What Children Really Inherit: Memory, Motherhood, and the War Against Forgetting

What you are about to hear... is a deep meditation on how memory can feel harmless until it shows up with receipts. On Memorial Day, I got to record critical thoughts that turned into something I didn’t plan: a real-time confrontation with my own past, pulled from an accidental recording I found while cleaning old files. What do you do when you’re suddenly face-to-face with a version of yourself you barely remember, and you can hear the fear, the tenderness, the urgency, and the love all tangled together?

We trace how rituals like Mother’s Day get stripped of their original communal care and sold back to us as performance, then widen the lens to what that same machine does to parenting. I talk about raising Black girls inside an attention economy built on overstimulation, algorithmic manipulation, and digital surveillance. We get into why kids learn virality before media literacy, why unlimited access gets labeled “normal,” and why boundaries around screen time, smartphones, social media, and gaming are not about control for control’s sake. They’re about protecting a child’s mind, nervous system, and ability to remember.

Then I share the recording itself and sit with it alongside you, because hearing is different than reading. Tone tells the truth. It reveals impact, not just intention, and it shows how much growth can happen quietly in just a few years.

If you’ve been thinking about conscious parenting, Black motherhood, community care, digital boundaries, or how to protect memory in a culture that profits from amnesia, press play. Subscribe, share with someone who needs this, and leave a review so more people can find the conversation.

Transcript

Memorial Day And A Memory Thread

Momba 0:24

Hello, kings and queens, it's your girl, BlakkMomba . Welcome back to Momba Raw and Unfiltered. First and foremost, I just want to say thank you to everybody that continues to pull up and share space with me. Everybody listening across the country, across the world, everybody that has been growing with me in real time through all these reflections, meditations, and conversations. Thank you, truly. This episode right here is heavy in a different kind of way. Honestly, I wasn't even planning to record this. I was only going to write about it, but I came to realize that I had to do both. And then life kept lifing as it always does. So I kept having to sit with it longer than I expected. Which is kind of wild now when I think about it, because today is Memorial Day. A day literally set aside for memory, for remembrance. And somehow, without me planning it, this just happens to be the day I finally get to sit down and record a meditation where memory is the whole damn through line. Man, divine timing. And let me be clear before anybody gets all emotionally triggered. I'm not trying to take anything away from soldiers, veterans, or anybody grieving someone they love. This ain't that. But I also don't let this country or any calendar date dictate when I'm allowed to speak on memory, war, sacrifice, or what people are expected to carry quietly. Because if this country really cared about veterans the way it performs, caring about veterans, it would prioritize them every day. Not just set aside one day for public remembrance while sending human beings off into forever wars that have more to do with empire's pockets than anybody's actual freedom, safety, or security. But I ain't even trying to digress all the way down that rabbit hole today. What I will say is this as a woman, a black woman at that, and as a mother, raising children on this timeline and this country in particular, I know something about living inside a war people refuse to name. Not the kind that comes with uniforms and patriotic parades and somber little speeches. I'm talking about an invisible, insidious war inherited before I was even born. A war on the mind, a war on the womb, on memory, a war that doesn't always look like combat from the outside, but still requires strategy, endurance, discernment, protection, and a refusal to let the next generation inherit amnesia in place of truth. And maybe that's why this episode feels so aligned, even though I didn't time it this way. I was cleaning old files off my computer this past Mother's Day, trying to free up storage space, and somehow ended up falling down a rabbit hole of old voice notes, accidental recordings, random conversations, just emotional debris frozen in digital space. And somewhere inside all of that digital clutter, I stumbled across an accidental recording from about three years ago that completely stopped me in my tracks. Not because I remember recording it, I didn't. That's what shook me. Because what do you do when you are suddenly confronted with a version of who you used to be on a different timeline? What if it reveals behaviors, fears, projections, or beliefs you no longer subscribe to? What if it reveals ugliness and pain? What if it reveals truths about yourself that changes your beliefs about who you think you are? Do you delete it? Pretend you never saw it, rewrite the memory until it becomes easier to live with, easier to convince yourself the past version of you no longer exists or no longer even matters because the current version of you is, at least in your mind, more evolved? What if? And what started is me privately holding the weight of an old accidental recording outside in my rocking chair at 8 in the morning on Mother's Day, two weeks ago, spiraled into a much deeper meditation about motherhood, memory, fear, empire, technology, collective consciousness, raising black girls on this timeline and what it means to revisit yourself honestly after enough time has passed for perspective to settle differently, especially as a mother. Because memory hits different once you realize your children are inheriting pieces of versions of you that no longer even fully exist anymore. Talk about a mind trip. That meditation eventually became this episode. So, before we jump down this rabbit hole, I want to say this. When the meditation ends, please remain seated with me for just a little while longer. Don't be so quick to rush off immediately afterwards, nah. There's something else waiting for y'all on the other side of this that I think matters just as much as the meditation itself. The actual recording. Instead of just sitting with this privately, I decided to do something I honestly don't normally do. I decided to publicly sit with the audio again for the first time with you all. Because I think there's something powerful in witnessing what time does to people, honestly. So yeah, go ahead and settle in with me for a little while. Sit back and relax. And there you go. I will see you on the other side. Let's go.

How Mother’s Day Got Marketed

Momba 7:09

Especially when a woman's work is never done. I learned this past Sunday that the true meaning of Mother's Day started as a matriarchal movement rooted in collective action and communal care before capitalism got its funky ass hands on it and rerouted it into flowers, brunch reservations, edible arrangements, and guilt tied to spending money. And somehow that realization hit me harder than I expected, because my mind immediately went back to being a little girl, feeling bad when I didn't have money to buy my mama a gift. Sitting there feeling like love was supposed to cost something tangible, like gratitude had a price tag attached to it. Like my inability to purchase something meant my love and gratitude somehow weighed less. Once the community rituals lost communal meaning and became consumption rituals, people stopped gathering to remember why they existed in the first place. And memory disappears quietly long before history books change. Just like that Mother's Day fact. Learning about it sent me spiraling every which way. Because once you see how easily a communal ritual can be stripped down, repackaged, and sold back to people as proof of love, you start seeing commodification everywhere. Not just in holidays, but in attention, childhood, identity, community, memory, grief, all of it. Damn near every sacred tradition we celebrate eventually gets dragged through the marketplace, stripped from its original spirit and fed back to us through consumption, money, and performance instead of connection, presence, and people. Everything tender gets assigned to price. Even the moments that were supposed to gather people back into each other somehow end up measured by what was bought, posted, reserved, wrapped, delivered, or publicly performed for social media. Look at how motherhood gets flattened into aesthetics now. Cute colored, coordinated or matching outfits, curated brunch photos, soft piano music over Instagram reels. Everybody schedules a time and a date on their platforms to make motherhood look all pretty and my pillow soft for a day. And then the next morning, the flowers start dying on the table, and reality walks right back through the door asking, What's for dinner? Who needs a ride? What bill is due? What child is spiraling? What appointment got missed? What right got stripped? What headline just reminded you that this country is still exactly what it has always been with better ring lighting and faster Wi-Fi. That's the part they never put in commercials or the comments. The fear that is still there, the bills that are still there, the exhaustion, the constant questioning yourself that is still there, the trying to raise children with emotional intelligence in a world that has none, trying to protect your children's minds in an attention economy where every app, algorithm, influencer, corporation, and political machine is competing for slave ownership over their nervous systems before they even know how to spell their first name. And honestly, that explains why the day always felt a little strange to me, even when the display of love looked beautiful, deserving. Because motherhood is one of the most powerful assignments on earth. And somehow we've reduced it into edible arrangements and Facebook tributes people type between distractions before going right back to a society actively chewing mothers up in real time. Especially black mothers trying to raise children consciously right now, because the work doesn't end at keeping them fed, clothed, loved, and alive. The work now includes protecting their minds from a world that has learned how to reach for children before their parents even know they are being targeted. And that's what really made me reflect about all this today. Because motherhood on this timeline feels spiritually disorienting in a way I don't think people fully understand. Not harder than what our mothers or grandmothers had to survive. Because black women have always mothered through impossible conditions. Slavery, segregation, poverty, Jim Crow, violence, mass incarceration of black men, state neglect, white supremacy, everything that they are throwing at us today. Just rebranded. We descend from women who somehow kept children emotionally alive while living inside systems specifically designed to break black families and black communities apart from the inside out. But this era feels different in a way empire reaches for our children's minds now. It's not just labor anymore, sweat equity. It's attention, identity, memory. It's the ability to sit still long enough to even hear your own thoughts before something interrupts them. Everything competing for access to children now is constant. Their focus, their imagination, their confidence, their sense of self, their nervous systems, everything screaming, everything flashing colorfully bright, everything demanding reaction, everything trying to keep people overstimulated and emotionally exhausted, disconnected from themselves, disconnected from each other, from silence, from reflection, history, disconnected from memory itself. Because once attention gets fragmented long enough, people do too. You can see it happening in real time now. People struggling to sit with themselves, struggling to focus, struggling to sustain outrage longer than a news cycle, struggling to remember what mattered last week because the next algorithmic emergency already arrived to emotionally interrupt it. And children are absorbing all of this while their brains are still forming, while their sense of self is still forming, their emotional infrastructure still forming. That scares the hell out of me. Because you start to realize how easy it becomes to control and shape people once they lose the ability to slow down long enough to remember, to recognize patterns. That's where memory starts to become more than reflection for me. It becomes protection. Because if you can't remember what is being done, you can't recognize when it comes back, wearing a different face. Motherhood is not just being celebrated on this timeline. It's being hunted, studied, politicized, commodified, sentimentalized, then abandoned in the same breath. This world, this world loves the idea of mothers when we're soft enough to market, tired enough to praise, and silent enough to exploit. But let a mother start asking real questions about what kind of world her children are being raised inside of, and suddenly she's dramatic, negative, paranoid, angry, too deep, too strict, too much, especially if she's a black mother, especially if she can see the architecture under the floorboards and is raising children who might learn to see it too. Then she becomes radical, mentally deranged, dangerous. Because what does Mother's Day even mean in a country that's actively erasing women's rights, bodily autonomy, public education, history, truth, language, and memory while telling us to smile pretty over mimosas? What does it mean to thank mothers one Sunday out the year while patriarchy keeps its foot on the neck of every system that shapes whether our children get to be safe, whole, educated, protected, housed, believed, or free? What does it mean to celebrate mothers while the war on the womb keeps showing up in legislation, medicine, religion, poverty, domestic violence, maternal mortality, forced birth, reproductive surveillance, and every other polite little system that Empire uses to remind women that creation is sacred until we demand control over it. That right there is called connective tissue. And Empire works hard to keep it infected enough for you to never find out what any of it means truly. The war on the womb is not separate from Mother's Day being turned into a photo op. It's the same machine wearing a different face. Period. One side sells motherhood back to us in pastel colors, while the other side legislates the body that makes motherhood possible. One side tells us mothers are sacred, while the other side treats women like experimental state property. One side wants the photo of the smiling mother with her children. The other side wants to control how many children she has, how she raises them, what they learn, what they remember, what they believe, and how quickly they can be fed into the next version of Empire's Hunger Games. So Mother's Day is not simple. And yes, it is that deep. It can't be simple when I'm raising black girls on a timeline where Make America Great Again was never just a slogan. It was a threat with Confederate nostalgia dressed up like patriotism. Everybody knows exactly what again means, even when they pretend not to. Again for who? Great? For who? Safe. For who? Because for a black mother, that phrase doesn't land like politics. It lands like inheritance. It lands like mourning. It lands like looking at your daughters and understanding that the same world trying to rewrite the past is also preparing the peers they will have to live beside, work beside, love beside, vote, survive beside. These children growing up right now are not just children. They are future adults being shaped in real time by whatever we allow to raise them, just like the racist demons in power now. And that's where motherhood becomes bigger than biology. Because what we plan in our children grows past us. It follows them into classrooms, friendships, relationships, jobs, communities, the way they love people, the way they handle conflict, survive pressure, treat the vulnerable, the way they either repeat harm or interrupt it. That's why children are never just ours in the isolated household sense. They become part of everybody's world eventually, just like everybody else's children become part of the world mine, have to inherit. A world that is increasingly attempting to strip people of their humanity itself. And once you understand that our children eventually become part of each other's world, it gets harder to pretend mothering stops at your own front door. That's why I don't just mother my children. I mother every child I come in contact with. I always have. Their safety matters to me, their minds matter to me, their futures matter to me. And that's the exact kind of communal thinking Empire had to break apart in order for all this hyper individualistic bullshit survival culture to fully take hold. Because once people stop seeing children collectively, once everybody retreats into mine instead of ours, the whole social fabric of empire starts rotting from the inside out. These demons knew that if the idea that children belong to the village actually took root again, that it would reawaken black consciousness on a level they wouldn't be able to contain, maintain, or control. But everybody too tired to look up from their phones, too overstimulated to notice the connective tissue, too fragmented to realize all these isolated little crises are actually one giant hydra, a cancerous ecosystem mutating in real time by design. Empire privatized survival, and now every household is broken into its own overwhelmed island, divided in the same struggle. And they bank on that, literally. But I refuse to play the part.

