Firstborn Immigrant Daughter
Dear Firstborn Immigrant Daughter,
First. There are many ways to be an immigrant. Some immigrate to territories, others to tax brackets. There is only one way to be an expat. Say your parents, both doctors, were born in West Africa. When they moved to West London, they were immigrants. If they had been Uber drivers and not doctors, they would have been migrants. If they had been white American doctors, they would have been expats. Migrants travel on boats, immigrants travel on planes, expats travel on psychedelics. In London or Lisbon or Brooklyn or Berlin, you are the firstborn daughter of immigrants. Not expats.
•
Second. By “firstborn daughter,” we do not mean firstborn child per se.
You might have elder brothers. A second-born twin. Your father might have children from—how shall we put it? Children from a previous entanglement. You might not know, or yet know of, his firstborn. But you are the first human being your mother ever met—and this, dear F.I.D., is key—over whom she felt complete and uncontested dominion. You are the first thing your mother could own.
You see, a son will leave, she says, and must: to leave is his mandate, his mission. After all the love that she’s poured into him (she pours school fees—a different liquid currency—into you), a son will leave your mother to love some other woman whom your mother will refer to as a “girl,” very likely the daughter of another Immigrant Mother but ideally, if your mother is lucky, not the first (not an F.I.D., difficult and defiant like you, but a middle child, mild and compliant), and if they have children, this son and that girl, the Dominant Grandmother will be the other mother. The horror. No, says your mother, a son can be loved but not owned, not contained, not controlled. A son becomes a man, and men tend to leave, or else, staying too long, to let down.
Read an interview with the author for the story behind the story.
A daughter, by contrast, as your mother knows well, born a daughter herself, is a belonging. She belongs to the family, to the village, to the culture, to the Church, to the Old Country, but to herself? No. Because your mother was a girl once, she was owned, too, and though abandoned or betrayed by her owners she believed them when they told her, as they liked to do often, that a woman unowned is unloved. Despite her brilliance and her resilience, your mother still believes that a woman is safest in the world as a wife and that a wife is safest in a marriage as a mother—hence your father, hence her fury, hence you. Point being. When your mother chose your father—if (1) she did choose, and we pray that she gave her consent, and if (2) one can be said to have chosen a man when “no man” was never a choice—if your mother chose your father, she did so in part to be safe, to be claimed, to be owned. As a girl in the Old Country, she could not own herself. As a woman, she sought out a co-owner. Then, given that a mother cannot own a son, her first shot at ownership was you.
By “firstborn daughter” we mean only this: the first thing your mother could own.
•
Third. If you wish to belong to yourself, you must forgive your mother. She knows not what she does or has done. But we do.
•
Fourth. We know.
We know that she pushed, prodded, pressured you incessantly; criticized, nitpicked, corrected you insensitively; valued your performance much more highly than your peace of mind; scarred you, scared you. (She scares us all, too.) She is sorry, of course, that she made you unhappy, and sorrier that the New Country made you ungrateful, but she doesn’t see why you need a therapist at all, much less one who has something against her. No. Your therapist is the problem, your mother pronounces. Gentle parenting? Covert narcissism? Codependence? She laughs. Politely, you explain that at first you laughed, too. Like all F.I.D.s, you are hyper-independent. But it makes sense in, say, Spanish, where dependencia means addiction: codependence should be called “co-addiction.” Less politely, she reminds you that she doesn’t speak Spanish, as she never had the schooling that you did, or the mothering. No one poured school fees or study-abroad plane tickets or holidays in Málaga and Mérida into her. She speaks accented English and two languages from the Old Country, neither of which she taught you to speak, and so what? If you learned to speak Spanish or Mandarin or Russian, could you not learn an Old Country language? (Touché! But what she doesn’t understand is that your cousins’ taunting laughter doesn’t haunt you when you mispronounce 母亲 or мамочка—that no foreign language makes you feel as foreign as your Mother’s Tongue.) Besides, she pivots, she seldom drinks wine, unlike you, with your full-bodied this, tannic that! Say what you will, but she isn’t an addict—a dependent—so how can you be codependent?
When you explain that some addictions aren’t to substances but, instead, to online shopping, shit-stirring, little-white-lying, exploding into anger in the middle of an otherwise polite conversation, she explodes. Your mother speaks the language of the bone-tired provider, the culturally oppressed alpha, the captain: commands. You speak the language of the sailor-intellectual: questions. And she doesn’t understand. If you love her then you will obey her, and if you obey her then she will love you. See? Simple. She can’t understand why you can’t understand.
•
Fifth. We know. If she is mentally unwell, she refuses to seek treatment, living perched on the verge of rage or tears, clinging blindly to the belief that all her suffering will cease when you cease to expect her apology. You Google diagnoses. Anxiety? Depression? Borderline? Bipolar I? Bipolar II? The Woes of a Brown Woman in a White Man’s World? Will the DSM-6 include W.B.W.W.M.W.? No. Your mother doesn’t practice nonviolent communication. She doesn’t know how to hold space. But what she does know is how to survive in a racist-capitalist patriarchy as a nonwhite woman without a trust fund—and this, we insist, dear F.I.D., makes your mother a conquering hero. What is John Quincy Adams said to have said? “I am a warrior, so that my son may be a merchant, so that his son may be a poet.” (His only daughter, Louisa, died in infancy, tragically. We shall never know his vision for a girl.) Your mother, heroically, became a warrior and a frontierswoman, an explorer, a pioneer. But you are no Henry Adams. An F.I.D. may become a poet, yes, but she must become a corporate lawyer first.
•
Sixth. We know. When the mothers of your friends from the New Country coo, “All I want is for my daughter to be happy,” you laugh. Your mother doesn’t want her daughter to be happy. Your mother wants her daughter to be impressive. And you tried, o! We know how hard you worked to earn the woman’s approval, if not her affection or affirmation, with those accolades; your academic achievements in primary, secondary, undergraduate, and graduate school(s) were legendary. Legion. For years you amassed them—all the trophies from the spelling bees, the sports matches, the recitals, the debate-team competitions—as if they were chips at some Vegas casino which you could one day trade in for her love. But when you brought them to the counter, your hands overspilling, you discovered that this freight ton of chips was insufficient, enough to buy her approval in public, yes, but not what you craved—her affection in private. Strangers say, bursting, “Your mother must be proud of you!” Must she? Your mother says, tersely, “Well done.” She loves to hear others praise your tireless efforts but never says, “Rest. You must be tired. Come.” She has no time for your tiredness. If you want to know what tired is then look at her childhood, then look at her marriage, then immigrate from the working class to the upper middle class in just under a decade, then tell her you’re tired. No, rest is for the lazy, the Caucasian adolescent, the indolent, the indulgent—until the age of thirty. Then rest is for beauty, and beauty is for mating. After thirty, rest is important. Your mother, suddenly, is alarmed by your exhaustion. Why must you work quite so hard, stay so late? Yawning holes in your soul you can hide from your suitors, but not static wrinkles.
•
Seventh. We know. Your mother finds you beautiful but only when you’re thinner, when your hips are not looking so fleshy, so full, or only when you’re fatter, when your buttocks are fuller, a steak wouldn’t kill you, you’re all skin and bones. Your food is the problem, your mother pronounces. Quinoa? Spirulina? Nooch? She laughs. As she is not eating these foods, you point out, she need not pronounce their names. Then the problem is the food that you don’t eat, she pivots. What kind of immigrant doesn’t eat white rice? It is your food that makes you anxious. Not her fretting or fuming or guilting or exploding over nothing at all, not her ever-running commentary, as if she were a sportscaster reporting the score of your body-mass index, not her aggressively passive questions about your boyfriends or lack of boyfriends or lack of babies or lack of love or lack of REM sleep. It is not your mother but your food that makes you anxious, says your mother, and the anxiety that makes you fleshy or not fleshy enough. These men in the New Country may like Starving Beauties but men where she’s from, where you’re from, prefer curves. (It’s a shame, she adds, sighing, that you can’t see your beauty. In those earrings that she bought, you are beautiful. Never mind that those earrings are not to your taste. Your mother does not believe in your taste.)
