I cannot tell a lie.

I am a sucker for a Black romance film. The first one I ever saw, Mahogany, left me swooning for a man like Billy Dee Williams. Committed to his community and his lady?  Yes, please. Love Jones left me (and just about every other Black woman on the planet) running out to my nearest coffee shop/record store/open mic, looking for my very own Darius Lovehall. So, I was beyond thrilled to see that Issa Rae and Lakeith Stanfield were going to bless my life with another Black romance to tide me over for the next twenty years.

The Photograph, a new film from the king of Black rom-coms, Will Packer, centers itself on a budding romance between museum curator Mae, and writer, Michael, who fall for each other after Michael begins researching Mae’s mother, late photographer Christina Eams. While most of the audience was completely engrossed in the romance between Mae and Michael, it was the love story, or rather, the lack of love story within the love story that I lost myself in.

The love story between Mae, and her late mother, Christina. 

I often found myself swallowing the lump in my throat and blinking back hot tears at a marathoner’s pace, reflecting on the relationship between Mae and her mother, and how much it mirrored every guilt I experience on a daily basis. The mother-daughter dynamic may be one of the most complex relationships in existence. As mothers we want to raise smart, strong, independent girls who are also able to love fiercely, live fearlessly, and move through the world with confidence. We work hard to pour this into our girls and love them with fierce passion.

We love them.

We love them.

But what if we have  something else in our life that we also love? And we love that thing so fiercely that at times we willingly put our children “on the back burner” for it?

As a writer, this is my life.

I loved words before I loved my daughter. I inhaled verbs and adjectives and nouns before I even knew how babies were made. I have stayed up for 36 hours writing every single thought that popped into my head simply because the passion wouldn’t let me sleep. And as an artist who is also a mother, I carry guilt like a cross on my back because my first love, my biggest love, the love that sustains me is not the love for my child, but the love for the words I type on this screen, the words that roll around in my head throughout the day, begging me to remember them because I have nothing write them down with, the words that wake me up in the middle of the night – when sometimes I don’t even hear my own child.

In The Photograph, we see Mae’s mother’s love for photography as a thing she must follow. She knows it is bigger than she is and that if she does not follow it, she will not know life as she is meant to know it. She lets this love carry her all the way from her tiny town in Louisiana to the bright lights of New York City. She makes a name for herself while simultaneously making a tiny human, and here is where the guilt begins. We see Christina working, and tiny Mae playing nearby on the floor, by herself.  We see Christina snapping photos of a model, pouring herself into her work and compliments into the subject of her lens, but when we see her interacting with Mae there are no words. There is quiet. There is a tension that I’ve never seen exist onscreen between a young Black girl and her mother. We see Mae sit with this tension as an adult, questioning if her mother ever loved her, was proud of her, saw her.

This tension felt all too familiar.

I love my child more than I love myself. At the end of the day, she is my why. Every decision I make, in one way or another, must be able to confidently answer the question: will this benefit my child. When she looks over at me while we watch cartoons and pulls me to her so we can rub noses, my heart swells to the point of near combustion. I would move mountains and part seas for this child. But I also have that same deep, self-sacrificing love for my art. I would run into a burning building to save my journals, laptop and thumb drives. Yes, I would also do this to save my child – I’m not a savage. But… I knew my art before I ever knew my child. I loved my art well before I ever loved my child. I’ve gone a whole day without eating, dangerous hours on end without going to the bathroom – just to get one last word on the page. I’ve let my child watch a mind-numbing amount of YouTube videos, just so I could write. Am I proud of this?

Honestly?

No.

And yes.

Yes, because writing is one of the things that has made me a better parent. After giving birth to my daughter, I suffered sometimes debilitating post-partum depression, and it was writing that saved both my and my daughter’s life. Many days I contemplated shaking her tiny infant body. Many days I wanted to scream at her for hours on end, just to make her stop screaming (the irony, I know). It was my (now defunct) blog that allowed me to sweep the shattered pieces of myself into a post and parade it around as funny momlife stories, when I knew that in actuality it was a case study in postnatal survival. Writing was (and is) my oxygen when life sucks the air out of my lungs. It requires nothing of me except a pen and paper. When I am walking through life as a shell of a human, it loves me into existence as a whole being - allowing me to live on paper in the raw, honest, ugly-beautiful moments we call mothering.  And getting those feelings out into the ether actually allows me to show up as a mother. As the mother I actually want to be for my daughter.  As the mother she needs me to be.

