Dear Firstborn Immigrant Daughter,
First. There are many ways to be an immigrant. Some immigrate to territories, others to tax brackets. There is only one way to be an expat. Say your parents, both doctors, were born in West Africa. When they moved to West London, they were immigrants. If they had been Uber drivers and not doctors, they would have been migrants. If they had been white American doctors, they would have been expats. Migrants travel on boats, immigrants travel on planes, expats travel on psychedelics. In London or Lisbon or Brooklyn or Berlin, you are the firstborn daughter of immigrants. Not expats.
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Second. By “firstborn daughter,” we do not mean firstborn child per se.
You might have elder brothers. A second-born twin. Your father might have children from—how shall we put it? Children from a previous entanglement. You might not know, or yet know of, his firstborn. But you are the first human being your mother ever met—and this, dear F.I.D., is key—over whom she felt complete and uncontested dominion. You are the first thing your mother could own.
You see, a son will leave, she says, and must: to leave is his mandate, his mission. After all the love that she’s poured into him (she pours school fees—a different liquid currency—into you), a son will leave your mother to love some other woman whom your mother will refer to as a “girl,” very likely the daughter of another Immigrant Mother but ideally, if your mother is lucky, not the first (not an F.I.D., difficult and defiant like you, but a middle child, mild and compliant), and if they have children, this son and that girl, the Dominant Grandmother will be the other mother. The horror. No, says your mother, a son can be loved but not owned, not contained, not controlled. A son becomes a man, and men tend to leave, or else, staying too long, to let down.
A daughter, by contrast, as your mother knows well, born a daughter herself, is a belonging. She belongs to the family, to the village, to the culture, to the Church, to the Old Country, but to herself? No. Because your mother was a girl once, she was owned, too, and though abandoned or betrayed by her owners she believed them when they told her, as they liked to do often, that a woman unowned is unloved. Despite her brilliance and her resilience, your mother still believes that a woman is safest in the world as a wife and that a wife is safest in a marriage as a mother—hence your father, hence her fury, hence you. Point being. When your mother chose your father—if (1) she did choose, and we pray that she gave her consent, and if (2) one can be said to have chosen a man when “no man” was never a choice—if your mother chose your father, she did so in part to be safe, to be claimed, to be owned. As a girl in the Old Country, she could not own herself. As a woman, she sought out a co-owner. Then, given that a mother cannot own a son, her first shot at ownership was you.
By “firstborn daughter” we mean only this: the first thing your mother could own.
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Third. If you wish to belong to yourself, you must forgive your mother. She knows not what she does or has done. But we do.
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Fourth. We know.
We know that she pushed, prodded, pressured you incessantly; criticized, nitpicked, corrected you insensitively; valued your performance much more highly than your peace of mind; scarred you, scared you. (She scares us all, too.) She is sorry, of course, that she made you unhappy, and sorrier that the New Country made you ungrateful, but she doesn’t see why you need a therapist at all, much less one who has something against her. No. Your therapist is the problem, your mother pronounces. Gentle parenting? Covert narcissism? Codependence? She laughs. Politely, you explain that at first you laughed, too. Like all F.I.D.s, you are hyper-independent. But it makes sense in, say, Spanish, where dependencia means addiction: codependence should be called “co-addiction.” Less politely, she reminds you that she doesn’t speak Spanish, as she never had the schooling that you did, or the mothering. No one poured school fees or study-abroad plane tickets or holidays in Málaga and Mérida into her. She speaks accented English and two languages from the Old Country, neither of which she taught you to speak, and so what? If you learned to speak Spanish or Mandarin or Russian, could you not learn an Old Country language? (Touché! But what she doesn’t understand is that your cousins’ taunting laughter doesn’t haunt you when you mispronounce 母亲 or мамочка—that no foreign language makes you feel as foreign as your Mother’s Tongue.) Besides, she pivots, she seldom drinks wine, unlike you, with your full-bodied this, tannic that! Say what you will, but she isn’t an addict—a dependent—so how can you be codependent?
“So you eat the madeleine, but the story doesn’t end there, does it?”
Cartoon by Jason Adam Katzenstein
When you explain that some addictions aren’t to substances but, instead, to online shopping, shit-stirring, little-white-lying, exploding into anger in the middle of an otherwise polite conversation, she explodes. Your mother speaks the language of the bone-tired provider, the culturally oppressed alpha, the captain: commands. You speak the language of the sailor-intellectual: questions. And she doesn’t understand. If you love her then you will obey her, and if you obey her then she will love you. See? Simple. She can’t understand why you can’t understand.