Mothering As Village Level Care

Momba 21:38

Being called back into a place where your babies once learned and laughed and cried and grew, that means something. To some people, that may not be a big thing, but to somebody's child sitting in that classroom, it might be the first time they hear somebody talk about creativity, voice acting, podcasting. Content creation, storytelling, or possibility in a way that makes them feel like there's more in them than what the world has already decided to measure. To me, that's mothering too. Maybe even the purest version of it. Not mothering in the biological sense, not just whose body carried who, in that communal sense, in the act itself. The kind rooted in showing up, reaching back and pouring into children that are not yours before the world hardens around them completely. That's matriarchal care to me. Understanding that you don't have to be a mother to be a mother. Understanding that children require more than individualized household survival to stay human, that they need more safe adults invested in their becoming, letting them feel seen, letting them feel possibility, letting them encounter creative minds that still speak to their imagination instead of only their academic or athletic performance. That is what motherhood as resistance under Empire looks like to me and why I go hard for the babies. Because too many kids are growing up inside systems that monitor them, discipline them, market to them, diagnose them, harvest from them, but rarely actually pour into them. And you can feel the difference in a child when somebody finally does. How people cannot see that they are in the present of the future when they look at children is crazy to me. They must be protected at all costs. Community doesn't always look like a nonprofit, a podcast panel discussion, a grant proposal, a photo op, or somebody standing on stage calling themselves a leader or motivational speaker. Sometimes community is passing out snacks after school and asking a child how their day was because you know some children don't even get asked that when they get home. Sometimes it's showing up to speak to a classroom your own children no longer sit in because your responsibility to the village didn't expire when your children aged out of the building. Sometimes it's looking a child in the eye long enough for them to feel seen, because all children want is to be seen, heard, and understood. That's what all any of us want, is it not? That is how you build a healthy community. Not with Pinterest-inspired aesthetics, not with look at me, I'm active in my community, social posts or with another branded and time-stamped leadership moment. With time, with presence, with people willing to give something that doesn't immediately center and profit them. And to be blunt, we don't have any more time to waste pretending somebody else is coming to do this for us, fight for us. Our generation was uniquely made for this. Building the collective, restoring memory, looking around and asking, what can I offer? What can I teach? What can I share? And what child can I help feel seen today? That is where the real Mother's Day lives for me. Not in the flowers, in the everyday, ordinary work. It's what keeps me up at night, looking at the state of the world, our youth, and knowing there is so much preparation that is not happening. Because people still want to pretend children are simply growing up differently instead of being exposed to adulthood too early, too fast, and without mental guardrails. Children can't be children anymore on this timeline. And people can't see how detrimental that is to them, to us, to the future. I think about the old universal black saying. Stay out of grown folks' business and stay out of grown folks' face. People love to flatten old sayings like that into teaching obedience and respect. And yes, oftentimes it was exactly that. But it wasn't only that, there was protection in it too. Developmental pacing, knowing that some things were supposed to arrive with context, experience, emotional maturity. Childhood back then had partitions, not perfect ones and not always healthy ones, but still, there were doors, curtains, rooms you weren't supposed to enter yet because you had not yet grown the bones to carry what was inside them. But now, in today's world, everything has accelerated. Everything is exposed wide open and loose at the touch of a fingertip. And people keep calling this unrestricted exposure freedom without asking what it's producing. What kind of human beings are being formed inside an environment where every developmental boundary has collapsed at once? Kids can now see everybody in their mama's mama's business online. Grown folks fighting, grown folks oversexualizing everything, including cartoons, grown folks humiliating themselves for engagement and likes from strangers. Grown folks treating cruelty like entertainment. Grown folks having breakdowns and real time and calling it content. The list goes on and on and on. And the kids watch, absorb, imitate, remix, and carry it back into their own little worlds like this shit is normal life because who the hell else is there to tell them otherwise when all the adults are drowning in it too? Who? Throughout time, children have always imitated upward. Little kids want to do what older kids do. Older kids want to do what the adults do. And adults, we just want to do what other adults do. That ain't new. What's new is how fast the layers of childhood collapsed. We

Childhood Boundaries Collapsed By Feeds

Momba 28:33

had rites of passages that gave kids something to look forward to, to earn. Events like prom and graduation meant something because you had to wait for it. Parties meant something because you had to age in order to enter certain spaces. Even being outside had its own kind of training ground. You learn people, you learn timing, you learn consequences. You learn how to read a room without a notification telling you what to think about it. Now everything is included into one feed. The layers separating childhood from adulthood got flattened almost overnight, and people are calling it evolution. Natural. Look at how everything exists beside everything now. Childhood sitting shoulder to shoulder with pornography. Violence, cuddling beside entertainment, adult insecurity, chilling beside adolescent identity formation. Politics dressing up beside propaganda. Human suffering, laying down beside memes. A child can move from dance trends on TikTok to war clips to beauty standards to racial hatred to sexual content in under five minutes, and nobody even considers how that changes a child, changes their nervous system, how they form identity, empathy, patience, intimacy, attention spans, emotional regulation, self-worth, imagination, even memory itself. And for the same reasons, the adults cannot see how psychologically abnormal, how dangerous it all is, because this level of toxic exposure has become environmental, atmosphere, culture. Parents hire the tech bros as their living babysitters these days. They stick phones and tablets in their babies' faces to get them to sit still and be quiet. At home, at church, at the grocery store, in the car, everywhere all the time. Our kids never did get a slow drip of dopamine and screen addiction like we did. They got a full dose starting in infancy. And now today, taking screen time or a phone or PlayStation or Xbox from a child could get you shot or stabbed in your sleep. Children are spoon-fed exposure without guidance, premature consciousness without emotional infrastructure and are absorbing adult-scale realities before they even have the tools to understand how that affects them mentally, emotionally, spiritually. And it is all our faults. We played a part in what we see happening in our world today. Look at it. Full faces beat before natural self-love. Clothes and poses and aesthetics that make little girls look like they skipped childhood and landed straight in somebody's perverted algorithm. Porn and OnlyFans before first love. Comment sections before discernment. Everybody learning to be watched before learning how to simply exist. And then people want to act shocked when children are anxious, entitled, overstimulated, insecure, emotionally dysregulated, socially confused, or addicted to online porn, violence, mimicking the ugly behavior of the adults they see, but ten times magnified. It started at home. Literally. We TikTok stitch screens into the culture of parenting, and we are complicit in Empire's collapse of childhood as we know it to be, even if unknowingly. And it will never go back to that because the world now depends on the tech bros, and they ain't just coming for our children. They coming for life itself. Even the stars ain't safe from them. Ignorance has never been an acceptable excuse for the results of an outcome. The impact. That's called accountability. That's called awareness, accepting the fact that you played a part in the outcome, that your intentions don't weigh shit against the damage. I mean, seriously, what in the hell did we think was gonna happen when the whole wide world got placed in their small hands with no real filter, no real context, no village or elder sitting beside them helping translate what they are seeing because they too are asleep. They didn't get caught in the web. They were birthed there. When will we learn there is nothing Empire offers us that equals freedom? That everything created for good will always be used for evil, that there was never such a thing as science fiction or a conspiracy that wasn't rooted in some truth. Every single thing they do, give, create is designed for a nefarious purpose, never a human one. Access to innovation without guidance is universal neglect, dressed up as modern life. And the ugliest part about it is how insidious and malevolent it all is, how their corruption embedded itself so deeply that it's now intricately rooted in our culture, and how we raise our children, and what we allow and tolerate and deny, all of it conditioning, all of it programming, all of it engineered by Empire. I keep reminding my people that they clone Tyrone was real life, artistically non-fictionalized. I mean, their eyes are open, but they wide shut, they see what's happening, they know what's happening, but they are willfully ignorant, choosing to make denial home. It makes me feel like I'm walking in a world of NPCs. They couldn't wake up even if they wanted to. Their program corruption is that rotted. It has to be for them to see the danger, but keep moving the same way anyway. They are the walking sleep. Look at it this way: a 10-year-old now moves through the same digital terrain as billionaires, predators, propagandists, porn addicts, white nationalists, influencers, livestream war footage, AI-generated manipulation and deep fakes, and whatever else the algorithm decides belong besides childhood and all before breakfast. Shit, as soon as they open their eyes, it's what they reach for, the screen. They have the same latest and greatest surveillance phones with the blood of Africa running through them. Visit the same platforms that create personalized feeds from the same algorithms and exercise their fingers into early arthritis on the same endless scrolls. They're all being psychologically programmed by systems most adults still barely understands themselves, let alone refuse to protect children from on purpose. And now, they have shape-shifted into deaf, dumb, and blind sheep. Sheeple that grazed the feed all day and believes whatever the captions tell them to. These feeds were never created just to entertain people. They were designed specifically to shape attention, to shape emotion, to shape desire, insecurity, behavior, perception, and memory. They train people what to react to, what to ignore, what to fear, what to crave, what to normalize, what to consume, who to hate, who to imitate, who to become, and when. And with the adults program too, it makes everything worse for those who are awake and doing whatever they can to help others see. That's also the part people keep missing when I talk about how I raise my girls differently and why. They think I'm just being overprotective and not in tune with the beat of the times, that I'm too intentional, that I think too deeply, too seriously, too much. Yet they all want to know how I did it. How did I raise such good girls? But check how wild this is. Every time they ask and I tell them, they say my level of parenting sounds too exhausting for them, that how we were raised were good enough for they, mama, just as it was for them and they turned out fine, which means, of course, so will their kids. And they're right, but only about the exhaustion part, because it is exhausting as hell, but only because I'm stuck doing it alone and not in partnership, not in community, not in a village, not in a reality where everybody around me has swallowed the lie that this is just the way of life now. Because I'll never call this bullshit normal. And I won't pretend that it is either just to sleep better at night or not to look weird to the sheeple. Otherwise, how we were raised required an update. It no longer works on this timeline. Unfortunately, they chose Empire's update instead, and it came with a virus that made everything abnormal, normal to those that it infected. Children having phones and group chats in third grade is normal now. I refuse. Children with social media accounts is normal now. I refuse. Children knowing adult language, adult dances, adult jokes, adult cruelty, adult business, adult everything is normal now. I refuse. And every single time I reveal that my children don't have unrestricted or unsupervised access, that my oldest daughter, now 26, didn't get a smartphone until she was 16, that every device they own got parental controls, even their switches and Xboxes.

