Work Text:
We all know the infamously aromantic “Do you love my mother? Thiago thinks so” / “Not the way he thinks” exchange, right, but do we ALSO know how aro relationship anarchy the ensuing exchange is too:
I said, “Your second mother is…” Client wasn’t the right word, not anymore. “My teammate.” I could see I had to clarify. It was really hard finding the right words. “Before your second mother, I had never been an actual member of a team before. Just an…”
Amena finished, “An appliance for a team.”
That was it. “Yes.”
“I see. Thank you for letting me ask you questions.”
This is MB putting to words just how important Mensah is to it, what their relationship IS to it without social shortcuts or euphemisms or any other bullshit. They are teammates, and that means more than anyone outside the relationship would know. She made it feel like its contributions and opinions mattered to the team. She offered their reliance on it like that meant it could rely on them, an interdependence, a being part of something as someone. She was the first person to ever make it feel like it mattered. I’m fucking tearing up just thinking about that.
And there’s no script or euphemism or simple social shortcut to say that, is there? To say, “That person who’s important to you, she’s important to me because she took the time to treat me with dignity and respect when everyone else had overlooked me. She saw me as my own person, and I answered that recognition. She saved my life, and I saved hers, not because I’m obligated to save her, or because she’s obligated to me, but because we care about each other.” What a whole narrative to explain a relationship- and yet to cut it down to “love” or even to “she’s my client” would be to flatten everything that is important about their relationship into something that it isn’t. The things that are important about their relationship- and in this case, the things that Amena deserves to know about how her mother and her mother’s SecUnit are important to each other- need to be explained in their own terms, without bullshit, without glossing, without hiding behind a pre-existing shape.
It’s about finding your place in a network of relationships, isn’t it? A network effect. Not a hierarchy, no insistence that relationships must take certain shapes, no pre-set expectations imposed upon relationships from outside, no expectation that this or that kind of relationship must be more important than other kinds. No hierarchy, no rules.
That’s the best of what relationship anarchy offers. Just people figuring out how they relate to each other in the ways that make sense for them, with the words that make sense to them, how to fit together in the great web of connections known as family and community.