The Bridge Between
The bridge between who you are and who you must become to survive is never straight. It twists through memory, scent, and silence. Mine begins with two women who shaped me in ways words rarely touch.
Granny Rosa Lee smelled of Elizabeth Taylor’s Passion—a thick, floral cloud that clung to her dresses—but beneath it lingered the sour sting of urine. She was a big woman, and by her bed sat the jug she used when getting up was too much. That smell wasn’t cruelty, it was truth. A layered truth of a body that had carried too much life, of a woman who lived in Los Robles apartments, where survival mattered more than appearances. She turned the simple into sacred: fried chicken golden enough to hush a room, deli meat wrapped in pink paper from the Apple Market, cereal softened with half-and-half from the 99 Cents store. To me, it was magic. To me, she was magic.
She cried every time we left. “I’ll never see y’all again,” she’d say, rocking with tears brimming in her eyes. My mother dismissed it as dramatics—“Your granny is crazy; we’re just going up the street”—but even at five I could feel something heavier in her words. She knew prophecy when she spoke it. We moved to Arkansas, and she never saw us again.
Except once. Years later, in a nursing home that reeked of bleach and piss, I saw her again. She was drugged or dazed, her once-loud voice silenced into mutters. My grandfather asked, “Rosa Lee, you know who this is?” She turned her head, slow, confused, then a smile broke across her face—wide, radiant, familiar. “Yes.” Just one word. But in that word was every hug, every toy from the 99 Cents store, every bite of fried chicken. That “yes” told me I was still hers. Then her face shifted into disgust when she looked at my grandfather, a reminder of the distance between Palm Street and Los Robles, between the life she had and the one denied her.
If Rosa Lee was raw, unfiltered love, then Grandma Hazel was cultivated grace. She smelled of garlic and honey, warmth layered with prayer. She lived in the mountains, in a home that held more money, more order, more expectation. With her, I felt a different kind of belonging, one built on heritage and ritual. She made medicine from her kitchen, faith from her garden, legacy from her table. Her love was quieter, steadier, like something you inherited rather than reached for.
And then there was my mother, the bridge and the break. She carried control like a weapon, like armor. She believed her method excused her madness, that survival itself was enough proof of love. She gave us more than many, and for that, she expected silence. Any mention of pain or longing was treated as imagination, weakness, ingratitude. She told me once, half-joking, that I was a mistake. I laughed with her, but the little girl inside me did not. That little girl still longs for Rosa Lee’s hug. Still longs for a mother who would say, “I’m sorry,” and mean it.
My mother wasn’t a bad mother, but she wasn’t a soft one. She was a maintainer, a manager of appearances. She reminded me of a teacher who claims to love her students but resents the job—dutiful, but detached. She raised us into survival but left us to figure out identity on our own. That gap, the silence between maintenance and nurturing, became the space I had to cross.
I carried it in my body. Years of stress turned into cancer, pain manifesting in the flesh. The bridge between Rosa Lee’s prophecy, Hazel’s prayer, and my mother’s control lived inside me. And yet, I am still here. Writing. Reaching. Remembering.
Identity, I’ve learned, is not a straight line. It is a collection of smells, tastes, voices, and absences. It is the sound of Rosa Lee crying on Los Robles, the taste of deli meat wrapped in pink paper, the scent of Hazel’s garlic and honey, the silence of a mother who did not explain. It is the body breaking and the spirit rebuilding.
I am not just my mother’s child. I am Rosa Lee’s grandbaby. I am Hazel’s granddaughter. I am the sum of what was given and what was withheld. And though the bridge between who I was and who I had to become has been crooked, I am learning that crooked bridges still carry you across.