Choosing Tech Limits On Purpose

Momba 39:18

That makes people gasp. Teachers, parents, kids alike, everybody looking shell-shocked, like I just said, they sleep in a shed and read books by candlelight, instead of saying I delayed smartphones and created boundaries around the platforms and technology that are literally designed by grown people with billion-dollar budgets to keep human beings baited, hooked, and trapped in a game of their making. I'm considered weird for that. Out of touch with reality? Okay then, I'll accept it. Listening to adults gasp almost hits harder than the children, because the level of my restraint in itself looks extreme now. How I protect my children looks strange now. The boundaries I create for them, they look like punishment now. Meanwhile, surrender a self in every way is being sold to them is normal. And everyone else like me, who refuses to update and subscribe to the new normal, are considered radical or paranoid or woke. When a word like woke, a word birth in black community, meaning awareness, consciousness, knowledge, wisdom, and understanding get stolen, whitewashed, remixed, and sold back to the culture as a character flaw, making it more a slur than anything else, and convinces even our own to deem it so. That's what I mean when I reference the movie They Clone Tyrone and how upside down, inside out the world is now. To me, it's one of the main benefits of being Gen X in 80s, baby, or at least being close enough to remember the world before this one. We were part of the first wave of this mass social experiment in real time. And those who were awake, when being awake wasn't considered a slur, watched the shift in reality happen. We remember the before, the timeline before the internet became the world people psychologically live inside of now and not just visit. A time before every thought became labor for the content plantations, and every response became laundry for machines to clean up and sort into better language. We remember what attention felt like before it became monetized, before everybody started performing themselves online instead of actually becoming themselves offline. We remember riding bikes across town, going skating, going to the movies, being outside until the streetlights came on, going to or having house parties where the worst thing your mama feared most nights was probably a random fight or somebody sneaking alcohol into the function. Being a strict parent now doesn't mean what it meant when we were growing up. And I'm not romanticizing it like nothing bad ever happened back then because bad things always happen all the time, especially to black children, especially to black girls. Rest in peace, tied us. But the scale is different now. The access and the speed and the permanence of everything is different now. Child predators don't even have to be in the neighborhood cruising in those creepy vans anymore. They can reach your child through a device and call it connection, mentoring, teaching. They are digital Epsteins and they are worldwide. I think about that constantly whenever people bring up parenting styles, at least when it's trending. The whole strict parents versus gentle parents versus soft parents versus authoritarian parents versus free reign parents versus vegan parents. Labels, labels, labels, labels. Everybody got labels. Everybody got woke think pieces around the labels. Everybody got opinions about the labels. What works, what doesn't work, how folks need to raise and discipline modern day kids. Meanwhile, at Band Camp, I'm over here focused on just trying to raise girls who can still hear themselves think. Girls who don't perform wellness online while quietly falling apart internally. Girls who know how to sit with themselves without a screen in their faces. Girls who know how to remain soft without becoming easy prey for a world that feeds on softness. Who understands that everybody following you online ain't community, and that being visible is not the same thing as being known or loved. Who know how to maintain eye contact and hold a conversation and recognize when something feels off instead of immediately absorbing whatever the internet fed them that day. Girls who understand that attention is the real currency now. And everybody is competing for how they spend it, including people who mean them no good. My goal was never to raise girls who could perfectly blend into a sick world without questioning it. I wanted something deeper than that. I wanted legacy. Sisters with enough discernment and self-awareness that when life inevitably comes for them, and it will, they all have something inside themselves stronger than whatever this world keeps trying to tear apart. Something that allows them to maintain closeness and connection and emotional intelligence through conflict instead of letting bitterness and resentment rot them from the inside out. That's the kind of stuff I think about when people start throwing all these parenting labels around because none of those labels really capture what it means trying to raise emotionally grounded children inside a world this psychologically abusive. So, because childhood itself has fundamentally changed, I chose to raise mine accordingly, not traditionally, differently. I have to. In my mind, there's no choice. And a label ain't gonna do shit to help me with any of it. And I know that makes me look crazy, too intense, too aware, maybe even authoritarian to people who don't understand what I'm guarding against. Maybe even to my own children sometimes, because all children want what their peers have. They want to do what their friends do. Go where they go, watch what they watch, laugh at the jokes, know the references, the tea, be in the mix. Nobody wants to feel left out, especially not when the whole middle and high school culture in America has always been built on making exclusion feel worse than death to children. But shit, there really is no maybe with my babies. They call my parental control apps my electronic dictator and chief apps. I don't blame them. They don't fully understand why they can't have and do and see all, that they can't be like their little friends, that the reason they can't be normal or do what normal kids do is because what is considered normal in their world is actually abnormal. And it's difficult for adults to even recognize that because everywhere you look, you see and hear the opposite. So I don't even take it personal. I don't expect them or much of anyone else to understand, truly. But I am confident that one day they will, though. And that has to be enough. And for better or worse, what I'm doing is working. I can already see the difference in my girls, in the way they move through the world, the way they communicate when something is wrong instead of immediately shutting down or pretending like nothing touched them. The way they question things instead of swallowing information whole. The way they maintain closeness with me, even when they are frustrated with me. They can sit with emotion long enough to actually write about it and process it instead of instantly trying to escape themselves through a screen. That didn't happen accidentally, and I own it. That came from years of me creating intentional friction, standing on boundaries, providing in-the-moment conversations, consistently redirecting, explaining, protecting, repeating myself over and over and over until I sounded insane, even to myself. And no, I don't always get that right. Obviously, building blueprints for this timeline didn't come with instructions. That's one raw truth. People try not to admit out loud that intentional parenting is not perfect. Parenting. Sometimes the fear leaks. Sometimes the urgency comes out too sharp. Sometimes you're trying to teach a lesson, but your exhaustion is teaching one alongside you too. Sometimes your character deficiencies and emotions create a bigger issue, leaving bruises that may never heal, not even with time. That is the truth motherhood keeps putting in my face front and center. And maybe that's why memory has been haunting me so much lately. Because memory is how you notice what repetition has done. Memory is how you catch the pattern after the moment has already passed. Without memory, all of this turns into a simulation. Every day becomes another day to survive, and you never get to look back long enough to see the machinery of what you were building, what you were breaking, what you were passing down, what you finally interrupted before it could keep traveling through the bloodline, before the feet reset reality. Don't be a sim. Not a simp, my people. A sim. S-I-M.

Photo Albums Versus Digital Graveyards

Momba 50:16

Before all this meditation, I had been cleaning old files off my computer and somehow fell down a rabbit hole and got trapped inside several years' worth of voice notes. Because I document everything. Random conversations, critical thoughts in real time, little pieces of life I didn't even realize I was preserving while I was living it. There were so many recordings that instead of listening to them first, I started reading the transcripts instead to decide what needed to stay and what could be erased. It seemed easier, more efficient that way. And it was. But reading them? Nothing about that was easy in the way I expected. And somehow that turned into me sitting outside at 8 in the morning, spiraling about memory, about cloud storage, about how we used to physically sit with photographs and videos instead of scrolling past thousands of them trapped inside phones until an app randomly decides to remind us we once lived life. We used to have photo albums, y'all, not just pictures, albums, big heavy ones kept in closets and under beds and living room cabinets, sharing space with VHS tapes full of home videos. We sat with family and revisited those memories together, told stories around them. Remember when we corrected details, exaggerated moments, added context. We would laugh at the same stories over and over again. It was a movie. Memory used to feel alive, like something physically carried between people instead of outsourced somewhere outside of us, waiting to be rediscovered by an on this day push notification. That changes something psychologically. I recall, for this reason alone, taking my daughters to the thrift store a while back and letting them each pick out picture frames they liked. And then we sat together going through the cloud, creating individual folders and choosing pictures they wanted printed, and watching them light up when I told them they could order same-day prints directly from my phone. It honestly woke me up to how wondrous technology can be for kids in the most smallest of ways. So we started talking about layouts and sizes and Canva and custom designs and next, I know they were invested in exploring the rabbit hole of digital creation. Imagination activated by the possibilities of what they could create for themselves. Things they don't have to wait for somebody else to create and they buy. And just like that, in one ordinary day, new doors were opened in their mind's palace to explore, and memory became tangible to them again. Now they, on their own, are teaching themselves how to use technology to help them create and learn things like photography, video editing, transitions, music production, custom online games, painting, nail art, crocheting, and so much more. But the most important thing of all, they now have framed pictures of themselves and each other, family and friends all over their rooms where they can actually see them every day. Now look, I didn't do this because printed photos are magical or holy, but because they needed to learn that memory deserves space in the physical world and not just an endless burial inside digital graveyards. They are visible memory, tangible memory, and physical memory demands presence differently. Pictures are to have and to hold. You see them, pass them around to each other, sit with them. You are forced to revisit your memories intentionally. This is why language matters to me so much that even while sitting here thinking about all this, my mind got stuck on those words, to have and to hold, how people usually connect that phrase to marriage, but damn if memory doesn't deserve the same reverence too. Words and memories carry residue. And is that not mothering too? Not just feeding children, not just protecting them, but teaching them language that helps to anchor themselves in reality, in lineage, in memory, in selfhood, in reflection, carving memory into bones so that they stay rooted. The older I get, the more I understand why memory stays under attack throughout his story. Because memory creates pattern recognition and keeps people from being endlessly reintroduced to the same loop of violence disguised as innovation. His story on repeat depends on interruption, amnesia, constant reinvention, new packaging slapped onto old poison like Empire Banking on Nobody Remembering, the last time they released toxins into the air for us to choke on and die from. And now today, memory mostly lives externally in a digital world that they also own. Our memories now lay dormant in their clouds, in their data centers, in their digital storage banks where they make you pay for more space every time you want to save new memories past your monthly or yearly subscription rate, and with the stroke of a key, it can all be wiped clean, never to be retrieved, at least by you again. It gives new meaning to head in the clouds, don't it? Even the portable storage device sitting beside my computer right now, it too is an external memory bank. Extra storage for backed up files, backed up life. Empire doesn't own those, not yet. But don't get it twisted, because it only means that they created room for something else to constantly flood in all that freed up space inside of us instead. Content, distractions, outrage, overstimulation, endless scrolling, emotional interruption every five seconds, state media loops, attention spans fused with memory banks in a way I don't think we understand yet. And what scares me most is how all of this is in culture now. So much so that there's barely any room for silence anymore anywhere. When there is no room for silence, there's no room for boredom. And if there's no room for boredom, then there's no room for reflection, for rumination, for activation. Boredom used to be where creativity and imagination lived, where deep thoughts were alchemized, where outrage was sustained longer than what the feed told us was trending in today's resistance efforts. Perception has always been reality. An Empire made sure to own and control every system that shapes ours, including the feed. It was while all these thoughts were moving around in my head, I stumbled across a transcript from three years ago that I didn't remember recording. Man,

The Forgotten Recording Resurfaces

Momba 58:27

I had so many accidental recordings buried in folders, conversations, home screen recordings in my pocket. There's something really eerie about reading your own past consciousness. Hearing something is one thing, but reading it years later is another thing entirely. It freezes a version of you in time with retrospective context. And sitting there, getting to read myself as a mother in real time three years ago, punched a hole in my chest because I could hear myself trying to prepare my daughters for a world I already knew was changing around us before they fully had language for what I was sensing at the time. All while I was still making dinner, going to doctor's appointments, stressing about finances, surviving chronic pain, handling school schedules, and trying not to mentally collapse under the weight of empire, under the weight of survival, real life moving all at once inside one random conversation about middle school and binders and k-pop and hurt feelings and tacos. A critical flashpoint, frozen in digital amber. The time that has passed since then gave me enough distance to hear all sides of a moment simultaneously for the first time, especially mine. Hearing the fear threaded underneath the guidance, hearing how badly I wanted them prepared, safe, emotionally strong, aware. Hearing where my own emotions got tangled up in the message delivery, where my urgency overtook moments, hearing where I thought intention carried more weight than outcome because as parents we do that shit all the time. We be meaning well and somehow think that fact alone should matter more than how something actually landed on our children. And that's not true. Moms, we're not always right. People hurt each other, meaning well, every single day. Good intentions don't erase impact. They can pave brick roads straight to hell, too. Some of the deepest bruises people carry came from somebody loving them the only way they knew how. And that realization humbled me more than anything else in that transcript because I could see where my critical thinking started demanding to become their critical thinking before they had enough life to arrive there themselves. I could see where my fears about the world had already started bleeding into how I spoke to them. I could visually see in my mind's eye where survival mode entered my parenting. And at the same damn time, I could hear the love underneath all of the protection and exhaustion and pressure in it too. The tenderness, the anxiety of getting something wrong that could follow them for years. I could hear a woman trying to hold an entire household together while quietly carrying pain nobody else could ever fully see because I hid it so well. Those are the parts that sat heaviest with me after reading it. That transcript wasn't just documenting my daughters, it documented me becoming too. Once you become a mother, fear changes shape forever. Love, it changes shape forever too. You start looking at the world differently because it's not just your life anymore. Everything suddenly is attached to the future standing in front of you, calling you mom, mama, mommy, mother, moms, or even bro. At the time of that recording, I had just come off my ninth surgery and couldn't physically attend an important school event I had never missed before in their lives. Open house. And I remember feeling so shitty about it because I'm always, as a single mother, the parent that shows up, the parent that's present, active, and deeply engaged. The parent trying to prepare and teach them about systems they are walking into before they do because I already understand these systems too well for myself, especially the public education system, especially in the South. It too is another head of hydra, another invasive species planted into every system of America. It has always been important for me to go to their open houses and school orientations so that I could gauge the energy of the school, the teachers, the administrators, and any and everybody really that would have access to my children's minds and bodies for over seven hours a day. And for them, in turn, to gauge mine and know exactly what kind of parent they had in their midst. Not including the fact that this school year was a pivotal one and I couldn't be there. And reading that entire moment years later made me realize how hard it is to separate fear from guidance once you become aware of how much danger exists in the world around your children, even at school, especially at school.

Fear And Guidance Inside School Systems

Momba 1:04:05

And maybe that's why being invited back to speak at my girls' old elementary school affected me the way that it did. Because standing in those classrooms, looking out at all those little faces, I wasn't just seeing kids. I was seeing the future in real time. I was seeing the next generation already being shaped by forces most adults refused to even name out loud. And at the same time, I was also seeing possibility, joy, curiosity, creativity, the hunger to be seen, the hunger to be understood and poured into. They were starving for what my children get every day. And that almost broke me. There was this moment where I was talking to them about content creation, YouTube and influencers and virality, all the things they already love and engage with every day. And I would break off to ask how many of them had cell phones and every hand went up. Third graders, third graders. Every single class I spoke to, every single time, I received the same answer. All of them. It was the first real moment in 26 years. I realized my fears as a mother were never irrational. That nothing about how I raised mine is abnormal. What stayed with me wasn't even their questions or answers or their infectious curiosity. It was the energy in the room. These kids are smart as hell. Beautiful, funny, creative, and purely sweet. Nothing artificial about them. So many raced to hug me. Me after every rotation, leaving excited to create and learn more about technology. But in all of their childlike joy, I could physically see what the attention economy was doing to their little nervous systems in real time. Their attention pulling every few seconds, eye contact drifting, bodies struggling to remain still, constantly rocking from side to side or bouncing their legs up and down, and it wasn't in a gentle, self-soothing way either. It was hard. All of this was going on, and not because they aren't intelligent. The opposite. They are neurologically overloaded. But society would rather have us believe they all have ADD or ADHD or some other diagnosis that requires all kinds of behavioral and criminal and medical interventions instead. Or for black children, they are simply little badasses. What terrified me the most, looking at all those raised hands, was realizing they are already fully submerged in algorithms, overstimulation, technology, and adult level exposure while barely being prepared to understand the system shaping them before they even fully know themselves yet. They all know their favorite TikTok and YouTube influencers. They all know about clips and filters and followers and trends and going viral, but none of them knew how their favorite influencers get paid or what it takes for them to stay paid. When I told them with currency similar to Robux, but doesn't require a credit card, only their attention, making them the richest broke kids in the world. You could physically see the wheels trying to spin behind their eyes. And that math wasn't mathing for them either. Even though they didn't yet have the mental capacity to connect the dots, they knew enough to know that when you spend something, you're supposed to get something in return. They all could agree that they get nothing in exchange for the attention they spend on influencers. And that opened the door to talk to them about how they can spend their currency on people, places, and things in online spaces that teach them something instead. How everything I do, the podcasting, the voice acting, the streaming, even the publishing of books, all of it, I learned by myself, online, in the same place they visit every day. YouTube. That's when the lights came on. Sitting there listening to them talk, all I could think about was how backwards this whole system is. Children are given full access to technologies before they are even taught how those technologies actually work for them or against them. They know virality before media literacy, though. They know algorithms before discernment, though. They know consumption before creation, though. The world keeps bragging about artificial intelligence being the future while barely teaching the future how the machines shaping that future are even designed to manipulate them in the first place. At least in America. Has anyone actually asked, how are children being prepared for a technological future empire and tech billionaires boast about when they're simultaneously being conditioned to only consume technology rather than understand or control it? These are the contradictions that stay pressing on my spirit. Because Black America especially can't afford to sleep through moments like this. We historically already know what surveillance looks like. We know what underfunding looks like, what propaganda looks like, and what programming our minds look like firsthand. We know what it means to be monitored, erased, overpoliced, fragmented, and simultaneously foundational to the entire global culture itself, all at once. Memory lives long in black communities because survival required it to. And it's why Empire tirelessly works its evil ass off to make us forget ours. Because memory in black communities specifically is how people track what was done to them across generations long enough to interrupt it. It's how we recognize the pattern before it fully closes around our children again. It's why none of what we see happening today is disconnected. The attacks on education, the collapse of attention spans, the rise of AI, the over-sexualization of children, the white racist agenda disguised as political extremism, the hyper-individualism, the dismantling of developmental boundaries, the harvesting of data, the rollback of civil and human rights, the militarization of police, the fragmentation of mind, body, spirit, family, community, the erosion of democracy, the manufactured apathy. All of it is infected connective tissue that needs airing out, because infection survives in darkness, underneath the surface, hidden inside denial long enough to spread, and it has to be exposed at the root before it can be treated. You

Teaching Kids Attention As Currency

Momba 1:11:47

can't heal what Empire keeps covering with gauze and calling progress. Why do you think they work so hard to exhaust people into disengagement now? Why do you think historical literacy, critical thought, and even basic human connection are all under attack at the exact same damn time? Because the disconnected people are easier to reset. They're easier to divide, easier to reprogram and convince that every version of oppression is somehow brand new and unrelated to the last one. And that's what scares me about this moment historically. Not just AI or surveillance or racist political extremism by themselves, but how psychologically exhausted and fragmented people have become. While all of this is unfolding at once, people are overwhelmed to the point of disengagement, emotionally flooded, their attention span shattered into pieces small enough to manipulate. Civil rights for black folks are being rolled back in real time while half the country is too busy arguing with algorithms, performing outrage, performing social media activism, drowning financially, mentally, checking out, or simply trying to survive day to day long enough to fully grasp the scale of what's happening around them. And the hardest part about sitting with all this as a mother is realizing these are the conditions our children are inheriting, unless people collectively decide to interrupt the cycle. Because one day, we will be the ancestors too. And if this generation refuses to organize, refuses to protect memory, to confront the infection honestly, then what we leave behind will not feel like guidance or protection to the generations after us. It will feel like inheritance as assisted suicide. That's a hard assignment for a fractured people. And doing it alone is impossible. That's why they're telling us to keep out of the fight for democracy and sit this one out like none of this belongs to us. What's wild is that we're repeating the lies to each other when our entire history in this country proves otherwise. Somebody please tell me what the fuck we sitting on instead. What are we doing, building, preparing for while we wait this fight out? One, our late and most recent ancestors, hell, our living relatives, fought and died in for you to even share your opinions? Shit like that is exactly how generations inherit wounds they didn't create. People confuse sitting something out with staying unbothered and safe, but sitting it out is why this wound keeps traveling. And I refuse to be complicit in that. Reading that transcript pulled the whole thing closer to home for me. Not just the scale of what we're up against, but the small, ordinary ways we are either interrupting something or passing it forward without realizing it. Because while I was busy trying to teach my girls how empire operates, how to recognize the game, survive it without letting it hollow them out, and how to one day help dismantle whatever parts of it they are called to confront. Life was still happening quietly inside our own walls. Seeds were still being planted even when I was too tired, too worried, or too deep in survival mode to see what was actually taking root. That's what I understand more clearly now. That yes, whatever happens outside the home matters, absolutely. But what happens inside of it every day is what those seeds feed from. The conversations, the corrections, the over-explanations, the love and the fear, too, if we're not careful. All of it becomes soil, compost young hearts and minds absorb before they even know what's feeding them. After reading what felt like a distant memory, brought back into hyper focus. This is what remained with me more than anything else. The realization that so much growth happened quietly in the background while I was busy trying to stay sane and survive Empire's game long enough to keep something alive in us. Three years ago, Kylie was crying because her sister was leaving her behind for middle school. And Glory, she was terrified about leaving Kylie behind. Now this year, Glory will be leaving for high school while Kylie stays behind. Again, one sister stepping into another world while the other has to learn how to stand alone in a place that once felt safer because Big Sister was there too. And those same feelings then are bubbling back up to the surface today. It's the exact same cycle, spinning back around again, except everybody inside of it is different now. Them, me, the world. All of us have been rearranged by time. But this time, Kylie is stronger now, more grounded, more aware of herself. She's still sensitive, but she's since discovered it's tied to her gift of empathy. And she is now actively learning how to protect herself, how to build and reinforce her mental firewalls, how not to harden her heart. And Glory has found a footing in herself that wasn't fully there yet back then. There's a confidence settling into her now that makes me emotional to even think about because I remember every private worry I carried, wondering whether I was doing enough to protect her, if I was explaining enough or too much for her analytical mind. I still do. And then there's Tiana, because I have three daughters, and even though she was already a young adult then, and is even more so now, she still belongs inside this meditation too. She deserves her flowers on this mic as well. Three years ago, Tiana was 23, trying to navigate young adulthood on a timeline that had already felt psychologically upside down to her. Another whole conversation in itself, honestly. But even while trying to figure out her own life, she was still helping Carrie pieces of ours too. Supporting her sisters, supporting me, supporting herself, filling in parental gaps since 2011, while still being a child herself in so many ways. And I think that's the part that hits me especially hard now because I did the bulk of my growing as a mother, as a woman, with her, alongside her. I was a baby, raising a baby at 19. And somehow, that baby still turned around and helped me raise her baby sisters, too. Hmm, wow. Now, she's handling life better than she gives herself credit for, even if capitalism and the illusion of having it all together keeps trying to convince her otherwise. She too is more grounded in herself now, more confident in her individuality in a way that has, honestly, always inspired me. She stepped deeper into her creative bag and started selling her own custom crochet pieces. She started trusting her own voice more, and she's just as loving and supportive today as she was then. Fiercely so. Life has been lifing for everybody, especially her generation. I understand the insecurities that come from living inside a world that measures human worth through money, productivity, and optics while ignoring the majority of the things that actually matter. But she's still standing, still growing, still sane. A miracle when you think about it. And somewhere inside watching all three of my girls evolve into different versions of themselves. I had changed too. Three years really ain't nothing until you suddenly realize how much life can mutate inside of it. That's why this memory feels feels so surreal to me. What I found inside that old transcript wasn't just memory. It was buried evidence of my own life. Proof that time had been working underneath the worry. Proof that intentional parenting matters, that different parenting creates different children. Proof that children remember what you say to them, even when you think they aren't listening. And that all those repeated conversations and emotional check-ins and over-explaining, preaching reach them after all. Because as mothers, I think we spend so much time criticizing ourselves that we rarely stop long enough to notice growth while it's happening. We notice what we missed, what we could have said better, done better. The guilt always eats louder. But reading that old moment against who my girls are now let me see something I don't think I've ever truly allowed myself to see before. Some seeds actually took root. Mothers are memory keepers. Whether the world values that labor or not, we are living, breathing data centers, archiving entire human beings, not just birthdays and school pictures. We hold the evidence of life changes in real time, in our children, and in ourselves too. We record the invisible things people pretend don't shape human beings until they suddenly do. Things like the emotional climate inside a home, the way a child learns to interpret love, safety, tension, silence, conflict, disappointment, the private voice they develop inside themselves who speaks intrusively and without permission. The ways they learn to soothe themselves, protect themselves, express themselves, withhold themselves, the ways they learn to speak to themselves after hard days, the little survival rituals they pick up without even realizing it, the things they grow toward, the things they spend years trying to unlearn. Even their relationship with trust and softness gets formed somewhere early with their mothers. And that part turned the mirror back on me, reminding me to never forget that I will always forever be on the potter's wheel, still being shaped, still learning, still unlearning, still softening, still becoming until the day I'm released from the game. We

Motherhood As Accountability And Becoming

Momba 1:23:54

talk so much about growing children, shaping children, molding, guiding, and protecting children. But motherhood itself, we never talk about how it reshapes the mother at the same time. How every stage demands a death and rebirth, a constant shedding of old versions of yourselves while trying to guide someone else into themselves. It exposes every crack in you, every wound, every fear, every softness, ego, blind spot, and toxic tendency forcing you to face the truth of who you really are and not who you believe you are. I used to think being a mother meant pouring endlessly outward into my children, but now I can literally see through them a visible representation of how what I pour into them will eventually pour back into me. How we grow with each other symbiotically. That's pure power. An empire has thirsted for it for centuries. Today, I see more than ever that motherhood is not just sacrifice and protection. It's also accountability, reflection, growth. Accepting that even when you mean well, your fear, your urgency, your trauma, worldview, anxieties, and need to protect can still shape your children in ways you later wish you had handled differently. That you have faults and deficiencies that need work, that you fall short sometimes, fall down sometimes, get stuck sometimes, that you are only human. Our children are the clearest reflection of us we will ever have. Not the mirror, not the internet, not followers or titles, or careers or whatever version of success. This culture keeps dangling in front of people like a carrot attached to a dream. Our children and who they become under our tutelage, our management. That's the part motherhood forced me to understand differently because you realize early on that you're not just raising kids. You are shaping somebody's nervous system, somebody's inner voice, somebody's future relationships, somebody's ability to love themselves, trust themselves, survive hardship, navigate conflict, carry softness without shame. And that weight is terrifying when you really sit with it, because there are no perfect mothers, no perfect homes, no perfect blueprints for any of it. Our children really are blank canvases for only a brief period of time. And what gets painted there early on doesn't just disappear because they grow up. It remains, stained and painted over again and again and again. Some things soften with time, some things deepen. Some things get buried so far underneath adulthood, people don't even realize they're still reacting from wounds, fears, absences, survival instincts, and emotional blueprints formed before they even knew how to name what they were feeling. This is why motherhood feels so heavy once you really understand what's being formed inside ordinary everyday moments. Not just memories, patterns, reflexes, emotional instincts people take with them into adulthood without knowing where they learned them first. It's why I can get on this mic and confidently say that motherhood is one of the most powerful assignments on this earth. It's not the powerfulest. Because empires rise and fall. Politicians, they come and go. Billionaires built machines and marketplaces and illusions of permanence. But civilizations are first shaped somewhere much quieter. Inside the womb, inside homes, inside language, nervous systems, and inside the small, everyday exchanges children carry with them forever. Maybe that's why I still haven't been able to bring myself to listen to the audio yet. Reading it already felt like standing inside a ghost, like watching a previous version of your family frozen at an earlier doorway, while the current version of everybody is already halfway toward the next one before you even finish grieving the last transition. That's something nobody prepares you for. How motherhood is basically learning how to love people and yourself through constant versions of loss and arrival. Now here we are again, another version of us all ending while another one begins before I can even fully process who we just were. And honestly, it's one of the most beautiful and terrifying things I have ever witnessed. One day, you wake up and realize your children have been blooming quietly while you were busy tending to the garden. There really is no singular moment where you realize your babies grew up. No grand announcement or cinematic movie montage playing in your mind on cue. It happens gradually, softly, like flowers opening overnight when you swear they weren't there the day before. And then one day, the little versions of them only exist in recordings, in transcripts, in old pictures, in frozen voices in digital amber. Three years. That's it. And my babies have grown so much on me. No matter where I go, somebody stops me to tell me something kind about my children, how respectful they are, how thoughtful they are, how funny, intelligent, and sweet they are. And while part of me receives that as affirmation, another part of me still feels like motherhood is one long lesson in realizing you could have always done more, listened deeper, protected harder, love softer in certain moments. You know the cost, and you know you only have one shot at establishing a foundation that endures. And still, despite all my fears about the future, about what I see happening culturally and politically and spiritually around us, despite all the ways I know I could have handled certain moments better, despite hearing my own flaws reflected back at me through permanent dialogue from three years ago, my girls still kept becoming themselves anyway. Thoughtful, emotionally intelligent, funny, creative, mentally strong black ladies, all while navigating a timeline flipped upside down psychologically from the one I inherited. And it wasn't because I perfected motherhood or was successfully embodying the strong black mother archetype people love romanticizing after the damage is already done, but because growth happened collectively in our home. While they were growing into themselves, I was growing too. My inner standing deepened. The foundation underneath all of us strengthened little by little through every season we survived together. And that's why I feel like conscious parenting is the most powerful form of resistance on this timeline. Because motherhood really is the closest thing to touching divinity humans ever experience. Because what else do you call taking spirit and memory and blood and possibility and molding it in real time while simultaneously being molded yourself? A goddess with a little g. Clay shaping clay is spiritual labor, intellectual labor, emotional and survival labor. It is wartime preparation labor under empire. Not the soft hallmark card motherhood they sell in Walgreens, but protective motherhood, observant motherhood, historically aware motherhood, black motherhood. That's why memory matters. I pray that one day, when my girls are older, maybe listening back to this exchange themselves years from now on another timeline entirely, that they hear more than just my fear and exhaustion. I pray they hear my love underneath it all. My effort, my trying, my growth, my humanity, and fully understand why I raised them the way that I did on this timeline specifically. Why I worried so much, why I questioned everything, why I pushed against certain things, why I protected their attention and certain boundaries harder than they understood at the time. Why I cared so much about language and memory and critical thinking and emotional intelligence and connection, softness, discernment, humanity. Why I kept trying to build mental and spiritual firewalls around them and within them. I hope they understand that while I was raising them, they were raising me too, teaching me. I hope they realize that just like them, I had never been here before either. And that I was just the mother forever growing and trying her best to hold on to her babies while the whole damn game board was changing shape around all of us in real time. Trying to preserve softness without raising them naive, trying to teach discernment without teaching fear, trying to protect their minds on a timeline where people hand children the internet like it is in a psychologically destabilizing portal connected directly to Empire and every other invasive species mutating across humanity all at once. Not because I thought I was perfect or had all the answers, but because I could already see how easy it was becoming for people to lose themselves, lose their attention, lose their memory, lose their ability to think critically while systems far bigger than them quietly control the conditions of their existence underneath them. And isn't that all any of us can really do while living through a collapsing world? Try our best not to pass our despair down, untreated. Try to leave the next generation something sturdier than fear, something deeper than survival mode, something like memory, like discernment and community, the ability to remain emotionally connected to themselves and each other inside a world constantly trying to fracture both. I want my girls to remain each other's keeper long after I'm gone. I want them to never let this culture convince them cruelty is strength or numbness is maturity. I want them to stay kind to themselves because life will absolutely test a gangster. I want them to understand that mothering is bigger than biology and that you don't have to give birth to nurture, protect, guide, teach, pour into, or help hold other people upright through hard seasons of their life, or help another person carry the weight of being alive here. They are already a mother. And to be real, maybe that's what this whole meditation has really been about underneath all the spiraling about motherhood and memory. The terrifying responsibility of realizing children don't just inherit our features or our last names. They inherit whatever version of humanity we leave behind for them to navigate. As for me, as long as I'm still here in the potter's hands, I hope I never stop refining either. Never stop growing. Never stop reaching for the highest version of myself available to me while I'm here. Never stop using my voice, my pen, my memory, and my awareness to push back against everything in this world, trying to deaden people into apathy, disconnection, and forgetfulness. This meditation was personal, yes, but it's not only personal, it's relevant. And maybe that's why today, being Memorial Day, feels so strangely aligned with this episode. A

