Keep writing your story.

It’s hard to tell whether she was mimicking her own upbringing by birthing nine children into the world. My mom was one of ten after all. Maybe it was the fondness of being amongst a large family that she wanted to recreate. There are of course differences in the life she made for herself and the the one she was born into. She came from a two parent household, where her mother and father both worked. She herself was a single parent. Any single black mother of four children with only a high school education could easily find herself below the poverty line. My mother had more than double that and found herself removed from her own lower middle class upbringing and relegated into impoverished circumstances consequential to her choices. No matter the thinking that led my mother to nine separate pregnancies, two failed marriages, and no choice but to raise her kids alone in the most challenging and dangerous circumstances you could imagine, she never cowered to the arduous journey.

I wish I could say that Sylvia was always a graceful mother and had the right words for every situation. She wasn’t, but she always did the best she could. I sometimes wonder who she might have become had she made different choices. Yet, being number seven of her nine children, I am grateful she made me possible. It’s just natural to want to see the things we love in their greatest glory. There are many beautiful things that my mother engrained in me as a woman, but her most impactful lessons were in her actions. She taught me the power of faith. It was never through the the words that she read from her worn and tattered bible, but distinctly through the greasy olive oil crosses we would wake up with on our foreheads some mornings. We lived in a chaotic, dangerous neighborhood and nights of gunshots and police sirens meant no rest for my mom as she walked throughout our home praying like a warrior. She prayed over all nine of our sleeping bodies, anointed our foreheads, blessed every doorway, and created a force field of her faith in God’s protection over our home. It worked because we were often spared from burglaries, drive-by shootings and loss of family members where others seemingly were not.

My mother was and is competitive and loves to play games. In teaching us to play various board games or impromptu games she invented, my mother always made us earn the win. If she had a bag of M&Ms and was playing “guess the color” she had in her hand, if you guessed it correctly it was yours, and if you didn’t, she showed you the color you guessed incorrectly and ate it. In Uno or Connect Four she was out for blood and delivered merciless defeats, but she also showed us how to improve our skills. With each defeat. We always earned our wins, and I am grateful for that. My mom in all her competitiveness also taught us to take our losses in stride. She always reminded us that there will always be another chance to win, something to learn from a failure and to keep our heads up after a loss.

Resilient. Brilliant. Ingenious. Resourceful. Willful. Beautiful. Those are just a few words to describe the amazing woman who raised me. A woman who taught me to create joy no matter where you are in life or what’s going on. My mom always emphasized that it was not where you lived, but how you lived. She could style dollar store décor like it was from a designer showroom. Despite our circumstances, she strived to make sure that we lived well. My mom has always modeled with her life the Brian Tracy quote, “Tough times don’t last, but tough people do.” With all adult children and finally retiring from work she decided to go earn her degree in business management and made the dean’s list while doing it. My mom is always amazing me. She has taught me through her life to keep writing my story and make it interesting. She, to this day is determined to keep writing the story of her life and is dead set on making it more and more phenomenal.