Dear Mother, 

I’ve started this letter a thousand times and still the words escape me. I saw a video of a brother who wrote a poem for his father, it was relatable. I considered doing the same, working through the disconnect while making peace with the shattered pieces of who we are, and of who we could have been. As I sit and look over those late-night scribbles, they reflect the heart of a broken little girl who wanted to be held and nurtured. I won’t say that little girl is dead and gone, she’s not, but she’s learned to hold her own heart with the tenderness the world refused to show her. I’ve ridden the waves of trauma that come with being a Black girl, a Black woman, in a world that seeks to destroy us the moment we take our first breaths. I wish you had been there to lift me up when the world assaulted me physically, emotionally, spiritually, and sexually… the tears I’ve cried have always felt like little prayers, begging for anyone to hear and hold me close.

 
In the dark silence, I’ve learned no one comes when we cry out. I wish you had told me there would be no one to build me up and that the world would take every opportunity to tear me down. I wish you had provided me a tether to hold onto when I’m drowning under the weight of all this life requires of Black women. But, if I’m honest, we’re in this mess because no one told you either that our vessels are more like prisons in a world hellbent on our destruction. Who and what ground you down until there was nothing left? I wish I knew. I wish I could fix all that we’ve endured. To sew up our wounds with the ease I patch up a tattered blanket, but we can’t be patched as easily. The tears run deep, weaving into each generation and screaming to be rectified. 


Life has taught me in your absence that there is no going back, there is only the painful motion of forward with the wounds bleeding like breadcrumbs to a past we can’t fix. If the world had told us we mattered and meant it would you have been able to battle your demons and love me the way I needed? Would those demons have even existed? Even in this moment all of this sounds like selfish cries from a lost little girl. I know these answers. Our trauma exists because to the world we were consumable and disposable. I wish I could tell you it’s changed, but it hasn’t. My heart is traced with stress lines from the fight to exist in this body freely and safely. I draw lines in the sand and people tell me those are walls. 


I call them safety. 


Did you ever feel safe? I remember the first time I truly felt safe. It was last year. Yeah, I know I’m almost 40 but time is funny in this body. I broke down on my bedroom floor and felt like the fight was over.  They expect us to carry the world on our shoulders and smile through the death and destruction they unleash. I was tired of smiling when I wanted to cry and scream.  My husband came in and kneeled in front of me, he spoke not a word but wrapped his arms tight around me and I wept from a place I didn’t even know existed.  I clawed at his clothing.  I screamed.  I ached.  The pain we’re expected to carry like crosses upon our backs is fucking unbearable.  As I released decades of abuse the fog started to clear.  It’s easy to blame ourselves when the trauma compounds, but nestled under the trauma was a light screaming for air.  That was the first night in my life I slept without a nightlight… The first night I knew I didn’t need to fear the darkness, it needed to fear me. 


I’ve been tending to that flame since. It’s been difficult, they really don’t want us to survive out here. I want more than survival for us, I want us to thrive. The world tried to blow out both our flames. I’m sorry no one sees the way they’ve tried to snuff out yours.  I understand now that your rage and violence are the mechanisms you’ve developed to survive in a world that doesn’t want you to survive. They demonize us for the very skills they force us to develop to endure the violence they casually unleash on us daily.  I understand you couldn’t protect me, it was work enough to protect yourself, the world fractured us and there was only so much you could do. 


You deserved better.  We both deserved better.  All Black girls and women deserve better. 


We deserve a world that values us. 
A world that sees our pain and changes. 
A world that lifts us up instead of tearing us down. 


I can’t undo what’s been done, but I promise to do everything in my power to nurture my flame so it burns as a beacon to others so together we can burn down this world and build a world deserving of the magic we possess. 


Until then, may this letter be a spark, and may you know peace one day. 
​
All my love, 
Rayven​

Healing ain’t pretty. 

It forces us to take an honest look at where we’ve been and where we wish to go and adjust our behavior accordingly. 
It means building fences and leaving strategically placed doorways.

Healing ain’t pretty. 

It calls us to be the villain- so we can be the hero of our own story. 
With each wound we lick, another appears begging us to hear its story. 

Healing ain’t pretty.

It’s maddening. Life changing. 
It challenges us to ask, “who is this person looking back at me?”

Healing ain’t pretty. 

It’s affirming. 

