Lost Identity

Lost Identity

When I was a little girl, I only remember my mother having been extremely controlling. We were hers and if we didn’t do as she said, we had broken a law, no matter how minuscule it might have been. There was no room for our opinions. Even in my education. She would have wanted me to be smarter. There wasn’t time for me to become better at my writing, I simply should have just been able to do it. There wasn’t anything natural about writing for me. 

She took my papers. She took them and crumpled them up. All my hard work. I was 10 years old. She didn’t think I was smart enough to write a decent paper. 

“Give me the fact list that you have on the woman,” my mother demanded. 

She wrote the entire paper. I could barely read her handwriting but she made me rewrite everything she did and turn it in as my own. I wasn’t allowed to voice my opinion. It wasn’t right, I knew that when I turned it in, but she would be upset with me if I didn’t do as she said. She was the boss.

I was always afraid when turning in my papers. They weren’t mine. I was little, and didn’t really care how intelligent they sounded, as long as I felt honest. The guilt of dishonesty that never went away. With the lies you must tell to please your parents. 

Getting sick didn’t end her tyranny. It was all that kept her from “being hyperaware of the pain.” My mistakes in language kept her mind moving. She thought that the idea of intertwining her expectations into mine would be helpful to me.

As this process continued I realized that what she was doing was beneficial to only her. My mother was living through me. I knew nothing different and so I simply went along. You don’t say no to a parent who is losing hair and is nauseous all day, every day. 

The constant revision of my papers did not end. Her sickness progressed and made her interest in my education dissipate. She was forced into not overseeing and reading all of my work before it was turned in. She got too sick to know I existed.

One of the main points from the essay “How to Tame A Wild Tongue” by Gloria Anzaldía. “So, if you really want to hurt me, talk badly about my language. Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity- I am my language. Until I can take pride in my language, I cannot take pride in myself.” Language is the representation of experience, ethnicity, and family, all together to create the final melody. A perfect combination of sounds and a back story, that can all become known from a few simple words.

If language is your identity, who are we until we find our own? My identity was lost. As if mine were the clone of my mothers.

“A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him. And a child cannot afford to be fooled.” This quote, taken from James Baldwin’s essay, “If Black English Isn’t A Language, Then Tell Me What Is?” This states that any teacher who in fact dislikes children will not teach the child effectively. I connected this to my own experience because I learned from my brothers about the world and language. Much to their dismay. They saw I would never be taught by my mother who had taken the time to teach them. They must have been loved in a different way. I only learned from my own mistakes, and those of my siblings, when chastised for misuse of language.

I was forced to whine into a jar when I was young. I complained often I guess, but when I did, everything was gibberish. Nobody wants to hear words they can’t comprehend. The jar stayed on the kitchen counter until I was seven and a half years old. The way I spoke disgusted my family.

While my mother was sick, she ran a blog. She hated the term, so it was simply, her online journal. She began it the day after she was diagnosed. Wanting to be able to tell her story in the beautiful way that she knew how. Her writing was her everything. She touched people across the country. They read every post she ever wrote. So many people that didn’t know anything about us except what she wrote. I was 9 years old when her news crushed me. This was when I learned what a story could do. A person’s words were power. They moved mountains and could touch the heart of another without a physical contact needed. Even in Layman’s terms, her words sounded so honest. Despite the cliché, I find their overuse, very powerful and truthful.

“Dying is very inconvenient,” she wrote. Three days before her death, she knew it was coming. It isn’t about whether the language “intersects” with identity or not, but rather your identity is kept locked in your mind and soul. The only key to open it is your language. Whether writing the truest of true, or speaking, it’s poetry. She apologized to the people she never met, for leaving them. Her parting words made strangers burst into tears. Her story was public. But it was also over.

Language in my experience, is the power that kept my mother alive for longer than a year. It encouraged prayers from coast to coast. And it kept her mine for a little while longer, even if I believed she wanted to leave me. Language is identity. It also creates connection, whether healthy or not, the power of language is something to be worked on, not cloned.