Let this be my tefillah, a Kaddish for a born child, a kind of Ta-Nehisi Coates letter from a Brown Finnish mother. Except not as well-structured, not offering one single answer or piece of advice, written in no particular order—a fumbling effort straight from my heart. Sore, broken, and written straight to you from my heart as a mother.
For almost your entire life, it’s been the two of us. We’ve kept each other going. Since you arrived, not a single day has passed without me waking up to a feeling of sheer amazement that you came from me; that I have a child of my own—no, a daughter of my own; that I’m a mother.
You’re like the Finnish translation of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye I hoped Nana would get me for Christmas a long time ago. She hid it from my prying eyes so well that by the time Christmas arrived she couldn’t find it anymore either. One blazing hot summer’s day many, many years later, she found the book while clearing out the wardrobe and gave it to me. It had been there all along, even if we didn’t know and hadn’t seen it, and it was just as good as I had known it would be.
The best thing about you is the evenings, when you read books aloud to me. You know Annie’s Mum is Angry and Maisy Goes on a Sleepover by heart because in recent years we’ve read those two and nothing else. Am I ever angry with you, I ask, even though I know the answer. No, or, yes, a little bit. Would you like to go on a sleepover sometime, without Mummy, I ask, even though I don’t want to know the answer. No, or yes, a little bit.
You always want to know how my day was and what I’m reading at the moment. You listen, quietly stroking your chin and poking my ear with your finger as I read to you from Hilton Als’s White Girls:
Like dancers, none of us gets over that figure we see in the practice mirror: ourselves. Choosing your twin gives you that reflection forever – or as long as it lasts. Perhaps SL will leave me for one reason or another, but he will never go away: I see myself in him and he in me, except that for him our twinship is essentially private and silent. So how do I justify putting our we-ness out in the world by writing about it? I can’t. It’s something I’ve always done; SL accepts this in me: half living so I can get down to really living it by writing about it. I wrote about my first kiss more fully than I lived it. I wouldn’t know what I looked like in relation to SL, my twin, if I didn’t describe it on the page.
And so on and so forth. You listen, even though it’s in a language you don’t understand, but maybe one day you’ll read that book yourself, or this book, and you’ll understand. Maybe you won’t.
“Who loves you most in the whole wide world?”
“Mummy.”
“Who do you love most in the whole wide world?”
“Mummy.”
“How do you know?”
“Um, I just know.”
“Where do you feel it?”
“Mummy feels it in her ears, but I feel it in my cheeks”
No, the best thing about you is the afternoons. You know eleven letters of the alphabet. Twelve numbers. You run an ice cream kiosk from under the dining table chair and it never sells the flavours I ask for. For some strange reason, they’re always sold out and I have to make do with strawberry; strawberry, the taste of ear inflammation and the antibiotics I took for it as a child. Two things you didn’t have to experience, even though I didn’t breastfeed you. Your Elsa escapes from behind the tulip vase to the hills in Frozen because she no longer feels like being a good girl. The hideously expensive cushion cover I got in Paris becomes a nappy when you’re playing babies. From time to time a boutique opens on my bed, offering a range of wares, including Diptyque candles that smell of fig and jasmine, Doris biscuits, Marc Jacobs’s Daisy perfumes, and maracas. Your doll’s house contains a beaver, a Moomin wearing a tallit, and the feet of Bratz dolls. You want to sellotape everything. To you, everything looks like it’s broken and worth mending. To me it all too often looks simply broken. I’m sorry.
And sorry, while we’re on the subject, that I sometimes throw things you’ve made in the bin. Sorry that we don’t have a balcony or a toaster. Sorry that an ice cream or two doesn’t count as breakfast. Sorry that our family only has one adult in it who also needs to use our time together for laundry, cooking, cleaning, and paying bills. Sorry that, in my intense search for a second pair of hands, I’ve sometimes demanded that you act more mature than your age. Sorry that no one loves me.
