Vignettes for Mother's Day and hearing voices break
Something I've been working on // vignette-style reporting
Oof, it’s been a while. I’ve been up to more than I can probably handle lately, considering I can hardly keep track of the days of the week let alone each deadline on my calendar. But hey, here I am, surviving. I’ve convinced myself the best I can really do is wake up in the morning.
Luckily or unluckily depending on the day, I had a big assignment that required dozens of interviews and emails and a can’t-miss deadline to push me a little further than the comfort of my bed last week.
For my former paper, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, I put together a series of vignettes for Mother’s Day that’s live online and in print this Sunday. Spoke to about 11 folks across metro Atlanta on being separated from their moms during this cryptic pandemic. One daughter, dependent on her mother’s health insurance for disability care, will need to make big decisions about an upcoming surgical visit without her mom around. One son hasn’t seen his 84-year-old mother, who lives in a nursing home with dementia, in months. When he suddenly lost his sister just a few weeks ago, he had to tell his mom over the phone. I talked to an Ethiopian refugee who just wanted her mom to realize her sacrifices have not gone unnoticed—and a Colombian immigrant who filed for her mom to come to the United States last summer told me the process has stalled due to the administration’s new order on green cards and visas.
Vignettes are a nice way to capture the diversity of a region, both in people and in experiences. It gives you a chance to look through someone’s window and see how they live with permission. The purpose, I guess, is to realize the neighbors and strangers we interact with or view in our peripherals or neglect to pay much attention to—they all have stories collecting dust in their hearts. It’s just a matter of asking for story time.
There is magic, I think, in asking several people a series of the same questions—who are you, what is the current situation with your mother, have you been able to see her at all, what was she like growing up, what are her biggest quirks, how do you communicate differently nowadays, what’s changed in your emotional relationship during the pandemic, if you could say anything to her right now, what would it be?—and hearing each soul take a few breaths, a few seconds of silence, to ponder. I always expect an iteration of I love her. And I’m always surprised to hear a little more than those three words, as powerful as they may be on their own.
I love the sound of voices breaking when the breaking feels more like rearranging pieces of a glass puzzle. Every time you break the puzzle and rearrange it, the light hits each shard a little differently. New colors are born, new texture forms. The puzzle isn’t what it used to be; it’s that and more. That’s what I think of in those few seconds of silence between each question. How vulnerable will this person be for me today? Where will a breaking voice lead them?
A few of the people I spoke with are still reeling from the interviews, days later. You made me stop and think about all the layers of my mother and I’s relationship, said one. A series of thank-yous in my inbox, which make me feel strange. I am not doing anyone a favor here; this is my job. But the thank-yous, I’ve learned, are for the chance to answer questions no one’s asked yet. A chance to dig for an answer at all.
Sometimes I think I’m made for this kind of stuff. I like asking the questions that make you break and mend and remember. My friends know this to be true: I will ask you about the last time you remember being happy right in the middle of a conversation about sex toys. During a debate on global politics, between bouts of silence, I will ask you to tell me where in life you feel most neglected. I want to know what makes you feel most vulnerable and how long you let yourself swim in that vulnerability before you feel like drowning and I want to know if you’ve let yourself drown a little, too.
The questions seem strange if you don’t know me well, if you don’t know the way my mind wanders. The questions are eery on first dates and usually saved for the third or fourth. But the hearts that unfold and the stories people tell in response always, always surprise me.
Don’t wait for a reporter to come to you, please. If the story is tugging, tell it.
—fiza