Fireworks
I was born on the Fourth of July. A day of parades and lawn chairs, and kids on their parents’ shoulders. A day of fireworks.
July 4th, 1976
2 years before I was born, my mother was already a mother. She was 21 years old.
“Let him cry,” my grandma said, and she slapped my mother with open hands. Then, hit her again, with tight fists. My grandma had short knobby fingers, the tips hooking left. She was sturdy, stout, and strong. She wore muted house dresses, pea green or mud brown, her grey hair, parted sideways, held tightly in a bun at the nape of her neck.
Phip, just a toddler, fell on the ground, hard, while playing in the backyard. He was nearly two years old, with wispy auburn hair and tiny light freckles across his nose. He wore cutoff overalls with holes in the knees and liked to push dump trucks across the patchy grass. He wailed.
Dusk descended. The July fireworks were set to go off soon.
My mother wore a yellow sundress, a long red braid down her back. She dropped the fresh laundry she’d pulled from the clothesline, dried by the summer’s sun. Cracked wooden clothespins scattered among the grass. She ran to him—to hug him, kiss his scrapes, whisper what mothers say when their children are hurting. Before she reached Phip, her mother, my grandma, lunged to block my mother from her sobbing son.
My mother fought her off. She was just five feet tall and a slight 100 pounds. Grandma scrambled, pulled at my mother, ripping her dress. My grandma almost always won these battles. But on that day, my mother pulled herself free. She drew Phip into her arms, up over her pregnant belly. “Shush, shush, shush…”
My grandmother tore Phip from my mother’s arms and pinned him on the ground with her foot, as if he were her prey. Then my grandma turned and beat my mother, bloody. “Just let him cry,” she said.
Fireworks cracked overhead.
July 4th, 1978
I was born on the fourth of July. When my mother went into labor she walked to the nearby hospital. Labor didn’t linger, and when I emerged, her doctor—seeing my bright red hair stained with blood—announced, “She’s beautiful! A firecracker!” My mother named me Anna—Annie as she liked to call me. With me on her chest, the fireworks casting colorful shadows in the hospital room, she felt free.
July 4th, 1986
My mother was raising four children, Phip, Mary, Danny, and me. My grandma was a menace to us all. Her small townhome, sparsely decorated, reeked of danger. She had a bowl of mint candy placed on a sideboard near the kitchen, never to be touched. If she caught one of us taking a piece, she would slap our hands until they blistered. She would cook turnips and canned asparagus for dinner. Mary couldn’t stomach it. She gagged at each bite. But we had to finish our plates.
As we waited for the fireworks, my grandma stayed at her home, knitting a wool blanket in the humid air. In our kitchen, my mother sat on a wooden table and drank glasses of orange juice and cheap vodka. That was how it was, my mother drinking in the kitchen with the four of us roaming the backyard, chewing mint leaves and walking on the wire fence, like a tightrope.
The fireflies and sparklers cast everything in gold.
Danny, the four-year-old baby of the family, ran wild, as kids past their bedtimes do. Phip tossed white snap fireworks on the ground making everyone flinch at the erratic cracking. Mary and I knelt over ashy grey fire snakes. I liked snakes the best. I lit them with a match, the strike creating a sharp spark. But those snakes grew slowly, silently, freely.
Mary lit a long sparkler which burst tiny flares into the night. She twirled, making spiraling circles and diamonds. Danny ran like a barefoot banshee. Mary held the sparkler in her outstretched arms and Danny darted across the yard with his lit flame.
Then Danny’s sparkler pierced Mary’s underarm. She screamed, clutching the bloody groove. Danny sobbed. I left the silent snakes to calm them. Phip ran inside the house to get my mother. He was our leader, always calm in crises.
Lit sparklers, strewn across the backyard, went out slowly in the cool damp grass. I could hear the booms of the neighborhood fireworks going off while Mary and Danny screeched and wept. I held Mary in one arm and Danny in the other whispering to both, “It’s okay, it will be okay. I promise. Mommy’s coming soon.”
My mother stumbled outside, dazed and furious. But the foggy, fiery rage lifted when she saw us all huddling together.
July 4th, 2014
Decades later, when I was pregnant with my first child, my mother’s drinking days gone, she was sober and clear-eyed as she told me about her mother beating her when she was pregnant with me, my brother trapped under my grandmother’s foot. She spoke indifferently, like the witness to a crime, not the victim. “Your grandma is a tough woman,” she said. “She’s like a soldier, always ready to fight, as was her mother before her.”
I threw up, forcefully. No other action seemed right.
As my firstborn grew inside, I welcomed the nausea—I read that morning sickness meant a healthy pregnancy. But this vomit was different, like expelling a poisonous root.
The story haunted me, a horror show. I replayed the tape often.
The clean clothes hanging on the clothesline in July, just as the sun started gaining strength. Kids’ clothes and my mother’s pink and baby blue nightgowns hanging peacefully. A yellow bucket of wooden clothespins off in the corner. The blooming summer flowers—lavender, zinnias, and blue hydrangeas—framing the wiry grey fence. Pale sage and wild mint growing under the porch—the smell of spearmint leaves ever-present.
My grandma scanning my mother’s every move. A young mother, who was trying to find and follow her instincts rather than her history.
July 4, 2015
And when I birthed my first child, I tended to every whimper, every wound. When Patrick—Paddy as I liked to call him—was nearly a year old, I took him to see the local fireworks show. After the explosions started, he clutched me tightly. Scared of the sounds, curious about the colorful lights. I gathered the quilted blanket and left the park. We sat inside the car with the windows up, muting the bursts and bangs. But Paddy loved looking at the lights: golden streams mixed with bright purple, violet, and pink. Glitter streaming down like shooting stars.
It was past his bedtime. I whispered the same lullaby my mother sang to me: “Go to sleep my little one, it’s time to go to bed, I’m so glad you have a place to lay your weary head.” I watched the fireworks and wept.
About the Author
Anna C. Benyo is a writer and public health professional based in Skillman, New Jersey. Her work explores intergenerational memory, motherhood, and healing—how personal and ancestral stories intertwine to shape identity and resilience. She has spent much of her career advancing maternal health policy while writing essays and poems that trace the quiet inheritance of trauma, recovery, and reclamation. “Fireworks” is part of a larger hybrid memoir-in-progress about breaking cycles and reclaiming freedom.
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