•
Eighth. We know. If this warrior went to university—and let us pause to acknowledge what a feat this was then, for a woman—there were countless male students, most likely double the number of female ones, in her graduating class. That student-body demographics might limit the Options is a difficult concept for your mother to grasp. (This is how she refers to heterosexual men—as the Options, though never as optional.) All she wants, she says, is for you to find love. As if love were a thing in hiding. A low-lit mezcalería with an unmarked door. In fact, she wants other things also. (1) That the love be a man—not a woman—who loves to flatter your mother. (2) That the love—if not a great love, then a good-for-now love—lead to childbirth, and quickly. She’s being honest, she says in her wounded-bird voice, not unhelpful, as you say in yours. And it’s true: she honestly doesn’t care if you carry regret, just as long as you bear her a grandbaby. What you think but don’t say is that, to have this grandbaby, you will have to have sex with a man—the same kind of man, lo, the same kind of sex, that she once so doggedly scorned.
Podcast: The Writer’s Voice
Listen to Taiye Selasi read “Firstborn Immigrant Daughter.”
Or has she forgotten?
For years your mother spoke of men as if they, like sea wasps, could kill you on contact; as if brushing past some boy in a secondary-school corridor might inseminate you spontaneously and dishonor her irreparably. What we now call sex-shaming you knew, as an adolescent, as your mother’s only language, only logic, for desire. This, we understand, has to do with the Church—by which we mean a schema, not a structure. Church for your mother is less spiritual than social, a container, a social and cultural container, like a hot-yoga studio for New Country mothers, or a luxury artisanal grocery store: a space where women wear identical clothing, enjoy identical righteousness, repeat identical phrases. By the grace of God for your mother and her Church, Trust the process for theirs; a sari or a muumuu or a bubu in her temple, Lululemon or Lilly Pulitzer in theirs. But the pressure to conform is the same in both containers, with certain women serving as the archetype, and it is these women, like the popular girls of your youth, whose approval all the congregants crave.
N.B.: If your Immigrant Mother was ever unmarried when you were, say, older than ten years of age, you will have witnessed her wooing not men but these women—all wives by the grace of God. The single Immigrant Mother is an anomaly, an impossibility, torn between two irreconcilable desires: (1) to be rescued by men, who require sex; (2) to be revered by churchwomen, who revile it. The elders especially—dry-boned, bad-breathed, they take pleasure in Judgment instead. And the Options! “Single, solvent, straight: pick two.” The New Country is no country for second husbands. Better to return to the Old, where the devil is known.
•
Ninth. We know. If desiring a man was a distraction at best and a disgrace at worst for decades, then when were you meant to learn about men? Who was meant to teach you? Your absent-minded or absentee father? Your tactless or tactile uncles? Your cousins? (Non-immigrants find it confusing that non-relatives can be cousins. They think blood is thicker than water. We know love is thicker than blood.) Your aunties?
You can’t remember seeing, as a child or an adolescent, one happily married auntie. Comfortably, conveniently. But contentedly? No. Unsafe, all your aunties were un-soft. They taught you their secrets: to candy an onion, to fold fabric into wearable origami, to braid, to laugh in the face of want of all sorts, to dance in the wake of woe of all kinds. But to trust? To yield? To repair without delay, to disagree without damage, to hear without defense, to fold care into truth and truth into trust and trust into love? No.
Your mother insists that she gives great advice. You insist that she gives only warnings. Ages fifteen to thirty: Warning! You might get pregnant! Age thirty-plus: Warning! You might never get pregnant! Everything that you know about relationships you learned from the exclusively stable marriages that you saw on TV and the exclusively unstable marriages that you saw in foreign and independent films. (The former seemed to rely on a laugh track for survival, while the latter, like smoking, looked toxic and chic.) Now you have guidance—the podcasts, the memes, the self-help books summarized in Instagram carrousels—to help you make sense of the messes you’ve made. But your mother remains utterly baffled. You were always so good at things! Math! Music! Manners! Why are you so bad at mating? she asks in sincerity, confounded and offended, almost angrily offended that her belonging belongs to no man.
