Of Bastards, Bitches and Black Women: My Mother Taught Me to Speak My Truth

My mother, Frances Andrews, is the best kind of thief.

Today, the woman admitted in print that after hounding me for the unedited manuscript for my forthcoming memoir, "Bitch is the New Black," she took matters into her own hands, hacked into my computer and e-mailed herself some of the chapters. She wanted to know what I was "putting out there," she said in a recent story in the Washington Post on me and my book. Reading those chapters, she continued, was like "walking down memory lane from my child's perspective." Fine, I forgive you.

See, the lady likes to steal. Another thing she took from me (like candy from a baby) was this idea that I was somehow less than. That because she was black, single and a woman who loved women, then I was in turn some kind of hybrid test tube bastard baby with a future bleaker than that of an insect. Bastard. Frances told me once that I came home in tears after some blonde at school called me a bastard. No offense -- just officially. Actually, I don't remember that at all. Another thing I am thankful she stole from me.

Once, the rest of my family even tried to steal me from her because, as she says in the article, "I am a lesbian. My family thought I should not have had a child." But she had me anyway and was defiant and out and proud and all those things that make parents heroes and children worshipers. But this next quote -- one I'd never heard before -- made my heart contract, finally realizing that my mother's honesty couldn't have come easily: "I waited two hours. Then I gave up and went back to my mom's home and sat and waited. She came back without my daughter. She said, 'You need to settle down and stop chasing the world.'" Stop chasing the world? As if. Frances' pursuit of the great whatever is why I like flying solo. Why I'm not "desperately seeking love" but definitely "desperately seeking."

Even still, sometimes as a child I would pick her apart in my brain. I loved her laugh, her hands, her quiche. I could do without her feet, her wild hair, her need for speed. If we were normal and settled, maybe I 'd feel tethered, and names like bastard would lose their teeth. But like the Bible says, when I grew up I put away childish things and accepted that who I was was who we were. Seriously, who could I be but Frances' daughter?

"How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers' names," writes Alice Walker in "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens." What's less simple is that my mother's mother didn't realize her own visceral need to be a mother. The Post article goes on, "[Frances] promised her mother she would settle down. 'Just bring me my child.'" I was returned to the woman who stole.