When Remembrance Turns Into Performance

Momba 1:38:24

day originally set aside for remembrance somehow lands on the same day I finally get to start recording a meditation where memory is the whole through line. I didn't plan that. Life just did what life does. But even that says something. Because this country is real good at assigning one day to remember what it spends the rest of the year forgetting. Fallen soldiers get a day reduced to holiday sales, speeches, flags, and ritualized gratitude while living veterans are left fighting systems that should have cared for them the minute they made it home. People get sent off to die in forever wars dressed up as freedom, patriotism, and protecting the homeland, when so much of it has always been about empire, greed, power, and pockets that never see a battlefield. The same government finds money for vanity projects, AI weapons, surveillance, and taxpayer-funded slush accounts for insurrectionists, while people carrying the wounds of that violence have to fight for care. And that's the thread right there that connects the tissue. Mother's Day, Memorials Day, any day set aside for reflection can be perverted once memory is no longer practiced but performed. The ritual of memory stays on the calendar, but the spirit of it gets evicted. And I don't want that for my children. That's part of what I wanted folks to sit with, honestly. Not just motherhood itself, but the responsibility of raising children consciously during a historical moment that is actively trying to disconnect people from themselves, from each other, from community, historical memory, from humanity itself, especially the collective. We don't have the luxury of raising children without awareness on a timeline like this. Too much is shifting too fast. Too much is being erased while people are encouraged to sit on the sidelines and pretend not to notice or care. And whether people want to admit it or not, what we normalize now becomes the emotional and psychological inheritance the next generation will have to live inside of later. That isn't theory. That's parenting. That's community, that's politics, survival, resistance, which means that the ordinary things matter more than people realize. The conversations, the boundaries, the time, the presence, the memory, the intentionality, the way we love each other, the way we protect each other from becoming emotionally numb in a world that increasingly rewards apathy. Because at the end of the day, long after all the algorithms and outrage cycles and empire propaganda burn themselves out, what survives us will still be whatever we poured into each other. So, yes, every day is Mother's Day, not the brunch and flowers version, the real one, the everyday one rooted in protecting growth while it's still tender, keeping softness alive inside your home long enough for your children to carry it forward, practicing memory before it gets stolen, and understanding that resistance is not only something people march for in the streets. Sometimes it lives in the small, ordinary places first, before anybody ever calls it a movement, in what we teach, in what we refuse to normalize, what we repair, what we remember, what we pour into each other when nobody is watching. Because trust, children are always watching. They're watching us become who we are. Time is moving, whether we're paying attention or not. And what we make normal now will be the world they have to survive later. And black people have survived too much of his story already to keep handing our children amnesia in its place. Because what gets forgotten eventually gets repeated. And that is exactly what empire depends on. Our people forgetting what came before. Truly.

Why I Share The Raw Audio

Momba 1:43:42

Because I know this was long, heavy, and probably uncomfortable in certain places too. I know it was for me, but I think discomfort is part of what happens when people slow down long enough to actually sit with themselves instead of immediately scrolling past their own thoughts. And that's really what this whole episode became. Underneath all the rabbit holes about motherhood, memory, empire, technology, attention, and collective consciousness. A confrontation with memory itself, not just remembering, because there is a difference. Now, before I drop the audio of the recording, I want y'all to know that some portions of this recording have been lightly edited for long silences, background interference, and privacy concerns involving my children. My goal was never to expose my family or turn a personal, intimate memory into content. This is reflection. This is documentation. This is me trying to sit honestly with memory in real time. And I think a lot of parents, especially black mothers, are gonna hear pieces of themselves somewhere inside of this recorded conversation too. So if you're ready, let's get back to it. Shut

Open House Recap And Middle School Tour

Momba 1:45:32

up, get out of here. The principal was serious, but he uh miss Amy, this other lady I can remember her name, and then she counts with the pathway, and he was like, they're gonna be knocking on your door. If y'all like, you got kids, you got days where your kids just ain't coming to school, they're gonna be doing home business, they're gonna be knocking when I'm gonna do it. But I don't know if that's I don't know if that was a good thing.

Speaker 1:45:51

But make up what's let's talk about it's the last time. Sit down, sit down, sit down.

Speaker 3 1:45:57

They um will be like they'll offer different types of counseling this year, and grief counseling.

Speaker 1:46:01

Come over here, come around, baby.

Speaker 3 1:46:04

Greek counseling and stuff. Uh-huh. Um but that was the most I got from the meeting. Whenever we got there, we went right right. It was right when they began to introduce all the teachers by bringing Arlington. And so after that, we went Psalms Reman, um, Psalms IV, checked on everything. They checked on you and everything like that. Got all the papers, like sign, an emergency, all that good stuff. But that was all that there really was with Miss Freeman. The more that I think about it, I don't know if we were supposed to wait or if they were just gonna be sitting there and meeting with the parents then. So I think that they're just she's just gonna be giving everything on the first day of school because she didn't mention anything.

Speaker 1:46:42

Um what you feel about her? She asked her, she kind of real dry and yeah, she just usually like old person.

Speaker 3 1:46:50

She's just like old. Yeah, old person. Um I didn't get to talk to her much, but she, from what I got so far, she's pretty cool.

Speaker 1:47:02

Lorianna, you can give your sister advice on how to survive in this screen in class.

Speaker 3 1:47:08

Oh, they were they've already talked about it. Um the first class we went to was your math class, right? The math teacher. Oh, was that she?

Speaker 5 1:47:15

You have a good time. Did you have a good time? Did you see some friends?

Speaker 3 1:47:20

Yeah. So the teacher I just sent you um is a little, you know, number code that she'll text. Uh, this is for her math teacher. Okay. She's gonna send out the syllabus and school supply list that way.

Speaker 5 1:47:32

Okay.

Speaker 3 1:47:33

That's gonna be eight uh name and number. I had just written that little note down for the math teacher as well. Um, whatever that says, that's gonna be kept in the class. But I believe every teacher is like that too. They're all gonna have some refinery notebook that they're gonna class.

Speaker 1:47:47

Your dad sent money to help get your school supplies and stuff.

Speaker 3 1:47:50

So but yeah, oh my gosh.

Speaker 1:47:53

You got that for free?

Speaker 3 1:47:55

Wow, I mean they gave me free school supply.

Speaker 1:47:58

Um, thank God you brought your purse. You took your switch up there to school, huh?

Speaker 3 1:48:02

She didn't use it. But um is amazing, it's so pretty. Yeah, so so so so pretty. So, how was it? Uh I finally found the um middle school after seeing uh one of the chassis girls, and she told us where to go and everything. We went in, signed in with everybody, and then one of the cheerleaders was our guy, and she took it.

Speaker 1:48:23

Okay, what did you think about that? She was super nice.

Speaker 3 1:48:25

She was talking about it.

Speaker 1:48:26

Did you enjoy getting getting toured by a cheerleader finally?

Speaker 3 1:48:31

What about you, Lori?

Speaker 1:48:33

How'd you feel? You got to run around school. How's your tour? Tell me how you feel.

Speaker 3 1:48:40

All of all of the sixth grade teachers are all in one hallway. And you have to go out, and you have to go outside and go for another day to get to the cafeteria.

Speaker 1 1:48:51

Uh-huh. So you might need an umbrella or is it covered?

Speaker 3 1:48:56

Uh I have an umbrella in my back.

Speaker 1 1:48:58

It's not covered, no.

Speaker 3 1:49:01

So, we keep our feet touch or what with my homeroom teachers. Or they hope that they'll give us her schedules or you need a schedule, girl.

Speaker 1:49:14

That means you can learn your schedule. Yes.

Speaker 1 1:49:19

It's gonna be don't end agonized about it. She's just gonna get to learn because you're gonna have to go to different classrooms. You're gonna know between this time and that time, Tiana can tell you all about it. How do you feel about going to that middle school? Did you enjoy the tour? I mean, tell me what's up. It felt like a lot of walking.

Speaker 3 1:49:38

So it's like to get to place.

Speaker 1 1:49:43

Oh, okay. Well, yeah, you're going to a bigger school.

Speaker 1:49:48

So outside of the physical activity of walking, principal burgers, now tell me how you felt about it. Are you are you thinking you're gonna be happy there?

Speaker 3 1:49:58

Yeah, I think so.

Speaker 1:50:00

Did you see any of your friends?

Speaker 3 1:50:02

Yeah, I saw some of them. I saw I saw the people I didn't see, I saw in papers. I saw two of my classmates in the group for like social studies, I'm pretty sure.

Speaker 4 1:50:17

These are my granddad. These are my granddad.

Speaker 1 1:50:23

What does she have?

Speaker 4 1:50:24

Just watch it.

Speaker 6 1:50:31

Oh boy. That was nice.

Speaker 2 1:50:38

Okay, well, I'm so happy. Um, I hope you are you worried about going to middle school now that you had the tour.

Speaker 1 1:50:46

Are do you feel better about going?

Speaker 3 1:50:48

Not really. We saw Miss Yates.

Speaker 1 1:50:52

And she knows Miss Amy. How cool is that?

Speaker 3 1:50:57

Oh, what's she? And then after that, her Miss Amy had they, girl, they got a testimony. Miss Amy to fit girl in. Yeah, she told me she was live with her. She stayed with Miss Amy for about eight months. She was like, My life has never been the same since I met Mission.

Speaker 1:51:10

That is good. What does 444 mean?

Speaker 3 1:51:12

Um, you'll have to give you a little bit. I'm gonna I'm gonna do a little bit of research.

Speaker 2 1:51:16

I mean, because it's so amazing to me. Like the universe loves me for sure. Because soon I've been so agonizing about the transition and then me not being able to help. And but then again, I thought it was awesome that big sister get to take, you know, little sister to middle school. And I thought that was a beautiful thing too, and might make her feel, you know, super, you know, cool about it.

Speaker 1 1:51:40

But I was like, you think so?

