(ThySistas.com) Somewhere between that first sleepless night and the fifth grade science fair, a lot of us quietly agreed to vanish.
We handed over our names. Suddenly you were only somebody’s mama. Just the ride. The name they scribbled on the emergency card at school. Remember the girl who painted on Sunday afternoons and danced till her feet gave out, the one with loud opinions on everything from Coltrane to whatever nonsense the city council was pushing through? That girl folded herself down small enough to fit inside a diaper bag. And nobody clapped for that disappearing act, seeing as the world had already decided this was simply the tab a good woman ran up for having babies.
Pull up a chair on that porch with me a minute, since I have lived every bit of this myself.
Loving your kids fierce is holy work, and nobody in this room needs me lecturing them about sacrifice. We come from women who handed over everything they had and were told to be grateful for the scraps. Our grandmothers made dignity out of whatever was left over in the scrap basket. They fed a whole house on faith and neckbones. That inheritance is real, it lives in us, and I would never talk down on it. Still, somewhere the message got twisted around. Real devotion turned into pure self erasure, and we handed that lie straight down to our daughters, teaching them a mama with dreams of her own must be a selfish one.
None of that is true.
Took me years to swallow this next part. Your child does not actually need every part of you surrendered to motherhood. What that child needs is a whole, breathing person out here living a full one. When a little one watches her mama chase a passion, laugh with friends, read poetry in the bath, that kid absorbs something no lecture could ever teach. Being grown, she discovers, does not mean being buried. Quietly, permission to become takes root in her.
We all know a sista who disappeared clean into that household. Every conversation with her loops straight to the young’uns. What the teacher said about somebody’s grades. Which child broke out in hives from a new detergent. Who has practice on Tuesday and who outgrew their cleats again. Try asking how she herself is doing, and she cuts her eyes at you like the question came out in Portuguese. Girl, when did you last make anything with your two hands? Chances are she cannot even tell you. Make no mistake, she would walk through fire for those little ones. Truth is, she lost track of the lady she used to be, plain and simple. There was a time her name meant plenty in a room where nobody knew her from Eve. Ask what she has been reading lately, or the last record that kept her up past midnight, and she comes up empty, since whoever used to rattle those answers off got boxed up and set on a high shelf ages ago.
That kind of forgetting is not free. Our children wind up footing part of the bill for it.
A kid raised to believe he is his mama’s entire reason for breathing carries a strange weight. He becomes the emotional center of gravity for a grown adult, which is far too heavy for small shoulders. Later, that same boy can struggle to leave the nest, wracked with guilt for wanting a life. Some of us are watching it happen right now with our young adults, wondering why they cannot cut the cord, never realizing we tied the knot ourselves.
Now let me talk about the parts of you the world tries to bury first.
Your sensuality did not evaporate in the delivery room. You are still a grown woman who deserves to feel desire, to wear the dress, to be touched like you matter beyond the labor of caretaking. Somewhere a lie circulates that mamas should be soft, sexless, endlessly available saints in house slippers. Reject it. When your partner only ever clocks the caregiver and never once the lover, he is missing the bigger part of who you are. You deserve a lot better than getting loved in pieces.
Friendships matter too. Those women who knew you way back before the stretch marks, who still remember exactly how you laughed in college, the ones who will look you dead in your face and tell you the truth when your life is a hot mess, that circle right there is oxygen. Do not let it get smothered under carpools, homework, and everybody’s schedule but your own. Text the sistas. Show up for the girls’ trip. Sit somewhere loud and grown and cackle until the knot in your chest loosens.
And your ambition? Please. That degree, that business idea scribbled on a napkin, that novel half finished in a drawer, none of it died when you gave birth. Having career goals does not mean you are choosing ambition over your kids. A daughter watching her mama go build something learns more from that than from anything you could ever sit her down and preach. All the while she is taking notes on how you chase a life of your own. That lands a lot harder than any stack of motivational speeches ever will.
Now hold on, I can already hear the pushback, on account of it lands in my lap most every time I bring this up. Some sista out there is shaking her head at the screen right now, thinking must be nice for you, thinking a bunch of us just do not have that kind of margin. I mean the single mamas pulling double shifts. Grandmothers who find themselves raising grandbabies all over again in their sixties. Sistas already stretched thinner than a communion wafer with no relief in sight. I see every one of you, and I am not up here preaching some fantasy of spa days and self care most folks cannot afford.
What I am asking costs nothing but permission.
You are allowed to keep a sliver of yourself sacred. Fifteen minutes with a book. One long phone call with an old friend. A song that drops you straight into who you used to be before the world started stacking its expectations on your back. None of that is indulgent. Remembering yourself in small ways is how you survive, and it makes you easier to be around for the very kids you would lay down your life for. Nobody thrives beside a martyr, least of all the small people studying how you treat yourself.
Black mothers especially have been fed a poisonous script. Be everything. Need nothing. Bleed quietly and call it love. That script got written by a culture that has always demanded our labor while ignoring our humanity, and it is long past time we tore it up.
Your young ones may not remember whether you made it to every last practice. What they will also remember is the woman they experienced at home. They can feel the difference between a house with a living, laughing lady in it and one where the lights stay on but she checked out years back, running on fumes and old resentment. A joyful parent tends to raise little ones who grow up believing joy is on the menu for them too.
So take up space again. Reclaim the name that existed before anyone called you mommy. Pick the hobby back up, dust it off, and do it badly if you must, since joy does not require excellence. Call the friend. Book the class. Say those dreams out loud in the car, in the mirror, wherever you are, and keep on saying them until they quit sounding like a confession.
Here is the part they always leave out. You can pour into your family like it is breathing and still keep a firm grip on who you are underneath all of it. There is plenty of room in one heart for the two. The finest mothering I have witnessed came from a mother who flat refused to vanish, the kind who taught her family just by living out loud that a person gets to love hard and stay stubbornly, fully herself.
Go find her again, and know she has been waiting.
Staff Writer: Brenda Poole
BP writes about entertainment, relationships, faith, and life in general… She enjoys speaking on things Black women can relate to and hopefully giving a sista something useful along the way…
Feel free to email her at BrendaP@ThySistas.com.