Confessions of a Bunny

Cierra "Ruby" Bell-Cartier

"We have a healthy boy! When can I see mom? They are finishing up things, but you should be able to see her soon! A Boy! I have a son!"

Soon I'd be able to see you soon I mumbled looking at the casket. Two weeks ago, my life was so much different than it is now. Two weeks ago, I was begging my mom to let me go to the beach with my best friend and her family. I hadn't been to the beach in so long and I desperately wanted to go before she needed me to be at the house to help with the baby. Not to say that my father wouldn't help, its just different as my mom explained to me. She was going to need me to be there for her more than ever, because she was essentially starting over again. I didn't understand why they wanted another baby so far after me anyway, but hey who was I to tell them what to do, I just wanted to make sure that I at least got to enjoy my summer before starting 7th grade. I wasn't like most girls my age, I mean I didn't spend my summers vacationing and living it up, I spent my summers helping my mom at her beauty shop pretty much from the time I could walk, I was at that shop doing anything from sweeping, to restocking, product, or as for the last few months, I'd been running the cash register to help out while mom was tending to customers. My mother was no scratch that she is my best friend, my confident and literally my other half. Two weeks ago, I couldn't fathom what life would be like with out my mother.

The night she went into labor, I remember we'd just gotten home from the shop, she wanted to rest before my father got home from work, so I took on the role of prepping dinner for her. I just finished cutting up the vegetables when I heard her calling my name. I immediately ran to her, called my mom's best friend and from there things went from 0 to 100 and before I knew we were rushing off to the hospital and waiting for an update. We got the update 2 hours later that she delivered a healthy little boy and then we got the worst news ever, 4 hours after that. 4 hours after she delivered that baby, she, she developed a blood clot and it traveled to her heart and killed her. She spent exactly 4 hours with her son and me before she was no longer with us anymore. I couldn't believe it; I swore up and down they were lying to me. They were keeping me from my mother, and I couldn't understand why. Why would God take her from me when I needed her the most? Cierra it's time to go. I don't want to go; I just want her back. I know you're hurting but you can't stay at the cemetery. Why not, I don't want to leave her. The cemetery is no place for a little girl and your mother wouldn't want you here. Why did she have to go? It was the one question that no one could answer for me and the question that till this day I still look for the answer to. Death was a foreign thing to me. My mother and I never talked about it, and I'd never been to a funeral ever, to me it was just something that you see in the movies. Cierra! I am coming let me just say goodbye, I said responding to my father. He wasn't my biological father obviously, but he's been in my life since I was 4 almost 5 and he was the only man I'd ever known to be around.

"I love and miss you so much mom!" I dropped the little bouquet of flowers on the casket before making my way back over to my relatives. It'll be ok Cici one of my cousins said draping her arm over my shoulder as we went back to the waiting car. It was weird to have so much family around at this time of year, because we never really see the family until the holidays and even then, it was only certain family that we saw. My mother didn't have much family to begin with, but once she married my father, it seemed like the little family she did have started to thin out ever further. We went back to the house where everyone was gathering for the repass and all I wanted to do is hide in my room. My father was a militant man, everything in our home had to be straight and in order. We only watched black shows, ate what was perceived as black foods, and heaven forbid we talk to someone that wasn't black or he'd have a fit. I remember one time, my mother spoke to this lady in the grocery store, and he swore up and down that the lady was indoctrinating her into white supremacy and trying to overthrow the black man. She asked where something was in the store. We had pictures of Malcom, the profit Elijah Muhammad, and prayed at least 3 times a day. He was brought up Muslim, while my mother didn't really subscribe the idea of an organized religion. Don't get me wrong she believed in God, she didn't believe in the contrived way that organized religion's function. I guess opposites really do attract, a non-traditional woman marries a traditional Muslim man, you can only imagine how it went when she told him she was opening a beauty shop. I'll save that story for a different day though, back to this repass. I am surprised there was even a funeral because he didn't believe burying the dead, he said their soul was already gone, so their bodies should be returned to the earth. Or in other words cremation! And my mother as I said we didn't talk about death, but apparently, she had her own beliefs on it because there was a funeral, and she was buried.