Speaker 2 1:51:44

I was like, Lord, um, you know, I've been trying to get in touch with the counselor, and um, I emailed her before y'all left, one of them just saying, hey, hands-on all day. Yeah, I understand that just to give me a call, and then um that's when I text you when you were talking about what to say, and I was like, Well, they should be like Miss Amy, but there's nobody on the same tip I was like, but there was nobody like Miss Amy.

Speaker 3 1:52:10

I was like, girl, I will call my mom already. No, she was literally like, no, please. She was like, I was about to ask you because I told her, told her about your hip and everything, and that um knew that everybody was fishing. You should send a couple of emails, but I just wanted to make sure I could connect with somebody who can get back to whomever she cheated about to or answered to predominantly or whatever. And she was like, Do you just want to call a girl period?

Speaker 2 1:52:31

That's not what I mean. I text you, I'm like, there's nobody like Miss Amy.

Speaker 3 1:52:34

I didn't see y'all metal.

Speaker 2 1:52:36

You didn't see that text message? No. I go back and look at it, dude.

Speaker 3 1:52:40

We were walking, I didn't see you all.

Speaker 2 1:52:41

And then she calls me, and not only do she, you know, she no no Miss Amy. I'm like, God, the universe is good. They sent me another Amy.

Speaker 3 1:52:54

And she's so sweet too.

Speaker 2 1:52:55

She uh It just made me feel good about everything.

Speaker 3 1:52:58

She took the time to have a small conversation with Glory about some of her triggers between her and Glory first, and then I told her about like, you know, the heat and everything, says all her stimulants and stuff like that. Um then she experimented with Glory. I don't know. Um, is that I don't know if that'll be the place that Glory will go to. She needs a little space. But um, she like you know, closed all her blinds because her room is like, oh my god, it's so beautiful, so space. She's on the side of the campus where all the lights comes in. And so uh she closed all the windows and played with the lights. We have to give her a plan. Um she, you know, asked Glory, how does this make you feel? What are some things that we do to keep you comfortable? Do you need a safe space? I was this, I was so she wrote some of those things down and I'll wrote down your information and pass on to the lady. Good swing woman. Um, but uh she they told me she was at the table, she was one of the counselors at the table, but she might have been down towards the end.

Speaker 1:53:47

Yeah. So I didn't know. Clori, take that out for grandma, please.

Speaker 4 1:53:51

Y'all, what's wrong with crying with her crying? She went to her room off sad before I even asked her about the watch. I'm not sure.

Speaker 3 1:53:59

Um, because everything was fine when we went to hers first, everything was good, and we're walking around the school and everything, and then we were with the counselor. The counselor was the one who noticed she was crying. So I don't know if she's just, you know, feeling away because she has to go to Arlington again, and glory is getting new and all these. But I nothing happened. She just ended up. I'll check on her.

Speaker 1 1:54:20

Okay. Yeah, go you go check on her, please. And then make her come up here and sit and talk to me about the school. We were talking about her first. I was trying to engage with her, she really wasn't saying much.

Speaker 4 1:54:38

Just saying going out, eh?

Speaker 1 1:54:41

That yeah, it's gonna be thrown away. I'm looking forward to your new school year. You want a big kid's school. What's wrong?

Speaker 3 1:54:58

I'm

Sisters, Separation, And Growing Up

Speaker 3 1:54:59

worried that Kylie might be so that I'm not doing her. I want her to I want her to know that she'll be okay with that.

Speaker 1 1:55:11

Write her a letter.

Speaker 3 1:55:13

Okay.

Speaker 1 1:55:14

That would be nice. You know, y'all communicating and talking to each other doesn't always go well. Cause she can be goofy sometimes, and that irritates you, but she's young. You have to understand that. And then and that she's catching up emotionally, just like you have conditions, Kylie. You know, her emotional intelligence is, you know, because of her speech delay that she had growing up and her stutter and all that stuff, it makes her shy, and then she she loves to just be, you know, goofy and stuff. I think that's how she, you know, makes herself feel good, is to be goofy and silly all the time. Because, you know, but y'all both gonna have to learn how to express yourselves and talk to each other, especially as sisters, like Tiana. Like you talk to me and I talk to you. Tiana makes sure that she talked to you guys as a big sister, and she goes and checks on her sister. You know, you're her big sister. That means, you know, you gotta level up in how you treat her and let her know that she can come and talk to you and and and come to you for help if she needs help with anything, whether it's her homework or situation at school, you know, learn to ask each other about their day and what bad happened and what good happened and help them feel better. But I think that would be a good thing before the start of school, you know, just to write her a nice letter and let her know because she often feels like you don't care about her sometimes. But that's normal. That's little kids, you know. So you can write her and tell her how much you love her and care about her, and then pretty soon it's just only a year, she's gonna be at school with you again. Then it's gonna happen again when you go to high school. You're gonna go to high school and she's still gonna be at middle school, and then you're gonna graduate, and she's still gonna be at high school, ready to graduate. But by that time, she'll be, you know, more mature.

Speaker 7 1:57:14

Yeah, hopefully.

Speaker 1 1:57:16

See, there you go. There you go. So, yeah, write her a letter. Shunt, what you got? Tell me what you got.

Speaker 3 1:57:22

Uh-huh. Some sticky notes, some glue, some tape, racer.

Speaker 1 1:57:28

I can see all that. Uh I meant really the paperwork. Oh. But thank you. What's this? Something I gotta fill out. You gotta fill out sixth grade social studies. So that's your teacher for social studies. Okay. Um that Kylie, um, is what did you say, worried about, you know, not being at Arlington with her anymore. Oh, that could be and that she'll be at school by herself.

Speaker 6 1:58:33

They're doing together because we ain't gonna require.

Speaker 1 1:58:37

Mm-hmm. It's gonna happen again when she go to high school.

Speaker 6 1:58:43

She'll be over there with glory.

Speaker 1 1:58:47

Yeah.

Speaker 6 1:58:48

What one or two? She'll be there with the glory for what, one or two years?

Speaker 1 1:58:53

Yeah, for two.

Speaker 6 1:58:56

Yeah, it's two this year.

Speaker 1 1:58:58

Mm-hmm. Your grades is gonna be based on your ability to maintain and organize your notes. So it's gonna be this is when you gotta start learning to take good notes and make sure that they're that they're organized notes and that they look good. You know, no crazy scribbles and stuff all over the paper, but um, good notes and stuff, okay? Let me go. Also your workbook packets and return homework assignments. So that's where your grades is coming from. You also have class projects that account as a test grade for each unit. So you for each unit, y'all gonna have a project to do. So that means if you study in China, you're gonna have a product, pro uh, maybe a project at the end of that. Or if you study in Egypt, you're gonna have a project at the end of that. They gonna you guys are hitting the ground running with a research project as soon as the first few weeks of class. So that means within the first couple of weeks, you're gonna, you're gonna, you're gonna have um a research project to do.

Speaker 5 2:00:10

Oh, okay.

Speaker 1 2:00:12

You're required to have a two-inch binder, highlighters, and pencils.

Speaker 3 2:00:18

I was wondering, because like all the teachers were saying that I needed a binder. Do you think I'll need a binder for like each class?

Speaker 1 2:00:27

Probably so. The binders will probably stay at school. So one day, don't you're gonna tear it. And that's not, you know, that don't have three holes in it. So you just have to set it in there. Set it on the outside, see if it fits on the outside. Might not either, it might be too wide. But yeah, I'll make sure. See, gotta get creative and find a way. So you're gonna get one copy of each chapter. It tells you ahead of time what you're gonna study, okay? It tells you week one, unit one. So that's cool. So you know ahead of time what you're gonna be studying from week to week.

Speaker 7 2:01:10

Alright.

Speaker 1 2:01:11

Is she coming in here?

Speaker 3 2:01:12

Yeah, she's coming.

Speaker 1 2:01:13

Kylie? To clean her face or something?

Speaker 3 2:01:16

Yeah, she's gonna clean her face and I don't really know.

Speaker 1 2:01:18

What are we worried about? The transition of glory.

Speaker 3 2:01:22

I've been noticing like she's been sad kind of on and off all day um about it because um, you know, going to JCM and seeing all the cool and pretty things, cheerleaders and basketball, it's natural with the track coach and everything like that. So I think she's just feeling her feelings. Yeah, their time is coming too, baby. And her, and then she's really nervous for school this year because she's gonna be by herself. Glory's not gonna be there. You know, she's not gonna see her in the hallways or anything like that. She just like those kids really mean. And I'm not cool, I just can't see Glory, you know, because I guess they have their cute little rendezvous at lunch, and they get to see each other, they see each other in the hallway and stuff. So she's just sad.

Speaker 1 2:02:01

Okay, that's natural.

Speaker 3 2:02:03

And I think she just I really I think she just really loved what she saw.

Speaker 1 2:02:06

Yeah, that should encourage her then.

Speaker 2:02:08

Let it be an encouragement to do that.

Speaker 3 2:02:10

Yeah, tell me why they're dance teacher. I don't, I'm she may have subbed for me. I recognize her. She has locks and everything, she's an older black woman. And so they have a dance teacher. So she's gonna be teaching them like the origin. If she gets the glass, they'll be teaching her how like the origins of dance, different dances, journal. She's gonna be journaling with them and everything like that, and they'll be earning points from their journaling if she does it. They're uh choir teacher, another major black woman locked up. Um, they pair with the band and everything like that, and they'll do really big shows together and stuff like that. All of the arts and everything together. I think Glory wants to be band.

Speaker 2:02:43

Is that what you're doing?

Speaker 3 2:02:45

And they explain how all of that would go and everything. And then this year's the first year that they're gonna have a track team. So I don't think track usually track isn't gonna start till like this spring. But I mean, she did say it's some information and stuff that we rolling out properly.

Speaker 1 2:02:58

She might enjoy throwing disc is in shot, put I did. This is my favorite thing to do. Think of a frisbee, but it's a disc, and you get and you, you know, you win by throwing it the furthest. Whoever can throw it the farthest, it's your first, second, and place.

Speaker 3 2:03:13

Oh my gosh, what's that one game? It's not a harder track, but it's like another one where people throw a disc to get them in the metal things.

Speaker 1 2:03:19

That's horseshoes.

Speaker 3 2:03:21

Oh, I didn't know what that was.

Speaker 2:03:23

Oh no, I didn't know. No, honey, that's like a cornhole game or something. Yeah, it's a disc. It's a country game, honey.

Speaker 4 2:03:34

Uh-huh.

Speaker 2:03:35

Knock stuff out the way. They do have competitive horseshoeing.

Speaker 3 2:03:39

She threw it through the trees and it like did a little curve and it like curved right into the goal.

Speaker 1 2:03:43

Fam bam, Fam Bam referees horseshoes for his grandfather out there in Oregon, Oregon. He they have horseshoe tournaments. Yes. Why are you opening everything? You need gas, mama?

Speaker 4 2:04:00

How much garbage do I have, baby?

Speaker 3 2:04:02

I think it's okay. So this is we're gonna need to get you a folder for each of your classes, yeah.

