I realized along with this generational narrative of traumatic separation from your firstborn in isolation. Isolation is like many things abused by “capitalism, imperialism, patriarchy and white supremacy”. Again, bell hooks first educated us with that poignant assembly in quotations to describe America, not me. I know that if I continued HEART Rituals on the same path, I would not be here. I know that the lockdown was the ugliest blessing to my sense of self and mental health. Entrepeneurship in an ecomomy that has made care a currency is in an echo chamber of “profit over people”. I cannot move like that. I cannot reduce people to a transaction. If I had continued supporting transitions, I would have drowned under the networking, marketing, branding, politics, and all the corporate terms being forced onto small business owners just trying to make in their communities. But, here I am. Alive and attempting to understand how I got here, and where I am going.

I am one of four children of my mother that I know breathed air. I say this in this manner because I do not know my mother’s full reproductive history.  She was luminous. My mother was the epitome of divine magical brilliance. When Tomi Adeyemi alliterated Zelie’s memories of her mother, I saw my mother, my grandmother. When I first met my mother and knew her so much so I know that my hand is mine…she was already my older siblings’ mother. Though I believe my conception to be at the helm of unconscious choice, i was told at points that I was requested. But when I came home far too fair to be family…then the request became rejection. But, my mother never rejected me. But there was a clear hierarchy amongst my siblings…let me elaborate.

My mother was the firstborn of seven children. She was brilliant, loving, blunt, and endearing. From what I know of her before I was born, she was the athletic (the beginnings of a track & field legacy in our family) and was considered one of the most attractive people in Kinloch. My paternal grandfather has six progeny with my mother’s mother. He blindsided my grandmother when she discovered he filed for divorce after my second youngest uncle was born via a notice in the newspaper. She then met my step grandfather, with whom she had her seventh. I genuinely believe that my mother was sexually assaulted. I know from my own living, education, and interaction with other individuals living with that trauma. And sadly, I believe it was our family and community that failed my mother. I believe that my mother tried to disclose her pain, and was abandoned. I believe it was and is our culture of forcing Black bodies to bear suffering in silence. I believe it is and was rape culture blaming the victim for being “too smart/attractive/grown”. I believe it was and is generational trauma of choosing provision over stopping abuse. While the wave of The Civil Rights Act was washing through the country, my mom’s biological father abandoned her, his first born.

There was and it this deifying belief in those in power to “do the right thing”. I have found far too many that do what they believe is right for them and theirs alone. I have found that many still do what they think is right based on their understanding of their god/gods/goddesses. I have observed that those many, the far too many and the people that deify them refuse to question their own motives and actions. l I believe that despite his love and respect for me, my step-grandfather was a/the possible perpetrator. There are so many people uplifted for images manufactured and marketed as success, though based in bondage. The false narrative of the nuclear family hides so many harms. Those “family over everything” “keep what happens in our family in our family” folx who need to get some therapy need to know something off the jump bout me….there is no such thing as a redeemed rapist over here. God forgave them. And if you are insulating someone that has committed sexual assault, I do not know you and you need help. I will not treat any human less than human, but we ain’t sharin’ air if I have a say in the matter. Stay the fuck over wherever you at. If God decides to open a sinkhole and gobble them up, I ain’t see not a thing, Black Palestinian Jew Jesus. I loved my Paw-Paw. But, when the math mathed…I could not unsee the forest and the trees. And for y’all “God forgives and so should you” weirdos, let me know when you are down to sit next to or in front of your church elders if you knew their incognito AKA private Chrome/Firefox/Safari innanet search history. I’ll look at him as redeemed when y’all read that Bible and match up Jesus’ image. When y’all get off of X/Twitter, i’ll reconsider. When y’all stop sexualizing and adultifying Black children. Again, I do not know that blue eyed blond European dude that be in all these churches and marketing materials... 

In choosing between rearing siblings and escaping pain, I think my mother tried both for a while. She excelled in spirit, academic areas, and socially. Diabolically, Reagan gave her a parasitic escape in a package that ensured his hold on her. No one would ever see the source, only the shame. I think about how we are going about life as if millions of people have not died from crack/cocaine, as if millions were not snatched by COVID…AND STILL BLAME THE DEAD. I digress, back on track. I believe that my mother loved her first marital partner, and it was reciprocal. With them, she had my two eldest siblings. The apparent narrative was the older two were the “wanted kids”, born of two high school sweethearts that married when my brother was conceived. But after one of them began to attempt to work through their shame before the other, it collapsed. This is the marketing package explanation. Oddly, I know I was born of rebellion. Maybe, I was the result of a rebellious rebound? My progenitor was not well-liked, but being attractive was the predecessor to cryptocurrency and here I am. I have a younger sibling, but they have their own paternity. There were parallels between mine and my younger sibling’s origin contexts. But, I do not know details. These other three people I feel know our mother in three very different ways from me. Honestly, each of us seem like a different side of her.

Bearing witness was a complex constant in my childhood. Much of it would now be called “adultifying a child”, but I feel that all of the physiological pain had made me capable to hold awareness. “Being seen and not heard” is a phrase that so many of us are still recovering from daily. Again, I believe in the truth of suffering so much so that I know it gives children wisdom that is seemingly beyond the years they have inhaled air...But to see now what had been seeded before I breathed, was a child standing in a stadium with all of the films of loved ones’ lives running in parallel… holding still to not get lost, break something, out of ignorance or lack of guidance. I am now an adult with that child showing them that they do not have to hold still for their synchronized snapshots. And that the trees from the seeds cannot hide hurt. I feel that my eldest sibling’s existence was a testament to the magic of God. I will be referring to my eldest sibling as he/him/his. These are the pronouns that they last used. 

