Brett never let go of the fact that I only invested 2K of my own money into SPOKE when we were first starting out. The suggestion was that I was cheap, or that I didn’t believe in the brand. But that’s about what to expect from friends and family in the early stages of a startup. You don’t go for broke with a new business. It’s an inadvisable and rash strategy for anyone, let alone a single mother. Brett would have known that if she had bothered to do any research into what it took to incorporate SPOKE. And hey, at least I could write a check—Brett had squandered her portion of the money our mother left us in her will at a breakneck pace.
In the end, it worked to my advantage that Brett was too focused on the message of SPOKE than the nuts and bolts of building SPOKE. Before I put in my measly 2K, I spent half that on a lawyer to help me draw up a partner agreement that delineated me as her cofounder. I suggested Brett hire her own counsel to read the dense print over before she signed and accepted my check, but she didn’t have the resources to do so and moreover, she couldn’t be bothered.
My sister is very good at the ideas and selling stage, but there are so many uncreative, unsociable aspects to starting your own company. You have to write a business plan, come up with a mission statement (which I did and which Brett ridiculed mercilessly), secure funding, register your business name, file your papers of incorporation, set up account and tax records. All the unfun stuff. Brett gave me the brush-off whenever I broached anything vaguely resembling an accounting decision with her. She didn’t want to hear it when I told her we had to diversify our revenue stream if we wanted to provide Imazighen women with e-bikes, which cost nearly double to manufacture than the first-generation bikes. I wrote out a break-even analysis, with charts and graphs and visuals that my sister’s unique but easily distracted mind could compute, trying to get her to understand that if operating costs increased, then our profits needed to as well. Yoga studios have low operating margins and a successful history of throughput in New York City, meaning, they attract enough customers to cover the fixed and variable expenses of rent and personnel.
Sure, fine, yoga, she said in response to my painstakingly researched and thoughtful presentation on the matter. Sure, fine, no thumb grips then, she said, when I told her that if we wanted to upgrade the beta bikes with thumb grips they wouldn’t be ready in time for the Morocco trip. I wasn’t asking Brett to make a decision between giving the women bikes with twist grips or no bikes at all, I was suggesting we push off the Morocco trip entirely until we could provide these women and children with a safe and rigorously vetted product. But when I spelled it out for her, she pushed her jaw forward so that her bottom teeth protruded over her top, the same expression Mom used to make when you told her something she didn’t want to hear (I’d rather take Spanish than Latin, I’m thinking about switching my major to art history, I was invited to the prom). Just put a rush order on it. Brett had sighed, irritably, as though this obvious solution hadn’t been the first thing to occur to me. When I tried to explain how I had asked, but the factory we paid to meet our small-batch manufacturing needs simply didn’t have the manpower, she had flung her hand across her forehead and performed her tired old line. I can’t deal with this right now. I’m the talent!
It was funny when she said it in the beginning, until our roles became defined: I was to be stuck with all the slog work and none of the talent perks, like the show and the book deal and the 30K speaking fees. I was over it, and I was broke—something Brett continued to pretend she was long after she wasn’t, because she hadn’t figured out how to manage this new dimension of her image. She was not rich, not like the other women, not yet, but she could afford to gift Layla with a Mansur Gavriel bucket bag. To be clear, I wasn’t angry at Brett for buying Layla that bag, I was angry at her timing. Layla had gone behind my back and disabled the app I use to limit her screen time just a few weeks prior, and the bag seemed a missed opportunity to encourage good behavior. Why couldn’t it have been a carrot we dangled to motivate her to get her grades up? Or better yet, why couldn’t she have set aside that five hundred dollars for the trip to Nigeria I’ve been saving for since Layla turned eight? Layla’s hostility toward me for not knowing her father is natural and justified. Since I can’t give her him, the least I can do is help her forge a connection to her country of origin.
Brett is always describing Layla as so perfect, an angel, a gift from above we don’t deserve. Not only is that not true, I would worry if it was true. I’m proud that it’s not. I’m proud that my daughter sneered I hate you when I took away her phone for a week. I’m proud that she fought me tooth and nail when I told her Mr. Gavriel would stay in his Barneys box until she pulled up her grades (being sure to remind me, once again, how embarrassing I am). These are things I never did as a kid because I lived in mortal fear of displeasing my mother. Truly, when I look back on my childhood, one emotion beats brightly and loudly above the rest: dread. I was shown love when I followed the rules, and I was deprived of love when I did not, and how I dreaded those times when I did not. Kids should be disciplined, but they should never be unloved.
Kids should also tell their parents they hate them, they should groan at their bad mom jokes. They should bang doors and push your limits and break your rules. Healthy adolescents use their parents to sharpen their arguing skills, to learn how to assert themselves, to advocate for freedom and autonomy. Healthy adolescents who know they are loved no matter what aren’t afraid to use their voices. The ones to worry about are the quiet good girls who do everything mommy asks without complaint or question. I should know. I was one of those quiet good girls. I was the unquestioning, obedient daughter, in awe of Brett’s complete and utter disregard of the rules. I know now it was because she already felt unloved, that she didn’t feel she had anything left to lose by disappointing our mother—might as well have a little fun while she’s at it. It crushes me to know Brett grew up feeling so neglected, but in a way I’m envious of her, because she developed a kind of resilience that was not in place for me when our mother died. Without her rules, without her militant disapproval acting as my North Star, I lost the road. And so, as Brett likes to say, I went off the rails just a little bit.