Something Like Beautiful: One Single Mother's Story by Asha Bandele

From the Publisher

From the author of The Prisoner's Wife, a poetic, passionate, and powerful memoir about the hard realities of single motherhood

When Asha Bandele, a young poet, fell in love with a prisoner serving a twenty-to-life sentence and became pregnant with his daughter, she had reason to hope they would live together as a family. Rashid was a model prisoner, and expected to be paroled soon. But soon after Nisa was born, Asha's dreams were shattered. Rashid was denied parole, and told he'd be deported to his native Guyana once released. Asha became a statistic: a single, black mother in New York City.

On the outside, Asha kept it together. She had a great job at a high-profile magazine and a beautiful daughter whom she adored. But inside, she was falling apart. She began drinking and smoking and eventually stumbled into another relationship, one that opened new wounds. This lyrical, astonishingly honest memoir tells of her descent into depression when her life should have been filled with love and joy. Something Like Beautiful is not only Asha's story, but the story of thousands of women who struggle daily with little help and much against them, and who believe they have no right to acknowledge their pain. Ultimately, drawing inspiration from her daughter, Asha takes account of her life and envisions for herself what she believes is possible for all mothers who thought there was no way out—and then discovered there was.

LM - Library Journal

Poet bandele's first memoir, The Prisoner's Wife, recounted how she met, fell in love with, and married Rashid, a murder convict. This poignant, inspirational sequel covers some of the same ground but focuses on her role as an African American single mother (Rashid was denied parole and deported to Guyana). From the time of her daughter's birth, bandele struggles financially and psychologically but acknowledges her daughter as her most precious gift. Mothers single and married, black and white will find nurturance in her story.

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Chapter One

Love in a time of confinement

This is a book about love and this is a book about rage. This is a book about those opposing emotions and what happens to a woman, a mother, when, with equal weight, they occupy the seat of your heart. This is a book about what happened when they occupied the seat of mine at the very time when all I should have known, all I was told I should have known, was joy. Because what else is there but joy when a mother is staring into the brilliant eyes of the daughter she dreamed of, prayed for, and finally, finally made manifest? My laughter in those hours, days, weeks, and early months when Nisa was new and in my arms, on my breast, then, my laughter was loud, raucous even. It was regular and it was unbidden.

And then everything changed, dipped down so very, very low, but this is not a story about postpartum depression. It's an everyday life story of an everyday mother.

It's a story about the orbit of sadness that begins spinning in you and around you when you discover that the great life and love you had put together, the emotional balance and financial wherewithal, nearly everything you had counted on—everything I had counted on—disappeared, or, perhaps more accurately, shifted just out of focus. You can still make itout, sort of, what the picture was, but you have to squint. And even then, blurs.

The particulars of my own life involve prisons and no parole, single parenting, and shaky finances. But in a sense, they don't matter, my particulars. What I know now, after all these years trying to climb out of a hole, is that I am part of a long line of women, Black women especially, who believe we have no right to pain, rage, sadness, that to acknowledge them, let alone walk all the way into them, walk all the way into the feelings so we can at last deconstruct them, is weak, weird, wrong, just plain wrong. But when we banish them, send them out of our consciences and conversations, where do they go, all those hard, hurt feelings?

For some of us the pain, the rage, becomes a belt we lash our children with. For others it shrinks down into a tight little knot that we come to call our heart. For others still, for me, the rage went inside and became a fist I beat myself with and beat myself with until I was sure that I was nearly worthless. I was sure of it.

And I suspect sometimes that I would have kept being sure of it had it not been for my daughter, my baby, who was just as sure of the completely opposite point of view and told me so with words, but mostly told me so with her life, her full, incredible, indefatigable engagement with life. It was everywhere and every minute, Nisa's engagement with life and love, and finally I could not ignore and I could not deny it. So, yes, yes it was incredibly hard losing so much so quickly: my marriage, the dream of a shared future. But it has also been incredibly wonderful, perfect even, being this child's mother. Which ultimately is why I am writing this book, and why I am writing it specifically as a single mother. I'm writing to say that for all of the challenges, the children really do make it all worth it. And I'm writing to say that I know I am not the only woman to discover that I can look depression in the face and not call it by another name. I can face it, fight it, and finally, I can—and I am—moving past it. But I am also writing to say that this is no simple proposition, not in the slightest, and so this is how it was at times and this is why it was at times, but finally this was the way out. There was a way out.

After Nisa was born, people asked about her father, where he was, if he had a relationship with his daughter. "It's complicated," I would say at first, and then later, depending on the person, I would take a long, full breath and tell them how it was. I would tell them that Nisa meets her father in the place I met her father, the place I have always met her father. It's a place behind that's hidden, that's behind mountains and then more mountains, behind walls and then more walls. I meet him—we meet him—in a place that is beyond what's familiar, beyond what's comprehensible and perhaps even human. That's where we go, I say: a place beyond peace, but once there, we feel something like peace, maybe even something like beautiful.

Besides, I explain, for us, there is no choice. Despite our prayers, our deep magic, our spells, our potions, and all of our tears, we end up here each time. Here where it is barren, dry, bleak, rotting. Here at the prison. Here where my husband lives, where my child was conceived. Here where she learned the curve of his arm, the nuzzle of his beard. Here where I once did. Here in a prison.

Even in the brightest space of summer, when the sun has pushed aside clouds and everything is gray, the prison sinks in the center from the weight of its austerity. Still, Rashid and I had always refused to be broken by our own reality, a reality that has stretched across years. Undaunted, we proclaimed: We will never be broken by this.

We told each other stories about how we could always work together, a couple, a team, to cast aside that which did not sustain us. And when we could not piece together those stories, we figured out how we could at least make them minor factors, irritations, but not defining. Not of us.

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Excerpted from Something Like Beautiful by asha bandele Copyright © 2009 by asha bandele. Excerpted by permission.
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