KITCHEN IN THE RESTING ON

My mother cried in the kitchen, crumpling the dish towel on the counter as quiet tears snuck down her cheeks. I almost didn’t notice, too busy placing each dish and utensil where they belonged among the shelves. The dishwasher door hung open, still half full—I filled the silence with a hug. Soon after, her tears faded to laughter and with the dishwasher empty, we loitered in the kitchen before saying goodnight. What stuck with me nights later wasn’t what had upset her, but that she had let herself show it.

My mom has been a woman of composure for as long as I have known her. Her father was a military man, commanding officer of a house of eight. He showed kindness, but not weakness, and I found my mother walking in his footsteps. She plans ahead, arrives in advance, and is seldom caught unprepared for the task at hand. It’s the example she set for me, as it had been set for her. That composure also meant, when I was young, she rarely let anything that bothered her slip through. I hardly ever knew when she was upset. Only after I was tucked into bed or on the bus to school, I imagine, would those tears show.

When I was newly born, as my mother cradled me in her arms, she gave me my name so I would know that my history is more than what they would tell me. That, in my mother’s dreams, when I met her 6th grade history teacher, I could cite my name and tell her that our history is so much more than the period of enslavement. I can only imagine how my mother worried when she held me. Looking back on all the world had thrown at her, and how its eyes would now be set on me. With me swaddled in a blanket under the dimmed lights of the hospital room, she felt a sense of duty, as I imagine all parents do.

Then, I grew up a little, shape-shifted into an acne-faced high school freshman before her eyes. Watching movies on a lazy Sunday, my mother and I sinking into the couch side by side, she told me she couldn’t stand the possibility of me being bullied in school. How she worried when she sent me off to Pre-K to fend for myself all those years ago! It caught me off guard in between the lines of the Hallmark movie that droned on in the background. I never knew she had felt that way, a big smile and too many kisses on the cheek never betrayed her disquiet. Her excitement for each one of my first days of school never dwindled, despite the unknowns.

Fireworks bloomed in the night sky on New Year’s Eve. I had grown a bit more then, counting down the days till I left for college. Our balcony felt like it hung in the air, frozen mid-fall with no start or end. It’s hard to say why the moment felt timeless, with the new year looming to symbolize the opposite. We found ourselves in a bubble, the hazy in-between of one year and another. Our faces, lit by bursts of shimmering light, peered out from behind that gap.

There, my mother told me how she didn’t like to cry in front of me. That she wouldn’t show it when she was upset or bothered, whether by big things or small. I didn’t get it at first. I told her there was no need, that of course I would want to know if she was upset. The fireworks continued to fade in and out of existence as we watched, their distant drumming her only reply. My hands were going numb on the metal railing, and when I went back inside to warm them, the glare on the windows hid the fireworks behind the glass. They would be over soon anyway.

In time, I felt like I didn’t need to ask her why, I felt like I could already understand. Looking back, for most of my life it has been the two of us. Her days were full of early morning starts and late nights packed with emails. Business trips pulled her far from home and even moved us abroad. A single mother, she had to manage it all, manage herself, too. To lead through example, to keep composure, and, of course, to shield her child from the hardships of life.

I’m sure that some part of my speculation is true, that she concealed those emotions in the way that every parent protects their child. In the kitchen, I believe, she let herself cry because my childhood was ending. It really already has. When I was young, it felt like everything would last forever, but that illusion of permanence would eventually slip through my fingers, and naturally, my mother knew that as well. Those moments of hiding her tears weren’t to protect me from earth-shaking secrets or insurmountable struggles, things so scary they begged to be shut away. She hid her tears to prolong the fleeting moment of my childhood bliss, for just a little bit longer. In the kitchen, standing at the end of childhood, my mother’s head rests on my shoulder as she cries. She rests from a struggle inevitably lost to time. Her baby boy, whose first tool she gave him to protect himself was a name, now comforts her quietly.