A Postcard from Ribka’s Bedroom: The lack of air in a vacuum

My hometown was a vacuum: It had over 200,000 people (and 400,000 graves), but still, it was suffocating. It was small enough that if you jumped too high, the brim of your head would jump-start a cloud into raining. It was knotted enough that any gossip would unravel the town into a game of telephone.

Objectively, it is big, beautiful and grand. My relatives in Tigray tell me they would do anything to live in a town like Arlington. I get it. In elementary school, I would have done anything — anything, like killing someone and burying them in the wood chips — to be a rich kid in Arlington. Or at least to have the freedom of one.

I can’t really blame my parents for how strict they were when I was growing up. I guess I can only resent them for it. I can count the number of non-familial outings I went to in elementary school on one hand (spoiler alert — only three fingers). In middle school, early curfews and check-in phone calls lingered over my head like a damning sword. I couldn’t fathom my mother’s imagination or the situations she anticipated if I left a two-mile radius of my household.

California is pretty far from Arlington, Virginia (Reader, if you can’t count, trust me, it is more than two miles away). The distance from my hometown and California threatened to dissolve the glue of my household. Sometimes, when one of my relatives would mention college, I could see the pride rise in my mother’s chest. Then, when someone would mention the big, grand elephant about to finally escape the room, I could nearly see the oxygen leak from her chest. When she hugged me from behind, I could almost feel the holy honor and hellish terror from her grip on my left and right shoulder.

There’s sort of an impending doom in independence. You’ll be free from your parent’s grip, but you know that you will fall soon and there will be no one to one to pull you up. You could fatally crash at any moment and at the bottom of your death certificate, you’ll find your own signature. Instead of your mom’s, at least. I saw it coming my whole life and it still baffled me that I was the sibling who’d ended up furthest from home. I feel like I fell through a booby trap and ended up here. That has to be how birds end up so far from the nest — on accident. Mother bird tries to spit food in your mouth — sometimes, she spits on you on accident.

The thing is though, I have to remember my mother left Tigray with its talons still in her. I think in her eyes, on her leash, she felt that only adults made autonomous decisions. Part of me suspects that she saw adulthood as sacrifice and suffering, and perhaps, I was old enough to make decisions, but I was not old enough to suffer. Who am I to hold her fighting for my safety against her? Who am I to complain about scratch marks that never stray below the surface?

It held no matter to me when I was younger — sort of like how vacuums are devoid of anything tangible, still vast and inescapable — but I have come to appreciate my mother’s tough love. I may complain about her tight life vests, but I have learned to love how her restrictions resemble her arms hugging my chest.

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