Finding a Love That Heals

I was less interested in a romantic partner when I dated. Because I never lost hope that my deeper dream would become a reality—and I’d become somebody’s mother.

Each week, The Queer Love Project publishes an original essay. Want to submit your essay and add to our growing archive? Find our submission guidelines and more here.

Photo by Polina Tankilevitch

Nikkya Hargrove is a LAMBDA Literary Nonfiction Fellow and has written about adoption, marriage, motherhood, and the prison system for The Washington Post, The Guardian, The New York Times, and Scary Mommy. She has worked for social impact nonprofits providing support to underserved communities throughout her professional career. She graduated from Bard College and lives in Connecticut with her wife and three children. Mama: A Queer Black Woman’s Story of a Family Lost and Found is her first book.

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I had a type when it came to dating. I’d find myself smitten with how her straight, soft brown (or blond) hair touched my skin whenever we’d kiss. Or how her stories, the ones she felt safe enough to share with me, did not define her, but allowed me to understand that she too was broken. I often fell for the women who were either unsure of their sexuality or had dabbled a bit, like one does when perhaps they try out hot yoga and by the third or fourth class, they realize it’s just not for them.

Her baggage though, never quite felt as heavy as my own. My mother was in and out of jail throughout my childhood, pregnant four times by four different men, and my father committed his life to serving his country, in the Army, and he too became a ghost in my life. Being in a relationship allowed me to care for another person, that person, often unavailable to me in the ways I needed, just like my parents had been. Their love for me was conditional on their ability to be emotionally or physically present in the ways I needed them to be.

I clung to my dreams. Often revisiting the daydream I’d had countless times as a kid. In the dream, I’d be standing in my cozy, well-decorated, farmhouse-style kitchen. I’d be wearing an oversized gray sweater, and in my hands, I’d be rolling my homemade chocolate chip cookie dough into a nicely rounded ball, proud to have made them from scratch. The first batch of cookies, a perfect golden brown, are being pulled out of the oven, oven mitts on, and just then my tween kids, two to be exact, walk through the front door, deep in conversation, as orange and brown leaves follow them inside. It’s fall, my favorite season, and as they gather around the island in the kitchen, nothing else matters but their happiness, and mine, the freshly baked cookies giving our home the perfect scent. In my dream, my kids, and my house were the only two things I needed.

A partner never showed up in my dream. I hadn’t yet imagined what she would be like, how she would come to understand my complicated life, if she’d accept my baggage along with the person I was, despite it. I’d never reserved a spot for her in my dreams. In college, I dated plenty and allowed myself the freedom to settle into my queerness, as a lesbian, as a woman of color, as the daughter of an incarcerated woman…carrying around the secret within my family.

I dated and never lost hope that one day, my daydream would become a reality and I’d become somebody’s mother. If romantic love was in the cards for me, perhaps I’d find that too, but what happened, I could never have dreamed.

My mother died the year after I graduated from college, leaving behind her fourth child, Jonathan. In 2006, as a recent college graduate with plans to attend a pre-med program in Erie, Pennsylvania, I decided to pause my rather premature engagement to my most serious girlfriend and uprooted myself and my future to show up and take care of my mother’s fourth child the moment he was born in late November of 2006.

In the short four months of his existence, mentally, I’d tried, best I could, to prepare myself to live out my daydream, to become his mother, and to do so as a single woman. Who, in their right mind, would want to commit themselves to the insanity of loving someone who had mama and daddy issues, someone who feared abandonment, and someone who chose to be a parent to keep a baby out of foster care?

And yet, a huge part of me knew how deserving I was of love. I never lost hope that perhaps, one day, I’d find love. In the raising of Jonathan, in the sleepless nights and the bottle feedings, through the late payments made on my bills, to the disconnection of my cell phone to the unemployed days that became our normal, from excited recent college graduate to burdened single mother who had yet to mourn the passing of her mother who died at the age of 42, I had to redefine who I was and what I wanted my future to be. It no longer was my future alone, but Jonathan’s too, and I had to consider what he deserved.

As my mother’s body settled into the red clay soil in central Virginia, I began to breathe a little easier, knowing that the only person I had to care for was Jonathan. It gave me a little room to think about myself and what I wanted my “new” life to be. I decided I wanted to feel wanted, in some warped way, like I’d hoped I’d made Jonathan feel like he mattered to someone…to me. And now, I wanted someone to matter to.

Four months after my mother’s passing, I decided to create an online dating profile and began emailing and chatting with a woman who taught sixth graders, who shared her hopes and dreams with me, who was honest with me from our very first exchange. I too was honest with her, sharing with her the reality of my situation, the colorful childhood I had, and how I wanted to be pregnant and have babies, to create a “normal” family. Dinushka shared with me stories from her homeland of Sri Lanka. I shared with her the insecurities I had because of being raised by my grandparents.

One month after our first email exchange began, we met in New York City. Our lunch date quickly turned into something more. As we walked the streets of Manhattan, sweating in the humid summer air of September 2007, our deep “like” for one another—the like that grew out of our email exchanges—sunk into a comfort, skipping over any lustfulness I’d imagined we’d find ourselves wrapped up in. She knew me and I knew her in the deepest of ways—ways that had nothing to do with sex.

We had a soul connection that gave me hope that somebody might just love me back.

We spent the night together that September in 2007. And by the morning light the next day, we knew that our first date had turned into a relationship. By the third week of our relationship, we’d said, “I love you,” and by that October, she’d met Jonathan. We were an instant family. And there was no turning back.

We were creating something beautiful, something out of love, something blessed by God. We were building a foundation for what kind of future we wanted. We knew that the glue holding us together was love, what else could it have been?

In time, Dinushka, the woman I’d fallen in love with, had also fallen in love with Jonathan. We did not plan on being parents, being a family, but there was no denying what we felt for one another. When Jonathan looked into her eyes, the love he had for her was palpable. And when I saw them together, in my heart, I felt that Dinushka’s calling was to be his mother.

We were the parents he needed, and he was the son we were meant to mother. What we found in one another, what I found in Dinushka was a comfort, a knowing. The love she was able to give me (and still does) provides me with a place to call home, in her heart and soul.

It is because of the love we have now, that I now know, it’s what I deserved all along.

Nikkya Hargrove is the author of the memoir Mama: A Queer Black Woman’s Story of a Family Lost and Found

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