Actually, the best thing about you is the mornings, at four or five, as you turn onto your side and raise your left knee towards your chest while the espresso machine buzzes and my fingers dart almost silently over the keyboard as I’m struck by fear: what if this never works.
But “Mummy,” you call to me in your sleep, in your demanding duck voice, especially if the rubbish collection van is struggling along the street; its orange light flitting about outside below our window like a persistent butterfly.
And I say ten magic words:
“Go back to sleep, Mummy’s just doing some grown-ups’ stuff.”
For two minutes, everything stands still. The world stops; neither of us moves. Don’twakeupdon’twakeupdon’twakeup, I chant to myself. Notnownotnownotnow, I pray (I admit it). You breathe shallowly for a moment and then your dream wraps itself tightly back around you. The little finger of your right hand straightens while the rest of your fist stays clenched, which tells me you’re falling asleep. You’re out of my reach, in some better place, a place where you don’t need me, a place where I always know what to do and have the energy to do it. You keep going and so do I, we both keep going, always just as far away from each other, always just as incredibly close.
You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me, so I try my best to make your life good enough, secure enough, happy enough.
I remember when you were born. It was Toni Morrison and Eeva Kilpi’s birthday, although I didn’t discover that until much later. Your birth is the only thing I want to remember of this life when my time here is over. I don’t want to die because I don’t want to stop being able to remember the day you were born. You were born earlier than expected so we could have as much time together as possible. I was both completely ready and completely unaware of what I’d got myself into. Luckily, you’ve managed to teach me with your patience.
I spent ten hours staggering around the labour room in utter silence, holding onto the bedframe and wondering whether you’d slide out from inside me and onto the floor. But then you were there, and I got you in my arms. I put you to my breast and kept saying, “It’s all. Absolutely. Fine,” even though you weren’t actually crying. Your black eyes were flickering as if you were blind. We looked at each other.
It’s still rare for you to cry. Sometimes I don’t dare look you in the eyes because they look sad and it’s my fault. I can’t always be bothered to listen to you or understand you or meet your needs, and it hurts you and makes you snappy. Sorry.
You are wonderful because you’re you. That’s the miracle of life: you’re you, unique, different from anyone who came before or after you, yet at the same time you seamlessly continue our family line of women. What a coincidence that all of us have ended up here, all together. For that we can thank wars, instability, fascism, religion, love, life, globalization, and God.
One of us is white, the other one brown. But in spite of that—or maybe precisely for that reason—there’s something I have to tell you: if you ever become a mother, you won’t just gain a child. You’ll also gain another bundle, another quiet, patient, snappy companion. It’s something people never talk about, or at least they only talk about it as a joke and as a taboo that’s supposedly been shaken off. This other bundle contains forbidden feelings, confusing thoughts, contradictory expectations, disappointments, guilt, and shame. I’m not really sure what to do with these feelings. I’ve carried this bundle on one hip while carrying you on the other, pushed it along through the sleet in the compartment underneath the buggy and pushed it on the swings in the park. I’ve rarely written about it and spoken about it even less, at least in a serious straightforward way.
Let this be one of those rare occasions when I write about some of the things tucked in the folds of that bundle. On the one hand, you have the right to decide your own identity and story. I’ll keep fighting for you to have that freedom my whole life. On the other hand, I already know that I won’t necessarily be sharing my experiences as a brown woman with you, or you with me. And you’re my own child from my womb, the only thing in the world I’ve ever loved and believed myself capable of protecting. Somewhat naively, I imagined that this could only go one way—that while my mum could be white and that was fine, my child somehow couldn’t.
Once upon a time, I was born of a wonderful, serene, grey-eyed, silken-haired mother as a small, hairy reddish-brown bundle. I grew into a big, hairy, reddish-brown bundle. These days, I’ve begun looking like my mum, from head to toe, just with a different colour scheme. No one seems to recognise this, of course. But do they need to? We exist regardless of whether anyone’s looking, your Nana and I.
