Oh, Mama. Please Help Me.

I stopped doing yoga when I began writing my book four years ago because being on the mat felt unbearable, like putting a bee in a tight fist—trapped—there was too much energy in my body to be contained by the boundaries of the mat. My feelings were like a world of broken glass, and I didn’t want the pieces to cut me, and so I gave myself lots of space—the whole apartment, all of the East Village, all of New York, the world.

If someone held me, the holding was limited;I would let go before the cutting began.

The last two days I’ve been uncomfortable because I needed to cry but the tears stayed inside. This made me distracted and sad.

Today as I was feeding the chickens, I thought about George Floyd, his neck, the angry, heavy knee.

I thought about the seven cervical vertabrae, the tiny bone shaped like a horseshoe. I thought about how even a necklace feels choking to me, even when it hangs, not touching the front of my throat.

My neck hurts and it’s hard to take a deep breath. My body feels increasingly stunned, shocked, the more I think of a man crying for his mother as another man intentionally tortures him out in the world while others watch.

COVID-19 has forced has to stay on our yoga mats. We are bags of broken false faced with our edges. It is so painful and scary and sad to be human right now.

It is also miraculous. The big mother is taking care of us. She is giving us exactly what we need.

We are waking up. We are becoming even more human.

We cry when we are born for good reason—this place, this experience, this lights, these hands, are shocking.

And then we are held, rocked, loved, and the tears dry, at least for a while, and we take in our first steady breath and watch our story unfold.

Resmaa Menakem, in his talk with Krista Tippett on her podcast On Being, said the tears of a white woman have a certain kind of power.

I do not want this power. Leaking privilege is shameful and painful. I do not know what to do with my voice. There are so many wrong things I could say, so many ways I could invite rejection and isolation.

Not that long ago in the United States, doctors slapped babies on their newly born rear ends to start the crying.

When we cry, we know we are alive.

For many people, Mama is their first word. For some people, it is also their last.

We are dying at the hands of the fathers. As a mama, as a human, as a person whose only knee on her throat is my own, I want to be silent. I want to hide, collapse, cry and dissolve.

But no story worth telling ends in a puddle of tears, and so I will begin with a song sung under my breath. My throat feels blocked, but that is story, My body is afraid. Sing, Anne, sing. But what if I die?

The church near my house has a sign in front that says His Name Was George Floyd.

I don’t understand the was part, and I fantasize about changing the letters, only I’m not sure I’m in the right, not sure the property damage is worth my personal need to express my beliefs.

Having beliefs and feelings can seem like a burden. I have chosen to dedicate my working life as a writing coach because I saw what not fully expressing herself did to my mother’s body and life. And to mine. I saw this also in Virginia Woolf and Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. All white women, I know, all leaking tears of privilege.

And yet.

I heard James Baldwin quoted as saying something about having to leave the U.S. because he’d been given so many labels he had lost himself.

If I label my tears, I lose their gift.

There is a selfishness that comes with trauma: mine mine mine. A closing down, a tendency to isolate, a quiet collapse.

Never again, sweet lord, please.

Mama.

Do not let us do that again.

A Land Not Mine, still

by Anna Akhmatova

A land not mine, still
forever memorable,
the waters of its ocean
chill and fresh.

Sand on the bottom whiter than chalk,
and the air drunk, like wine,
late sun lays bare
the rosy limbs of the pinetrees.

Sunset in the ethereal waves:
I cannot tell if the day
is ending, or the world, or if
the secret of secrets is inside me again.

(Thank you, Catharine, for this poem.)