry whoever they want to when they get old enough. By now, she should know the beauty of us mixed folk is far more than skin deep.

That's me in the pink shirt. Katy's to the right, and her little sisters are in front of her. Wish we hadn't grown up so much.

Edit: A few of you have gotten in touch with me about taking care of your little mixed children’s hair. A friend of mine suggested these sites to me a few months ago, and they are really good resources for products suggestions and haircare tips:

NaturallyCurly.com (My friend also recommends the book, “Curly Girl.”)

Nappturality.com (This site has message boards where you can go on and talk with other people dealing with “going natural.”)

Prof. John Ernest with me and Kristin at our college graduation

I went to college with a mission: I wanted to learn more about Being Black. Problem was, $10,000 of my scholarship money for New York University had fallen through on the day of my high school graduation. I wouldn’t be attending school in the diverse Mecca-lekka-hiney-bro Melting Pot known as NYC.

Nope. The University of New Hampshire would be hosting my education in Being Black. It was as unlikely a place as one could find for increasing cultural awareness. There were 78 Black students out of 13,000. If you were counting me, there were only 77.5 Black students. We do what we can with what we have, though, and what I had was a course catalogue listing a 500-level course for Introduction to African-American Literature.

Any time I’ve ever wanted to understand anything, I’ve turned to books. From cooking to interior design to tarot card reading, if there was anything I’ve wanted to understand, I just buried myself in every chapter and verse I could get my hands on. I thought if I could read about other Black people, their history, what they had been through . . . maybe I would understand a little bit more about myself.

The first day of class was a Tuesday during my sophomore year. The classroom was small. The desks were set up in a circle. I was excited. I was finally brave enough to publicly acknowledge that I hadn’t the foggiest idea what I was doing telling people I was half Black.

The truth was, I was 100 percent White. My parents broke up when I was six and I haven’t seen my father since. I was raised by a bunch of rowdy Italians and it literally took me years to figure out what to do with my hair. When I was growing up in Florida, the Black kids put me down because I didn’t talk Black or dress Black. The White kids didn’t know what the fuck I was. When they asked me, I answered to the best of my ability. I told them, “I’m tan.” Duh.

As I sat at my desk in Hamilton-Smith Hall in September 1998, I was still wondering what I was and if I needed to be anything different. I just wanted to understand what all the fuss was about. I was earnest to begin some sort of inner transformation.

Therefore, it was a little disconcerting to discover that my mentor in Blackness was to be a lanky white gentleman with balding hair and black-rimmed glasses. I was expecting something different. Maybe a member of the Black Panthers. Panther Power! Or something.

It turned out that John Ernest was something different.

The first thing he asked the class to do was make a list of our five favorite CDs and to tell the class why we enjoyed the music we did. Secondly, he was a Scorpio. I don’t care what the fuck you think about astrology – I dare you to find me a Scorpio who doesnt have an affinity for Black culture. It’s like all Scorpios are Black on the inside and they’re looking for a connection with an old cotton picker’s soul or something.

But here’s what Prof. Ernest did: he broke me open and then made me more whole. I had experienced two sexual assaults and my first relationship right before I became his student. He didn’t know that at first, but he allowed me to connect my own struggles with what I was learning through him and develop a more organic understanding of the word “plight.”

I dated a Black classmate I met in Prof. Ernest’s class. If anything revealed how little I knew about Being Black, it was dating Big Al. It was the first time I felt like I was having an interracial relationship. His CD collection went beyond my familiarity with Biggie, Jay-Z and the rest of the Puff Daddy family. His enormous lips enveloped mine when we kissed, and he made fun of my ass-less ass. (It’s sad, really. I’ve always wanted a Bonita Apple Bum.) While Al played the gentleman, he did get a little annoyed when I told him if he was going to act like a typical Black guy and refuse to go down on me, I was going to act like a Black girl and refuse to go down on him (which kind of sucked – no pun intended – because we weren’t sleeping together, either).

I read W.E.B DuBois, Langston Hughes and “Celia; A Slave.” I went on to take a more advanced African-American Lit. class with Prof. Ernest and that class led to an independent study with him and my close friend, Kristin. (She’s another Scorpio, by the way. She minored in Black people.) I wish I could find the paper I wrote on Toni Morrison’s”Beloved.” I just remember crying from exhaustion when I was done with it.

At the end of it all, Prof. Ernest became a friend. He and I talked about my confusion over my racial identity, about relationships, about poetry, about our relatives with mental illness. He was the sort of professor who looked beyond students’ day-to-day problems like juggling two times the course load I should have taken and the general laziness that set in after too many nights partying.

Funny that it took a lanky white guy in a staff office the size of a toaster oven and covered with pictures of jackalopes to teach me how to be Black. If Being Black for me means I’m just Emily with a killer tan and a small ass, so be it.

