My mother gave me real, beautiful and honest love - a love that she most certainly garnered from a heavenly place because her earthly inheritance lacked both steady love and the passing down of what I recognize as a knowing. My heart preserves what I know of my maternal granny’s story - some textually gathered and most woven together with the historical context of living Black in South Central Los Angeles - a woman who survived the times however it took to survive her times. I feel rooted for her, my granny, I feel rooted for her, my mother - and every Black woman who has lived and birthed on this American soil amidst societal and/or community or familial neglect - without access to generationally satisfied abundance.

Throughout my motherhood, I have grown, and I have gathered this knowing. I have harvested it as their due. I am the woman, mother, and servant I am today as a living spirit of restitution for them. Because they deserved, we deserve - unadulterated access to joy, to comfort, to safety, to assuredness, to peace, to ease - for the flourishing of self, for the families we create, the families we hold, the families we love and go on to leave a knowing for. It has been a privilege in my life to honor this, to hold on to it and let it flow all over - to be certain that my own, know the very same.