Essay on Belonging by Stella Hayes

Essay on Belonging

By Stella Hayes

Last summer for 22 days I belonged to my mother: her post-op delirium, paranoia, disorientation, & a Tzvetayeva kind of “too muchness.” When my aunt Yana called to say that after falling, my mother needed hip surgery, I got on the next plane to LA. From her I inherited the attributes that stood in vivid relief when I saw her in a hospital gown, embedded in a bed; she was in the middle of telling one of the nurses her story, how she had to leave everyone she loved behind — her parents (my grandparents), including my Refusenik father — to make the heroic journey out of Ukraine alone with me & my sister. I was relieved to hear this old story, with its worn inciting incident & plotline, a story that always ends with my father dead. It said to me that for the time being, she was alive! But in the back of my mind I was waiting for something to go wrong. At her age, statistically speaking, the odds of her surviving were low. So I waited as in turns she got worse & better, released to a belonging of an inanimate kind: hospital bed, in a hospital room.

Who belongs anywhere or to whom? Women and their children used to be property of the father and in marriage passed on to the husband. I belonged to my father, my picture attached to my father’s — imposed in the right corner, bracketing human space & time, and when we left without my father, I belonged to my mother, inside her —, Soviet passport, I was theirs, in property. A materiality. A being on a Soviet document. It said Jewish, a nationality. Legally. It made me Jewish by association. A religious designation didn’t belong on a passport. But we were property, we belonged to a state.

I have a quarrel with belonging. I don’t travel light. My belongings are too important, with a weight of a mother not wanting to let go of a child. I keep asking my mother if I belong to her. It’s a given, Stellachka, her endearment pinging on a text.

I hope belonging is universal, not just the pain point of refugees, immigrants, internal immigrants, and the Other.

My mother got better. I went home to my family. For 22 days I belonged to her again just like I used to.

Stella Hayes is a Ukrainian-American and the author of the poetry collection One Strange Country (What Books Press, 2020). She grew up in Brovary, a suburb outside of Kyiv, Ukraine, and in Los Angeles. She earned a creative writing degree at the University of Southern California and is a graduate student at NYU studying for an M.F.A in poetry. Her work has appeared in Poet Lore, Poetry Project’s The Recluse, Stanford’s Mantis, The Lake, Prelude, and Spillway, among others. She translates and edits poetry and fiction. She’s co-editor of Ukraine/Russia inaugural issue on belonging for Through Lines Magazine. She served as assistant fiction editor at Washington Square Review (2021-2022.) She’s online features editor of Dispatches from Ukraine, and poetry editor, at Washington Square Review.