You, on the other hand, were born as a small, hairy, porcelain bundle. Your colour, your hair, and your features are completely different from mine. There’s no one I feel a deeper connection to than you, but there is a difference in that we’re not always perceived as a unit. When we’re at the airport they don’t always believe you’re my child, which is why I always take your birth certificate with me. Sometimes it confuses people when they realize you’re calling me Mummy. Sometimes it confuses me too. It doesn’t confuse you, though, and that’s all that matters to me. To you, I’m Mummy, just like Nana is Mummy to me regardless of what anyone else thinks. Although, it does matter that our language, culture, religion, history, and bodies only partially match, even though you’re my only biological offspring. It will affect you in ways I can’t imagine, and it will be hard to talk about, if my own girlhood is anything to go by.
Sorry that I didn’t take your side at the day care, when they asked which of the country flags was yours and I listed all four of them, but the teachers just picked one for the presentation. Sorry that I’ve been spoken to in front of you as if I was the mother of the brown children in the yard whom we didn’t know.
Soon you’re going to stop being too small to understand the racist incidents that happen to me when you’re around. You’re nearly always around and I’m always Brown, so they will keep on happening. I was around your age when I started asking Nana why she was crying and what the lady or the man had just said. Let’s make the most of it while we can, because once you start to understand, you won’t be able to go back to not understanding. When you bite into that fruit, it’ll have nothing to do with you or your thirst for knowledge; it’ll be shoved down your throat.
Back when I was pregnant, I always imagined you looking like me. I’m the centre of my own tiny world after all. You turned out to be a white child, which to me felt exciting, interesting, and somehow a little sad. With you and Nana, I feel like the burger between two slices of white bread. I would have liked an ally for myself, someone who understood. It turns out that I’m an idiot. Mums don’t know it all. Sorry for that.
When people imagine other people they’ve not seen, they imagine them as looking similar to themselves. Before I knew you, I’d spent years imagining how I’d talk to you about stuff, what tools I’d give you for dealing with different situations, how I’d get you to feel pride in your brownness. Now it looks as though I won’t be sharing this heritage with you, at least not in the way I’d imagined. It’s strange. Really, truly bizarre. What on earth am I going to teach you then, that’s not in my world? What’s my role, other than to love you? I don’t know what it’s like not to be racialized. If you want, can you reject me? There are historical examples of that happening. Do you see yourself in me? Do I truly see you?
Then again, even in your brief lifetime so far, the definition of what counts as whiteness and Finnishness seems to have narrowed, so you might find my self-defence techniques useful after all. I hope you won’t, obviously, but I want you to know that my entire arsenal is there ready for you.
I only want good things to happen to you, but that’s not possible. I’d like you to love yourself and others, but also to be honest; it’s difficult.
Mother-daughter relationships are like broken phones. Guidance, advice, praise, and expressions of love pass from one generation to another, from the lips, through the palms, into the ear, and from mother to daughter. By the time they reach you, too many trauma-induced misunderstandings have messed up what you originally meant. There have been long, hard periods in my life because I couldn’t identify with my mum, your Nana, in being white, despite our similarity in nature. I couldn’t understand that people’s disbelief in the fact that she was my mother didn’t make her any less my mother. I wasn’t open to us sharing our two completely different experiences on our narrow chopping board, a board that was cut into each time I was called a holiday souvenir, a bastard, a P-ki, wrong-coloured. It cut through her skin, shedding blood, and she had to go and wash it out. Cold water gets rid of bloodstains. I’ve been snappy on her behalf. You’ve been the same kind of guardian angel to me.
Maybe one of the biggest sore points that can come between mothers and their children arises when there’s no feeling of looking into a mirror when they look at each other, particularly through the eyes of others. It doesn’t invalidate selfless love, but it does make a difference, as if something almost irretrievable is missing. I can’t describe it in more detail, as I don’t know anything different from it, but I say this because I know. I know that some of your pains and experiences will pass me by—and I’m sure some of them already have—because I can’t identify with them. I’ll be dismissive, I’ll talk down to you. I’m going to try not to, but experience tells me that I sometimes have trouble putting myself in white-passing people’s shoes. I’m sorry. Call me out on it. Point my privilege out to me. I’m sorry.
