BORN IN BABYLON

ON VULNERABILITY

When I was a small child, about maybe five or six, I would cry every day for my mother who—on the other side of the world, fighting someone else's war—could not hear me.

Every day, I would be exiled from the classroom to the principal's office and forced to sit across from her, picking at scabs on my arm, swinging my legs, looking everywhere but directly into her eyes while she spoke with what could have been empathy or pity; it didn't matter to me at all. What mattered was that we were separated by a large black desk, her hands braided together in front of her instead of stroking my hair or rubbing my back.

I wanted my mother, but I also wanted someone to hold me. No one did: not my overwhelmed teacher who sent me away and wasn't my mother; not my well-meaning principal who smiled at me but wasn't my mother; not the sweet-faced nurse who never once offered me tenderness and wasn't my mother. When the other children cried, someone came to comfort them; when I cried, I was sent away to the principal's office like I had done something wrong. If I had asked for tenderness, would I have received it? If I had been a little white girl with pigtails instead of a little black girl with braids, would I have received it without having to ask?

When called, my grandmother—may she rest in peace—refused to come get me, not out of any real malice, but because she came from another world where children needed to learn how to manage on their own.

I remember sitting alone at a little desk, facing the bare white wall, an animal sound dying in my throat as I blinked back my tears, left, presumably, to self-soothe. I remember how I tried to swallow the longing but it grew horns, tore through the esophagus without permission, a different kind of birth.

I wanted my mother, but I also wanted someone to hold me. Head bowed in shame, I learned how to break vulnerability like a twig. My school of indifference opened and never closed; I remained its only student. I mastered the Art of Not Crying in Front of Strangers some time after I mastered the Art of Not Crying At All.