Something Like Beautiful by asha bandele Read Free Book Online

life. We mulled over the kind of schools we would want our child to attend, the suburbs or the city, places our daughter should see in the world, how many more babies we wanted to have someday, and whether I should work once Rashid came home. We talked and sometimes we struggled through things. We visited and revisited all sorts of theories about what makes for quality parenting. But we did it together, we did it as a couple. We did it just like any other brand-new mother and father.

Chapter 3
family tree
    B eyond the weekly sojourns up to the prison, in all of the ways that matter the most, in the same way that Rashid and I discussed the future as any other new parents, so too did Nisa and I live like the majority of new mothers and children. We were completely attached, fascinated by each other. Okay, well, perhaps she wasn’t fascinated by me, but I was by her. Still, I beamed when I saw how easily comforted she was by the sound of my voice, the voice that had been speaking to her for nine months in utero, the voice she heard first every morning, last every night.
    Even as she was barely weeks old, everything Nisa did seemed to me to be a miracle, a moment to be captured, shared, bragged about, held forever in my heart. Her discovery of her hands, the different faces she began to make, my God, I thought, no other child ever before, no other child ever after. I thought she was a genius and suddenly understood all those other parents I’d met over the years who always had ten or fifteen pictures of their children there at the ready.
    Humans will learn more between the time we are born and when we turn five years old, than we will for the rest of our lives.
    Nisa’s developing brain was taking in more information than I would ever again, even if I lived for another sixty or seventy years. It was a daunting process to witness and often I couldn’t imagine how hard it was, the toll it must take on the smallest among us. Early on, there were those who could not believe what they perceived to be my unusual patience with Nisa, but it wasn’t so much patience that I had, but reverence. And that reverence was rewarded; Nisa’s first word was “happy.”
    And she was, despite whatever challenges that she did not know were complicating our lives, Nisa was such a happy baby. And watching her discover life invited me to do the same, to see possibility everywhere and embrace it. That is what our beginning was, Nisa’s and my own, in the living colors of our home, and it was magic and joyful and perfect and if I was ever that blissful before, I don’t remember it.
    I only know that we were at the edge of summer, the days just before June after a spring in which there had been snow in April. But now it was May and the city was quietly alive in a pastel warmth and we strolled in it, through it, across it.
    Years earlier an acquaintance of mine had referred to her two-year-old son as her best friend. She was a single parent and her son was her constant companion in cafés and parks where she went to write or just sip coffee or tea. Back then I thought that she lacked proper boundaries. How could your child be your best friend? I wondered but did not say.
    Having Nisa taught me that what my friend meant, all those years ago, wasn’t that her son was her best friend as in, a steady emotional support, but best friend as in, there is no one else I would rather be with most of the time. Not that you have muchchoice when you’re raising a child on your own, but what I know I feel and what I believe she felt was that there was no one else who could bring us more pure joy than our children. I know there’s no one else whose laughter gives me such breath and movement. No one.
    Of course there are friends with whom I enjoy spending time without my daughter, but when I’m with Nisa, even to this day, it’s all brand-new, a fresh journey, and I am all too aware that I will wake up one day and