Maybe all families repeat the same, preordained mistakes over and over, like nooses fastened around our necks by previous generations, like songs that keep playing on a loop in your head. Even if you lead me to experience and think about my body and roots from a new perspective, and deal with my internal child or internal mother, your job is not to be a bandage, nor do you need to rewrite the family history. It’s enough that you’re here. It’s enough that you’re you.
You sleep just like my Nana, Helmi, your great-grandmother. Very seriously. When you’re asleep you look like she did when I saw her for the final time in her coffin. Before you go to sleep, you want me to tell you stories about where you were when I was a child. Were you in space? Were you in my imagination? Were you with Daddy that weekend? When I was little, I also wanted to know what it was like in the old days, in Karelia, being evacuated. When you’re a bit older I’ll tell you about it. I’ll take you to Jääski, or Lesogorsky as it’s called now, and Oravala village and show you what it’s like to sit on the stone foundations of an invisible house, silently eat rye bread with salami, and avoid making eye-contact with passersby, looking at the birch tree growing in the middle of the invisible cottage. I’ll tell you how painful it is to be a homeless Finnish Brown Girl Daughter.
You sleep just like Safta Chuli too, crying for your mother in your sleep; for your ima. Do you already know a bit about her, how her mother trekked from Yemen to what is now known as Israel, but back then was part of the Ottoman Empire, and died before Safta really got to know her? I’ll be here until the end of my life I promise, telling you what it was like to be a Girl there, where Girls didn’t get much schooling but could pick up Spanish from watching telenovelas. What it means to be a Girl in the diaspora, under an occupation and in a welfare state; to be both at home and an outsider at the same time.
Then you’ve got Nana. Your wonderful light-skinned, blue-eyed Nana, with whom you eat potatoes and caramel bars, go to the shopping centre to buy toys, and go to Maccy D’s for an apple pie and either a hamburger or French fries, as you can’t manage both, dear me no. I’ve done the same thing with her thousands and thousands of times, and I know how nice it is. How nice Nana is. I know how much she loves you because she loves me just the same way. The way I see it, the two of you are exactly the same. I’ve always felt like me and Mum don’t really know one another, and I’ve thought just the same about you, and that’s why we have differences of opinion, but it’s a great honour for me to have your companionship for this life. I’ve always felt like you have your own thoughts and secrets and I only see a fraction of them. That’s okay of course, although I like to pry.
You’re my self-control. You are perfect. You’re independent, smart, and vocal. You’re good at inventing brand new games and names for babies. Uncle Mandarin. Rivka. Ritu. Amanga Necta. You’re ridiculously beautiful; you’ve got a ridiculously beautiful nose that looks like a button for a lift. You’ve got any number of wonderful aunties that you take after. In your own way, you’re like another little sister: self-evidence, soul, joy, a doll, grace, a teacher, an empress, a paradise.
Do you want to hear a story? A story from before you existed? No, I hadn’t even met Daddy back then. No, you weren’t even in my tummy.
Vantaa, 1988. I was sitting on a plastic garden chair on Nana’s balcony watching her, dressed in a turquoise shift dress, as she watered some stocky geraniums. She started telling me how babies were born. A man and woman love each other very much. The man puts a seed in the woman’s tummy, and the seed starts growing into a person. Then she pulled the dress tight around herself to make the bump visible and told me that in the winter I’d have a little sister or brother. I was four years and four or five months at the time; everything I know about my life before that time comes from photos. So my first definite memory is linked to my little sisters.
I can’t claim to have been delighted at the news. I remember asking Nana if it was boy, and if we could call him Yrjö and chuck him in the bin. I remember her laughing and saying you couldn’t put babies in the bin, they’d just get out again. To which I suggested it would be better to put the baby in the freezer in the kitchen. I wasn’t allowed near the freezer. I’d been made to promise any number of times not to go there and take ice creams out by myself so that my fingers wouldn’t get caught.
