Maryam Ghatee

“Of course, my mother is her own person. Of course, she contains multitudes. She reacts in ways that surprise me, in part, simply because she isn’t me. I forget this and relearn it anew because it’s a lesson that doesn’t, that can’t stick. I know her only as she is defined against me, in her role as my mother, so when I see her as herself, like when she gets catcalled on the street, there’s dissonance. When she wants things for me that I don’t want for myself—Christ, marriage, children—I am angry that she doesn’t understand me, doesn’t see me as my own, separate person, but that anger stems from the fact that I don’t see her that way either. I want her to know what I want the same way I know it, intimately, immediately.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom