Jedah Mayberry

Up reading, revising, traipsing through lost pages. 📚

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Here’s the thing about secrets. The more you amass, the easier they become to keep, one secret piling on top of the other until the whole lot of them is immovable, like stones packed into the riverbed as time passes you by. The first little lie you tell gnaws at you. You suspect everyone has caught on to the lie, is able to read every thought to cross your mind. Every smile you offer wants to tell the lie, every frown to utter a confession.

The biggest lie I ever told was that I had stopped loving my mother. I told myself I had stopped, knowing full well that I had kept on loving her. Loved her the way a reluctant smile turns to greet the first blush of sunshine, warms to her touch, smiling at the vague recollection of sun-shiny days. I loved her even after she turned her back on me, cast me from her home to live out in the world... She shouldn’t have put responsibility for my upbringing on my grandmother’s shoulders, shouldn’t have tasked her with taking me on. I was her burden to keep, her daughter to raise.

And still I loved her, even as the lie cut loose inside my head, masquerading as though I never had a mother.

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Sun Is Sky examines the close circle of mothering, from mother to daughter then back around to grandmother. No three women are more alike yet more distant. They work tirelessly to distance themselves from each other's ways. But none of us is afforded the luxury of sifting through the features we wish to inherit. Hang onto the eyes, the mouth and nose then hand back any shortcomings we perceive, any frailties, the tendency toward self-indulgence. We cannot be them and not be them in the same breath. A mother with her ways is integral to the daughter's outlook on the world, the same way the sun with its warmth and light is a central part of the daytime sky.