But also, no. It pains me when I say it out loud. It is wholly embarrassing. And though my mom friends, some of them also artists, always respond with “Girl – we do what we gotta do”, I always imagine that after we all part ways, they conference call each other to decide if *now* is the time to call CPS for child neglect. Being a mother who is fully devoted to her child and her work feels heavy. No. Heavy is not the right word for it. Heavy, is too light. There is not a word in the English language that holds the appropriate weight for this feeling.  This feeling is unlike anything that currently exists. It is love and hate. Guilt followed by exhilaration, and sometimes a cocktail of joy and pain mixed with a brutal reminder of the times I have felt dispensable.

On the flip-side of that, I have yet to discover a more satisfying feeling than finishing an article that I know I poured my soul into, or waking up in the middle of the night and tearing open my journal to pen the dopest poem that just invaded my sleep, or even writing the last word of the hardest chapter I’ve ever written in my life. I get goosebumps. I cry. My insides feel like they are filled with lightning bugs, all aglow and looking for a way out, and my fingertips on the keyboard are their yellow brick road. Even writing *this* paragraph, I can feel the fireflies waking up, gathering, looking for the light, and I know that something amazing is about to come out of me, and I am getting giddy with excitement because I can’t wait to see what I’m leading them towards.

And what I’m leading them towards is the truth. The truth being that in the ten years I have been a mother, I have never experienced anything akin to this feeling simply because I did something motherly, or spent an amazing day with my child. Don’t get me wrong. I am filled with joy when my daughter and I have lazy Saturdays together, or spend hours upon hours at the beach during vacations. I hold on to those moments because I know that as she grows, so will the distance between us. But the lightning bug feeling? No. Never once. And every day I wonder if she knows it. I wonder if there is going to be a silence that thickens between us, the way it seemingly did between Mae and Christina. Will every page of my next book equal an hour of future therapy? Will each metaphor, adverb, and simile deliver an unyielding blow to her self-esteem that I can never heal for her because I am the bringer of the pain? I wonder if she will feel the disconnect and feel perplexed, trying to understand just how exactly she fits into my life – when there are times that, if I’m speaking honestly, I don’t even know.

And I’m sure someone reading this right now is cursing my name and calling me selfish. And to them I say, you’re right. I am selfish. I am an artist, and as an artist that is probably my biggest character flaw. I. Am. Selfish. With my time. With my energy. With my love. I know that this selfishness played a part in my now-over marriage, and I am sure it will play a major role in my daughter’s future life choices.  But I don’t know how to do life any other way. I don’t know to be the mother who loves her child more than the pen and paper that has saved her life, time and time again, and will continue to do so until I take my last breath. Is there a method to striking the perfect balance between art and motherhood? Do father/artists feel burdened with this guilt? Do we get do-overs, do-betters, and do-mores until we get it right?

In closing, I am fairly certain that I am not doing a lot of this mothering thing right – and though I tell every single mom I know that there is no right or wrong way to mother unless you’re abusing your child, I have yet to figure out how to apply this philosophy to my own life. There is a scene towards the end of The Photograph where Mae is speaking with her stepfather and she asks him if her mother, Christina, even loved her. I don’t know if Will Packer meant to do it, but this is where he broke me. Fat, hot, salty tears streamed down my cheeks uncontrollably as Mae searched her stepfather’s face for an answer, seemingly holding her breath and bracing herself for his response.  In that instant I saw my daughter at my funeral, asking anyone who knew me, if I even loved her.

I hope that when that day comes, if my daughter should ask, someone tells her this: “Your mother’s love for you was intense and complex and limitless and pure – much like her love for the words that saved her life so many times, so she could eventually be your mom, and love you”. I hope she understands that the words carried me to her and in my darkest moments the words kept me there, so for that reason alone, I had to love the words more. But I loved her as much as I possibly could – sometimes more than I loved myself.