From my earliest memories, my older brother and I were similar. One of my favorite memories is watching the Summer and Winter Olympics. We would pretend to be FloJo and Jackie, Carl Lewis, Dominique Dawes, Surya Bonali, Brian Boitano and Kristi Yamaguchi, Picabo Street. Obviously, we were rooting and imitating as much as we could across tile floors, with bed sheets and pillowcases, socks for slip and rubber for gripping. There was nothing about this play that was shameful, but we hardly acted out lifts and triple sow cows in public view. We were two Black children in our living room pretending to be on the Jamaican bobsled team. Fractured tiles, broken window screens, and couch plastic did not stop us. We imagined, hoped, and dared to believe in ourselves through play. Disney capitalized on our exclusion...But nonetheless, my brother was beautiful in voice and in movement. He stood out because he favored Tevin Campbell, and could sing himself. Children’s Choir made that apparent to everyone. It also is part of the reason I do not understand the shame in how he was treated as he became an adolescent. 

Sexuality and gender are not the same. Just as race and ethnicity are not the same. Sad thing is propaganda, religious indoctrination, capitalism, and honestly just lazy as fuck people cannot seem to grasp those differing concepts unless their lives are under some direct duress to cause significant cognitive dissonance. From my earliest memories, my brother was gay. Him needing to “come out” was weird to me. The way my brother was bullied, he deserved a party. The way he was beaten, he deserved the world to be given to him. My first crush, I genuinely believe was also my brother’s first boyfriend/kiss. That is where my childhood mind said “I love my brother. My brother likes the same person I do. They probably like my brother because he is older than me.” There was never a resounding echo in my internal world of “two men cannot be in a relationship”. But I am not my brother, and I am still sad to say that he never heard “You are loved, cherished, and supported regardless of whom you love.” He received the opposite. How many times did he hear from ignorance wrapped in fear, that Black boys are not meant to be in orchestras and symphonies. He heard that Black boys do not become opera singers, gymnasts, figure skaters. I vividly recall him being ridiculed for getting my younger sister and I ready for church. Ridiculed, despite not having community of adults to support his efforts when they were absent. It is here where I learned that Black boys are also abandoned by centuries of erasure and brainwashing of the very ones gifted with their presence. Sometimes, the bullying came from family. Other times, peers at school and church. Pathological propaganda. 

Reagan kidnapped my mother, placed her body onto the slab that was once the auction block for our ancestors. There without repentance and with disregard, he and his exploitive mob added bars. The price of her life for a system to function. A criminal justice system that made his chemical shackles a crime. A medical system that used his chemical shackles to deny her adequate care. A foster care system that used his chemical shackles to separate, and deny her capacity. An economic environment that made his chemical shackles profitable for him and his exploitive mob. Rehabs and halfway houses being used as indicators of socio-economic status. A family worn out from generational trauma, silence, shame, loss of kindred is left with the destruction. And the worst part was blood was given as the only/majority rationale for responsibility. I believe that love was a part of the reasoning initially, love for those taken and willing to rebuild. Again, my mother was an enigma. But Reagan’s chemical shackles were created to isolate the captive from the personalized care they required. Over time, her silencing and shame were blocked out in exchange for our care. Now, all I can think about is how this directly impacted my brother. He lost her first. I believe that he knew her most intimately out of all of us. And that she loved him as he was in the affirming way he needed. 

I think for the remainder of my mother’s life, my brother pursued to be near her in every way that affirmed he was wanted and loved. He followed her to the West Coast and back to the Midwest. He followed her, and I am sure held her woes with her. But like my grandmother, my mother would be estranged from the first soul that broken open hers. When he had her presence, there was a sweet safety in him. You could see it in him, and what it did to his soul. But he had to face domestic abuse without her safe harbor. He had to endure cancer running rampant within his body alone in the same system that punished him for defending himself, but celebrates when white supremacy wields a gun. This country stole my brother how they stole my mother, based on precendents filled with lies and capitalism. What does America do when a Black Woman who has been traumatized by its’ protected and replicated mass marketing scheme for endless wealth? Incarceration is this country’s response to exploited chemical dependencies created by its political and financial elite. Incarceration is this country’s answer to anyone not white and afflicted with the pains of imperial capitalist domiYet again it is cement, silicon, and stainless steel between the feeling of familial embrace and forced forfeiture. The hardest part about this part, is that I get this part in a way I cannot verbally describe. Almost as if as what I saw, I knew I needed to pay attention. To this very day, I feel my presence was only permitted by God to bear witness and know.

I wanted to hold my brother. To hold him in the way I felt our mother would have held him. I wanted the half of our genetics within me to wrap around him, and tell him he is loved and worthy of being loved. To feel and have felt that divinity said to stand still and watch, is infuriating. My morality is well rooted in my foundation: from my experiences, to how I have observed the humans that were called adults ahead of me as a child, and even now it is open to modification as I see the generations behind me…The empathy that exudes from children are primary colors to the depth and shadows of living and dying. This is why empathy and compassion from adults is so miraculous. It has hue, shade, tone, range, and canvas to behold. So the reflection of emotion is not primal, it is spiritual because it has been lived. It is why I try to be a hospitable for emotions, as I am capable of being in that moment. Emotions are not permanent, but hold a reflection of a person’s truth.

In being hospitable to own lived experience, I can clearly map my mother carrying longing for her children and brother’s longing for my mother’s presence. I can see her deep desire to be close to us, but far away from the environment that haunted her. I can see how my brother and mother were trying to be themselves in a world that did not want them to be. I can clearly see my grandmother carrying the inability to navigate the hidden war between her children - second marriage - and a being Black woman in Kinloch/Saint Louis before-during-after fleeing Jim Crow. I can now clearly see that what I carry has been carried before from adolescence n2 adulthood.