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Fifth. We know. If she is mentally unwell, she refuses to seek treatment, living perched on the verge of rage or tears, clinging blindly to the belief that all her suffering will cease when you cease to expect her apology. You Google diagnoses. Anxiety? Depression? Borderline? Bipolar I? Bipolar II? The Woes of a Brown Woman in a White Man’s World? Will the DSM-6 include W.B.W.W.M.W.? No. Your mother doesn’t practice nonviolent communication. She doesn’t know how to hold space. But what she does know is how to survive in a racist-capitalist patriarchy as a nonwhite woman without a trust fund—and this, we insist, dear F.I.D., makes your mother a conquering hero. What is John Quincy Adams said to have said? “I am a warrior, so that my son may be a merchant, so that his son may be a poet.” (His only daughter, Louisa, died in infancy, tragically. We shall never know his vision for a girl.) Your mother, heroically, became a warrior and a frontierswoman, an explorer, a pioneer. But you are no Henry Adams. An F.I.D. may become a poet, yes, but she must become a corporate lawyer first.
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Sixth. We know. When the mothers of your friends from the New Country coo, “All I want is for my daughter to be happy,” you laugh. Your mother doesn’t want her daughter to be happy. Your mother wants her daughter to be impressive. And you tried, o! We know how hard you worked to earn the woman’s approval, if not her affection or affirmation, with those accolades; your academic achievements in primary, secondary, undergraduate, and graduate school(s) were legendary. Legion. For years you amassed them—all the trophies from the spelling bees, the sports matches, the recitals, the debate-team competitions—as if they were chips at some Vegas casino which you could one day trade in for her love. But when you brought them to the counter, your hands overspilling, you discovered that this freight ton of chips was insufficient, enough to buy her approval in public, yes, but not what you craved—her affection in private. Strangers say, bursting, “Your mother must be proud of you!” Must she? Your mother says, tersely, “Well done.” She loves to hear others praise your tireless efforts but never says, “Rest. You must be tired. Come.” She has no time for your tiredness. If you want to know what tired is then look at her childhood, then look at her marriage, then immigrate from the working class to the upper middle class in just under a decade, then tell her you’re tired. No, rest is for the lazy, the Caucasian adolescent, the indolent, the indulgent—until the age of thirty. Then rest is for beauty, and beauty is for mating. After thirty, rest is important. Your mother, suddenly, is alarmed by your exhaustion. Why must you work quite so hard, stay so late? Yawning holes in your soul you can hide from your suitors, but not static wrinkles.
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Seventh. We know. Your mother finds you beautiful but only when you’re thinner, when your hips are not looking so fleshy, so full, or only when you’re fatter, when your buttocks are fuller, a steak wouldn’t kill you, you’re all skin and bones. Your food is the problem, your mother pronounces. Quinoa? Spirulina? Nooch? She laughs. As she is not eating these foods, you point out, she need not pronounce their names. Then the problem is the food that you don’t eat, she pivots. What kind of immigrant doesn’t eat white rice? It is your food that makes you anxious. Not her fretting or fuming or guilting or exploding over nothing at all, not her ever-running commentary, as if she were a sportscaster reporting the score of your body-mass index, not her aggressively passive questions about your boyfriends or lack of boyfriends or lack of babies or lack of love or lack of REM sleep. It is not your mother but your food that makes you anxious, says your mother, and the anxiety that makes you fleshy or not fleshy enough. These men in the New Country may like Starving Beauties but men where she’s from, where you’re from, prefer curves. (It’s a shame, she adds, sighing, that you can’t see your beauty. In those earrings that she bought, you are beautiful. Never mind that those earrings are not to your taste. Your mother does not believe in your taste.)
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Eighth. We know. If this warrior went to university—and let us pause to acknowledge what a feat this was then, for a woman—there were countless male students, most likely double the number of female ones, in her graduating class. That student-body demographics might limit the Options is a difficult concept for your mother to grasp. (This is how she refers to heterosexual men—as the Options, though never as optional.) All she wants, she says, is for you to find love. As if love were a thing in hiding. A low-lit mezcalería with an unmarked door. In fact, she wants other things also. (1) That the love be a man—not a woman—who loves to flatter your mother. (2) That the love—if not a great love, then a good-for-now love—lead to childbirth, and quickly. She’s being honest, she says in her wounded-bird voice, not unhelpful, as you say in yours. And it’s true: she honestly doesn’t care if you carry regret, just as long as you bear her a grandbaby. What you think but don’t say is that, to have this grandbaby, you will have to have sex with a man—the same kind of man, lo, the same kind of sex, that she once so doggedly scorned.
Or has she forgotten?