Who was at the door? It was my teenage baby-sitter, Jeannie. Jeannie had heard the crashing, yelling and screaming. My mother – she had one ear to the door and she was looking back at me, listening to Jeannie ask if everything was okay and holding a finger up to her lips as if to say, “If you don’t tell, no one will take you away from me.”

Then Jeannie’s parents were there in the hall. They wanted to hear my voice – make sure I was okay. They had heard about the time my brother was taken away. So my mother motioned me over to the door. I looked at it. It was like a warehouse door. Industrial grade. With paint you could scratch off with your fingernails. The door looked back at me.

I walked up to it. I said, “I’m okay.”

Next, my mother and Jeannie’s mother in the hall, screaming. My mother throws a white telephone at their door. Cord and all.
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My mother took me out of foster care at age three, after I started calling my foster mother Mommy.

I was in foster care for the first three years of my life for two reasons. The first reason is that my mother is bipolar. At the time of my birth her diagnosis was subject to debate, as most mental illness diagnoses are.

At different times, she has been labeled schizophrenic. She has had shock treatments. She has been drugged into and out of so many different realities, I’m sure she doesn’t know which parts of her life are fact and which are fiction. I do know that what I have told her of my seventh year she regards as fiction.

“I never did that to you,” she says. “And if I did, it was only because I loved you.”

She was taking Lithium before she discovered she was pregnant with me. Lithium and babies do not mix. She went off the psych drugs, in part for my fetal benefit, but mostly because she fucking hated being on them. The pattern would repeat itself several times over.
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I wouldn’t stop crying. My mother was cutting my hair. Why? It was so pretty. I had just grown it long enough to wear out of braids in my second grade picture. I remember I wore blue and feathers were involved in my hair somehow. I liked Indians in second grade. I always wanted to be Pocahontas. Mooky’s mom had hot-combed my hair especially for the occasion. I just couldn’t understand why mom would chop it all off with scissors like that when it was finally long. So I cried.

“The more you cry, the more I cut,” she said.

I couldn’t help it. She had just beaten me for no reason. It was Easter weekend. We were supposed to visit Grandma L. in Olean, N.Y., but we had come home from the Greyhound station because Mom had forgotten our tickets. We got home, and Mom just started breaking things.

First it was just her things. Things in the living room. Then she started breaking things I liked – like the little glass figurines that my uncles bought for her. Little blue glass penguins and elephants. And those glass animals – owls – from tea boxes. All of them – she swept them from the white plastic shelves in the hallway. She yelled. Really loud.

She bent me over and spanked me. I don’t know why she did it. I remember crying and I remember her putting me in the tub afterwards and telling me she was sorry. My skin was red. Then she was cutting my hair off. So I started crying again.
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My mother was skinny as a fishing line when she got pregnant with my brother at age 16. She was diagnosed with a variety of things in her early 20s, necessitating the use of a mishmosh of sundry toxins her doctors thought would fix her up. Lithium fucks with all of your body’s systems, including the regulation of your weight. My mother became obese. She went off those drugs when she got pregnant with me and, as you know, pregnancy does not make you any skinnier. By the time she gave birth to me nine drug-free months later, she had be hospitalized for her mental state.

She was in and out of the mental hospital for those first three years I was in foster care. The other reason the Commonwealth of Massachusetts didnt want me in her care was because they had to take my brother out of her custody after she beat him.

She was off her meds when that happened, too. I was in her belly, growing there, blissfully unaware of what I would be born into. I know my mother danced and sang and read and wrote when I was there in her belly. My brother was adopted by his father’s parents in California, where he moved for good before I was born. We’ve corresponded. We’ve spoken. I think he’s probably the best brother a girl could have. I’ve never met him.
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Mom went into my bedroom and started breaking all of my things. I haven’t done anything wrong. My mom’s not crazy. She told me she’s not and I believe her. She said they took my brother away from her and she was sorry, but she wouldn’t let them take me, too.

She’s in my room and she flipped my bed over when she was breaking things. I don’t have a lot of toys, but I have enough. Barbie dolls, my stuffed Gizmo doll that my brother sent me for my fourth birthday. But my favorite was my little jewelry box with the plastic ballerina. She did slow pirouettes when I opened the box. She danced just for me and played a song, too. I didn’t just want to be Pocahontas. I wanted to be Pocahontas on pointe shoes.

If I could make myself stop crying, I thought maybe she would stop breaking things before she got to the jewelry box.

I stood with my feet firmly planted in the middle of a mental breakdown. I was seven years old, there was broken glass all around me and half of my hair was cut off. My small body was red all over and my mother was at the dark green metal door to our apartment in the Beechland Street projects of Roslindale, Mass.

Jeannie is at the door asking if I’m okay. I’m sad. My little ballerina is broken now, but her song is still playing. I looked at the door. It looked back at me. I walk up to it and say, “I’m okay.”