•
Last. No judgment. We know. We do. Our gentle suggestion, just one, is that you begin to distinguish between two sorts of lovers. We call them the Slipper and the Shoe. The Shoe is a lover who is fit for your journey, the Slipper for your indoor comfort alone. Few people meet (or need) more than two Shoes. Some, alas, never know one. One day, you may find, to your delighted surprise, dear F.I.D., the Shoe that fits. Until that fine day, a Slipper will do—but only for indoor use. Here “indoor use” includes sex, yes, ideally good sex, sex that makes you feel sexy, but also (not limited to): binge-watching Netflix, forwarding memes, sharing music recommendations. We would urge you to pick a Slipper who excels at Food & Beverage—the Peter Pan with a penchant for gyuto, the oenophile man-child who plays the cajón—but an F.I.D. seldom picks Slippers. As with stocking stuffers, say, or Secret Santa gifts, you sort of take whatever turns up: a colleague of a friend, an unsuitable ex, a one-night stand run long. But eventually you will have to identify what is happening, and here you must not self-delude. The function of this lover is not to: be a partner, start a family, build a future, support your work out in the world. The sole function of a Slipper, like a Childhood Home, is to comfort a grownup indoors.
Just a word here about Childhood Homes. It is quite possible that you do not have one. But your New Country friends speak of theirs with an affection and an entitlement that, together, unnerve you. “Thiiis is my house,” they’ll drawl on arrival. “Oh, leave your shoes on!” A touch smug, falsetto: the tone that you use when speaking of your Shih Tzu, your mother of your standardized-test scores. The Childhood Home, for these friends, is a church of its own, if not a birthplace as such then a birthright, the residence of the mother but the dowry of the daughter. Half museum, half mutual fund. This is because, like all New Country capitalists, their mothers believe in Passing the Baton. Your mother does, too, but has mandated that you must rerun her leg of the relay. (It builds character and work ethic, she says. Stop whining. She did it barefoot, you’re running in spikes!) You have never considered—nor been invited to consider—the home in which you grew up as yours_._ It was your mother’s house always, a dictatorship, your little bedroom a Sanctuary City. If your mother continues to reside in that house, the city has likely been ceded: it is a guest room for family from the Old Country now, or a hoarder’s paradise, or both. If your mother moved out, then she did so in chaos, as one flees a war, saving none of your keepsakes. Gone: macramé bracelets, handwritten letters, hardcover journals with little gold locks. Unlike mothers from the New Country, your mother does not believe that childhood itself is an Old Country. Now, critically deficient in hugs, hot chocolate, framed family photos, and encouraging magnets, you delight in the comfort that you find in the company of underwhelming lovers. And fair enough.
Enjoy your Slipper lovers until they wear thin, we say! Just enjoy them indoors. They—warm, soft, a wee bit weak—can’t accompany you out into the world. The minute you try to walk any meaningful distance, their soles will go soggy, your feet will go cold: first discomfort, then disappointment, then dismay, then disdain will dim your delight—just like that. Alas. Such lovers can soothe certain wounds in your soul, but only temporarily, only superficially. To soothe is not to heal a wound, a heart, a bone. For that you must walk.
Start walking alone.
A Shoe will appear as you go, fear not, but first you will walk, as you must, on your own. First you will walk to your mother and say, “What you gave me was all that you had. What you gave me was not all I needed, at all. What you gave me was all that you knew.” For a moment you will sit with your mother, insisting, “Rest. You must be tired. Come.” With a featherweight kiss to that warrior forehead, you will whisper, “Well done.” Then, dear Firstborn Immigrant Daughter, it will suffice that you know, that you are: not first, just born; not immigrant, just child; not owned, just loved; not hers, just yours. ♦