Chapter 35
NOW: MAGGIE
The arrival of spring kept them busy. Well, kept Diana more busy than Maggie, though she still wanted to help.
Her little corner of the orchard was still standing after all.
Nothing had died. Maggie had started a habit of walking around the orchard in the mornings, just enjoying the change of spring in the air, the bird song, and secretly observing how the whole operation functioned.
There was a certain rhythm the orchard had fallen into. Diana’s spring to fall staff had come back to work, though Maggie had been pleasantly delighted to learn that she paid everyone salaried wages, full benefits, year round. She supposed that was another of Jay’s influences.
“I pay them for their availability and their skill level, not every hour of their life,” Diana had said when Maggie had asked her about it.
And it made sense, Diana built into the business.
Sure it didn’t maximize profits, but Diana wasn’t her parents.
She was not going to maximize profits at the expense of human dignity.
Maggie sometimes wondered what the older Blakes would think of how Diana ran the place, ran the business.
How she and Julia did. She imagined they’d be floored, always moving through a world that was happy to move around them, not understanding what it would be like if it didn’t.
Not understanding that in order for the world to move around them, it had to ensnare others, others who would never have had the chance to even begin to build what the Blakes had built and been able to capitalize off of for generations.
Maggie hadn’t fully understood it or really thought about it until one day in one of her history classes a Holocaust survivor was a guest lecturer.
An elderly woman told her story of almost being discovered when some neighbors had hidden her and her sister in an oven.
Her luck ran out and she finally had been shipped off to a concentration camp.
While there, she had been loaded up on a cart full of children that they were going to execute as Germany came closer and closer to losing the war, but the cart had hit a bump in the road and she’d fallen off.
Upon hitting the ground, a passing nurse had dropped her skirt over her, and she had been returned to her mother elsewhere in the camp.
How when the war finally ended and her camp was liberated, the Black American soldiers who had been sent in first had carried her and her surviving mother to safety because they were too weak to walk.
How that had been the first time she’d seen a Black person, and why the mere sight of them filled her with safety, instead of the fear everyone seemingly had, when she finally made it to America.
Maggie had listened to that woman’s words with tears in her eyes, realizing how everything, her entire existence and the generation after, had come down to these moments of kindness and compassion.
Her neighbors who shoved her and her sister into the oven at great risk to themselves.
The nurse who’d thrown her skirt over her.
The Black soldier who carried her to safety.
Kindness and compassion had changed the way she saw certain people, had shaped how she saw them and the world around her.
Kindness and compassion literally saved her life, and allowed her to live on and create a generation after her — had propelled her bloodline and humanity forward.
This is what Maggie often thought about in the early days of dating Damien.
He came from what was largely unheard of at the time, a wealthy Southern family.
Maggie knew most Black Americans, like all Americans she supposed, were not wealthy.
But what hadn’t been brought into sharp focus for her was why.
Sure, slavery ended, but then came Jim Crow.
Then came the torture and burning of prosperous Black people and towns.
So you learned how to not be too successful, less you caught the eye of the Klan.
Not to mention, Maggie’s mother had been one woman who would make off handed comments about slavery ending and integration and what were Black people still complaining about.
Maggie more or less was disinterested in her mother’s musings as a teenager, but meeting and speaking with Damien’s family had made her ask questions for the first time.
So slavery ended, did Black Americans also instantly gain generational knowledge and access to education and wealth?
So segregation ended, and civil rights were granted, but did that instantly undo all the generational oppression experienced by people?
“People forget that I am the first person in my family born with my civil rights protected by the federal government,” Damien would often say, which had blown Maggie’s mind.
Everything about them did. Damien’s family had wanted more, and all that it came down to was that his grandfather, who was an agricultural worker on what used to be a plantation, and in many ways still was, Maggie knew now, was able to get an advance from his boss so that he could pay for his son to get a college education.
And it just so happened, his boss wasn’t racist enough to not give him the advance.
That was it, a singular moment that changed his family’s life came down to whether or not someone was that racist.
It was not lost on Maggie that the two people she had picked as partners were technically everything her mother had wanted her to find: wealthy with established family backgrounds. But one had been a woman and the other Black.
They each had the wealth Maggie’s mother had dreamt of but had never worked towards.