It’s necessary.

But it ain’t pretty.

​Five years ago I sat in a hospital room gazing upon the body that brought me into this world as machines kept her alive.  She eventually woke up and will spend the rest of her life in a nursing facility, a shell of the woman she use to be.  As the wheel of life turns and I age, checking off preexisting conditions with each new year, I try to give myself some hope.  “You’re not her” my doctor mutters over his notes, doing his best to reassure me that while we have the same conditions we aren’t living the same life. I can count on one hand the number of alcoholic beverages I’ve had in the past two months.  I’ve never touched hard substances. I still mask in public spaces, and around those outside of my vetted bubble of trust.  I don’t overindulge, I exercise regularly, and I operate from a place of love, compassion, and an occasional ass-kicking.  I take my medications every morning, attend every appointment, and see every specialist I’m instructed to see.  

I do my best to do everything right to combat genetics and the stress of systemic misogynoir, and yet at night when the house is quiet and I’m left to my own thoughts dread fills my spirit as my memories drift to her.  The fear that encompassed every fiber of my being as I grappled with estrangement and my own mortality still lingers five years later.  

I sometimes wonder if the fear is merely guilt.  I’ve spent my adult life doing my best to prove I wasn’t her.  I wouldn’t abandon my kids, I would fight my demons and win, and the demons wouldn’t steal the moments that make life worth living from me.  When my brother and I arrived five years ago at the place she called home, a transitional apartment complex, those in charge weren’t even aware she had children.  Nothing in her records indicated that she once lived in the south where she walked her children to a small pier and told them stories about Medusa, or sold Avon and let us lick the bowl after making brownies.  No one knew about the butter on the walls from thrown dinner rolls, or the specially named belt that left welts covered by stockings with little hearts.  

No one knew anything.  

That decade of life didn’t exist for anyone but us.  I tried my best to soothe my inner child while reminding the adult me that I’m not her therefore I can’t end up like her.  As I packed up various bits and pieces that were her life and saw pictures I never knew existed, a life lived without us, I did my best to breathe through the rage, sadness, and fear.  

Death is the great equalizer and always does his best to remind us to stay humble, and even after he packed his bags and left us in limbo I struggled to unpack my baggage.  

“You’re not her” I whisper into the wind every chance I get, hoping it will echo back and appease the anxiety that grows with each passing year.  At the beginning of this year, one of her sisters reached out to me and asked if I would write to my mother.  She thinks it would be good for her to hear from me.  But what does one say to the person who left the hole that depression nestled into?  What do I tell her? 

She missed 28 years of my life.  There’s a lot I could say.  

Births I could recall, the strength I pulled from a place I didn’t even know existed inside of me.  Parenting moments that challenged me to rise above my own abusive childhood to create a home where my children felt safe and secure.  I have failed, god have I failed, countless times at being a decent human being and I still get up the next day and try again. I could recount each failure and the lessons learned.  I’m stubborn like her, but I have compassion that neither of my parents ever showed me.  I’m a ray of fucking sunshine hellbent on making the world a better place before I take my final breath.  I could tell her all the ways I’m not her, I could show her who I am, and I could tell her that with every choice I make I still can’t shake the fear that my path will still end in a hospital bed, in a dark room, alone.  

Those who love me will assure me that my fear is unfounded.  Even if I experienced the same medical emergency she did I wouldn’t be alone when it happened.  I would be rushed to the hospital, I would have people fighting to ensure I got the best care possible, and when I finally opened my eyes I would be surrounded by the living embodiment of all the love I’ve tried my hardest to put into the world.  

I’m not her and yet as I stand at another crossroads, to either reintroduce myself or to continue pretending that we’re just people we use to know, I find myself questioning the decision I made over 20 years ago to go no contact.  I know where she is now and I can contact her whenever I want, that’s all I wanted when I was younger to the point that I would cry myself to sleep from longing.  Now I have it, I have what my heart ached for and I don’t know what to do with it.  Instead, I’m left wondering if true healing is in forgiveness granted on my own terms.  

Does a simple letter have the power to grant us both peace?  Only time will tell, but I’ll never know if I don’t at least give myself the opportunity to say what my heart never got the chance to speak all those years ago.    

Nothing is final until the curtain closes and the coffin is lowered into the ground.  Until there is always an opportunity to write a new version of your story.  Here’s to a new story.