When Simcha was born, no one chucked her anywhere, except into my room. Like the Mona Lisa, Simcha always smiled, even when she was asleep. At home, this led to a standing phrase: “Why’s Saara laughing?”
I was simultaneously proud and jealous of Simcha. One time, Simcha, Nana, and I were at the supermarket. I rocked on the shopping trolley handlebar until the trolley flipped up and Simcha, swaddled tightly, slid down into the net bag hanging from the handle. On another shopping trip one man shouted, “Bring ‘em back from your holidays, did you?” at Nana. As the older sister I felt I ought to have been able to stop that kind of shouting, but to this day I’ve not succeeded.
We’ve never been thick as thieves, me and Simcha, but we shared a bunk bed. One time, Nana and Saba went to see Schindler’s List at the cinema and Helmi came to babysit us. We secretly ate too many sweets, Carmit toffees we’d hoarded from the pick and mix store at Ben Gurion. I vomited on the wall and all the green bile dripped down onto Simcha’s head in the bottom bunk. Years later, when we moved to a different flat, we found my sugary saliva encrusted on the skirting board.
We didn’t play together much, me and Simcha, but when we did we played with Barbies, Legos, or Monopoly according to our own rules, or played war, shops, refugees, intifada, women with big boobies, orphanages, or Beverly Hills, 90210.
We were fairly normal sisters. I don’t know for sure because I don’t know any different, but I think so. Nine years passed, and I turned into a teenager with an eating disorder and Simcha just became annoying. And then we got a little sister.
Lelu’s arrival wasn’t a given. We were forever hearing about how hard your Nana and Saba were trying to bring her into this world. We went as a family to make a humble request in a crack of the Wailing Wall. Wearing a headscarf and with my knees covered, I prayed with my palms against its golden, cool surface: “AngelsblessandangelskeepangelsguardmewhileIsleepgivemeblueeyesandgoodeyesight.”
Nine months later Lelu joined us, named literally after the original source and eternal paradise, and metaphorically after the sacrificial place of Isaac.
I saw Lelu for the first time when she was six hours old, in the same maternity clinic where all of us were born. Before I’d even got through the door, I burst into tears. Those tears haven’t stopped to this day.
By then, at the age of thirteen, I was already well aware of what awaited us all. I knew there would be a sad ending; none of us could avoid it. I knew that we all would cease to exist at some point, and that people end up alone, even sisters. I knew I couldn’t protect my little sisters in any way from anything, but that I’d still try, I’d tirelessly wear myself out on their behalf. Our mother was white, and as the oldest I had to try to be their Brown mother. It was an unspoken agreement, and I didn’t succeed in keeping it. That all three of us were P-kis, n-r bitches, y-ds was a source of consolation but also despair. This is also how I felt when they eventually asked me if I always forgot I was brown as well.
Simcha and Lelu constitute my tribe, my community, the group of people I know will always put up with me even though they always say they can’t. The two of them, in a world of billions. The two of them: the first Finnish Brown Girls I ever met.
And now there’s three of you. Little sisters, daughters, children. My responsibility.
People are always telling us Brown children born in the 1980s that we’re trailblazers and bridge-builders. We’re not, though. We don’t necessarily want to be, and as long as the blood circulates through my body, I intend to make sure that you don’t need to be either—unless you want to. You don’t need to pave my way for me, or pave this country’s way. Your personal does not have to be political, unless you want it to be. You have the full right to your body, your identity, and your story, even though we share that narrow chopping board, because I’m the one who gave birth to you.
It’s enough that you’re here. It’s enough that you’re you.
Gladys, Cat-dog, Neshama.
Osher.
Buba.
Elah.
Metuka.
Yafati.
Elsa me Lishbor et ha kerach
shel Ima.
With love,
Mummy.