It had always been easier for her mother to claim the ‘ease’ of the life of people like Jay, of immigrants of color, which couldn’t be further from the truth, than it had been to look in the mirror and work to end whatever generational curses haunted her, the ones Maggie was still spending time undoing with Lauren on a weekly basis.
She worked out many of the thoughts she was currently having on her morning walk around the orchard, convinced more and more every day that as corny as it sounded, love was truly the only path worth traveling. It was the path of kindness and compassion. It was the path that propelled you forward.
And she was trying to move forward. While she and Diana openly spent time together, she still had some hangups about telling Maya, and this was another core focus of her sessions with Lauren.
One that after this lovely walk she was going to have to sit down and continue to unpack: how to come out to her daughter.
Afterwards, she was excited to join a meeting with Julia, who she hadn't seen yet in person, and more nervously, Jay and Michaela. But she had been intrigued by the idea they had about founding an after-school program, a community center of sorts, with the goal of one day getting it accredited and becoming a full-fledged school with kindness and compassion at the core of their education. Maggie had been surprised when Diana had suggested it and more so when Diana had mentioned that Jay had been excited for her to join. “They need all the help they can get, and well, I think you might be better at that, than, well, whatever it is you’re doing to that little corner of yours,” Diana had said teasingly.
Despite the teasing, Maggie was thrilled to have something to sink her teeth into and help in any way she could.
She had seen how Maya was treated growing up, knew of Damien’s past, and echoes of that survivor lived with her and were loud enough to make her know how truly powerful such an institution could be.
For every Maya, Damien, and survivor of the Holocaust, there were too many who didn’t make it, one way or another.
And wasn’t access to education about improving one’s odds?
What was the point of living in one of the richest nations if everyone didn’t have access to a chance?
But first things first, she needed coffee, and she needed to emotionally prepare herself for her therapy sessions.
“That’s a very jarring thought,” Lauren said knowingly as Maggie told her about the revelation she’d just had before the session.
“Yeah and I think maybe that’s part of it? Like aside from being afraid that she’ll think her whole life was built on a lie or on my ‘closetedness’ or whatever, there’s real…” The word lingered on the tip of her tongue.
Lauren gently coaxed it out. “Shame?” she said quietly.
“Lots of shame,” Maggie agreed.
“We’ve talked about shame a lot Maggie, and it is a powerful deterrent, a powerful emotion to have. Be gentle with yourself here, what aspect of the shame is coming up for you right now?”
Maggie took a deep breath. “That I’m pathetic.
I mean, I am her mother. I am supposed to protect her, be brave, wise, and all.
How can I claim to be able to encourage her, protect her, love her, when I couldn’t even do that for myself?
” Maggie felt the tears she’d grown so accustomed to in these sessions prickle her eyes.
But these days they were welcomed. She found them oddly cleansing. Healing even.
“Oh Maggie, that is a lot to take on. This idea of who you’re supposed to be as a mother. How about we look at who you are as a mother? Tell me about Maya.”
“Well she’s smart, strong, beautiful—and she knows it, funny, creative and driven,” Maggie said, sniffling as she smiled with pride.
“And you said she knows all of those things? Does she think you think all of those things of her?”
“I tell her every moment I can,” Maggie nodded.
“And she is in the world whole and doing wonderful things, because you gave her the chance to. You encouraged her, you supported her. Oftentimes, we have these expectations of being a ‘super mom’ or some mythical idea of the perfect parent. But let’s look at the facts.
All of the things you couldn’t do for yourself, say to yourself, give to yourself, you did do, say, and give her.
That’s a marker of parenthood right? The mothers who forgo food so their children can eat.
Or the parents forgo a new pair of shoes so their little ones can take an art class.
Sacrifice to give our little ones the best chance and life possible?
You did that, even if you had things you needed to work through for yourself.
You didn’t make her pay for those things at all, you gave her everything you could and that’s all we can do.
And if we do it, that’s what makes you a good mother, right?
You have been holding on to your pain and secrets and you could have made them hers, but you chose not too. So give yourself a break.”
Lauren, seemingly always aware of how much she’d been talking, sat back a little in her chair.
In the pause, Maggie felt Lauren’s words sink into her.
Each new depth they reached she felt like they untied a weight she’d been carrying for so long.
She put her elbows on the table over her laptop, and when the tears finally spilled over, she placed her head in her hands and let them fall.