Speaker 1 2:04:09

So you can keep up, yeah, keep everything, don't be mixing stuff together. If you start now to have big organizations, you'll last you the rest of your life. Because it's nothing like not being able to find what you need when you need it.

Speaker 2:04:23

Because you got your social studies mixed up with your math and your math works with your science.

Speaker 5 2:04:32

Okay, wonderful. I'm looking forward. It tells you everything you're gonna be learning and when.

Speaker 4 2:04:38

That's why I want you to have to go. I think I'm gonna drive you over there. Mama's car tomorrow. I mean you're gonna drive it for it for you. I know, but it ain't been started.

Speaker 2:04:51

My car? My car, baby.

Speaker 4 2:04:53

Oh, she wants you to, yeah.

Speaker 2:04:55

If you I gotta get some shooting, or she just needs to raid because I ain't got no insurance on there right now.

Speaker 4 2:05:00

Oh, you ain't got no insurance.

Speaker 2:05:02

I told you I it laps, mom. That was before I went into surgery. I forgot to pay.

Speaker 1 2:05:09

I I y'all remember? No. You remember that card?

Speaker 3 2:05:13

No.

Speaker 1 2:05:13

No, I ain't got no insurance on it, baby.

Speaker 3 2:05:16

Oh, that one on my head. I try to run a block.

Speaker 2:05:19

No, you can just start the car. That's all you have to do.

Speaker 1 2:05:23

Okay. Yeah. That's all.

Stress, Health Costs, And Healing

Speaker 1 2:05:26

I've been, I'm sorry, under a lot of stress. I tend to forget things from time to time, and I ain't never not not had no insurance. So it just is what it is.

Speaker 2 2:05:39

That reminds me, thank you, because that means I gotta get this phone back on.

Speaker 1 2:05:46

In the back of my backpack, you don't have a phone, uh, glory. But yeah, that's what's up.

Speaker 2:05:54

That's a nice little cool space.

Speaker 3 2:05:57

Yeah, super good.

Speaker 2:06:03

Gotta meet your hands. Come sit down. Come on. That ain't so much of it. Look, it's natural what you're feeling right now.

Speaker 1 2:06:13

I felt that way with my sister, Tamika. Okay, Tamika's four years older than me, so I was only in school with her. I never got to go to high school with her, and I never got to go to middle school with her, but I got to go to elementary school with her for like one year before she left middle school. So she was always getting to do all the cool stuff before I could do it and get to go places that I couldn't go. And, you know, but guess what? Your time is coming too, baby. It's just for one year. Everything is ages and stages, you can't rush. But it's okay to feel that the way it's sad. Glory, you know, is worried about you missing her too, and that makes her sad as well. You know, she doesn't want you to that you're a big girl. This is the time for you to shine and show what a big girl you can be, help build your confidence. You see where Glory's going, right? And that's someplace you want to be. You want to go there next year? Okay. Well, guess what? Middle school is your roughest year socially, dealing with the kids, girls, mean girls, boys, teachers. And it's it's it's a heavy load. This is Glory got five different teachers. This is just her supposed to study teachers, and look at all the stuff that she gotta do. They have a research project soon as school starts. Okay, so take this time, don't rush because when you get to middle school, it's gonna be a whole lot of work. It's not just gonna be the social scene, okay? It's not gonna be the dance team or the the choir or the band and the cheerleaders and and all of that. That's the fun part. But just like anything else, like y'all science lab, you got, and all the cool stuff you guys got coming, there's work that needs to be done. And it's gonna be a lot of work. So I know that you feel sad, but you know that's okay. Feel sad, it's natural. But understand that this is your time to shine and show what a big girl you can become because you're gonna be there with your sister next year, okay? And we don't need you getting eaten alive by the sharks, okay? Because they're gonna smell blood in the water when they see your little sweet self. Especially if you're talking baby fight and not in your big girl voice, honey. So this is a year for you to prepare mentally to go to middle school so that when you get there with Gloriana, not only can your big sister show you the ropes, you're gonna have your sister. She's she's think of it like this: Gloria is going ahead of you to scout the way. She's gonna go and figure everything out so that by the time you come, you're already gonna know everything when you get there.

Speaker 2 2:08:58

Because you got a sister that goes to JCM Middle.

Speaker 1 2:09:01

And you get to say that when you get there, that Gloriana's gonna be able to help you navigate middle school. So it's okay, but let's not agonize. Stop. Let's not agonize about it, honey. All right, I want to hear about your school year and what you think about Miss Freeman and everybody that you got to talk to. You got a new Miss Amy at the school too, Miss Yates. This guy's lady you talk to knows Miss Amy. So when you get there, you got an awesome school counselor already. But it's not gonna be this year, it'll be next year. Okay. You hear me? You've been waiting for school to start. Stop, leave it alone. And now here you are, you got to go, get a preview, and now you're said.

Speaker 2 2:09:47

You knew this whole time Glory was gonna have to go to middle school, Kylie.

Speaker 1 2:09:51

That she was going to a different school, you know that. Okay? There's no fifth grade at middle school. Gloriana's older than you. Alright? You will get to go next year, but you gotta survive this year. Okay? On your own. Alright? This is how we get strong. We have to learn how to stand by ourselves because sister is not gonna always be around. Just like Tiana ain't always been around because she had to leave and go to college. And you are so happy to have your big sister home and get to see her and talk to her all the time, but you know that Tiana had to leave and go to school, and that made you sad. This is no different, okay. Now that Tiana's home, it may become a time where Tiana might have to leave again to find her own place, and she won't live here with us anymore. Okay, you can't be sad about that. That's ages and stages. Pretty soon that's gonna be you too. You're gonna blink and look back, and before you know it, you're gonna have your own apartment and got a job and a car and a boyfriend and going out having fun and doing what you want to do in a safe and healthy way. But until then, you can't cry about not being able to drive a car right now, can you? Does that make sense for you to be sad that you can't drive a car? It don't. This don't make sense either. I promise you. Don't be sad about something you're gonna get to do too. Okay, you're gonna have your time. Now tell me about your day. Grandma asked you about your teacher. Who's your second teacher? I don't know. She's trying to make you feel good. So who your teacher, Miss Freeman? Do you know who your second teacher is?

Speaker 3 2:11:52

This is all all four fourth grade, all four fifth grade teachers are gonna be teachers.

Speaker 1 2:11:59

Yeah. Look how, look, look how the universe loves you. Not only for your last year by yourself at Arlington, you get the same teachers that Gloriana had. She had Miss Freeman and Miss Ivy. And I know both of them. I got to talk to Miss Freeman last night, she called me. And you know Miss Ivy. I already know Miss Ivy. Stop it. You stop that. I already know Miss Ivy. And I'll talk to her. I'm sure she's looking forward to have you in her class too. So it's a good way to end the school year at Arlington. I love Miss Ivy and Miss Freeman, she's stern. And you need that in your life because you need to start growing up and being a big girl. Otherwise, that middle school that you would like to see over there is not gonna be a fun experience. You're not gonna like it. Okay? So we gotta do some big girl things. Starting with stop meddling. Stop going into grandma's room and taking her things. That's not nice. Grandma does too much for you all. She deserves her privacy and respect for her possession. Just because we see shiny things that look pretty and we want them, that don't mean we take them for ourselves, okay? That's not yours. Alright. So you owe your grandma an apology for that.

Speaker 4 2:13:23

That's fine, baby. I don't want to lose. Um doing a good job.

Speaker 1 2:13:35

I'm liking how you're putting yourself back together after being sad. You gotta choose. It's a choice. You gotta choose to breathe through it. Take deep breaths and calm down. You don't have to be crying right now if you don't choose to. This is a happy day. We're not gonna we gotta go shock for school clothes and school supplies and shoes, and you're making this a sad experience. Get it together, okay? You can't breathe through your nose right now, it's clogged up, so stop trying. Okay? You just need to go get some tissue. All right, put some cold water on your face, look in the mirror, and be like, girl, you got this. Next year I'm gonna be at that school with my sister on the dance team. And you know.

Speaker 4 2:14:18

I guess Sienna needs to try to get them out of there.

Speaker 1 2:14:22

Yeah.

Speaker 4 2:14:23

Well, she works Saturday.

Speaker 1 2:14:25

Yeah, maybe Sunday. And it could be anytime, there's no rush. It's not like Yeah, Glory needs her uniform shirts and everything, so they gotta have some more tennis shoes. Mm-hmm. And skirts, cause she ain't too short, her legs don't grow. So yeah, she needed more clothes. But um Yeah. Stop choosing this right now. Okay. It doesn't make me feel good to see you crying and feel sad. Okay. Are you gonna say something?

Speaker 2:15:10

Okay, I'll be quiet.

Speaker 1 2:15:20

You said you're here first. Uh uh. No, I talked to you first. I told them to sit down and I said, wait, Kylie, tell me about the thing. What did you say? We gotta what? Was I not talking to you first until you decided to get up and walk away? I was trying to talk to you, and you weren't talking to me, ma'am, because you were sad. So think back because you sat down and now you pulled your chair next to me, and I asked you to talk to me about your day and your school and your teacher and your friends, who you got to see, but you weren't trying to talk to me back because you're already sad and feeling away. You were already sad. Everybody's happy and excited and talking at one time.

Speaker 2:16:12

I was trying to tell you what you okay.

Speaker 1 2:16:19

Well, guess what? That's just that's wrong too. You shouldn't feel jealous, then you shouldn't feel like I don't care.

Speaker 4 2:16:28

Okay, well, she's you're right there, Kylie. Right here.

Speaker 1 2:16:31

I'm sitting here, you got my whole divided attention, and you worried about that.

Speaker 2 2:16:35

I'm excited. I couldn't be there if I was there myself. I wouldn't have to ask you, Kylie.

Speaker 1 2:16:42

Okay. I wanted to come. I wanted to be there. And guess what? If I was there, Kylie, I wouldn't have to ask you how things were going because I would know for myself. I got text messages the whole time that you guys are at Arlington, Kylie, with Tiana asking about you, the school, your teacher. Tiana's telling me everything and taking pictures of you guys. I've been concerned and worried about your school year, too. This is an important year for you as well. It's not just about Gloriana. So please don't make it seem like I care more about Glory's Day than your day, because that's not true. That's a lie that's being planted in your head. That's an ugly thought. Okay? And it's not true. You know that your mother loves you and cares just as much about you as I do Tiana and as I do Gloriana.

Speaker 4 2:17:39

Yeah.

Speaker 1 2:17:40

You have to know that.

Speaker 4 2:17:41

This was a garden. That was good. Okay. You hear me?

Speaker 1 2:17:45

You have to know that. I love you and care about you, Kylie.

Speaker 4 2:17:48

That's a cute picture.

Speaker 1 2:17:50

Now I'm sorry, you felt like I didn't care. But the energy I was getting back from you was that you didn't want to talk about your day. Okay. And then you got up and you left, so I talked to Gloriana. I told Tiana to wait. Okay? So that we could talk to you about your day. But we're talking about it now. All right. All right.

Speaker 3 2:18:16

Glory's walking down her little hallway. You didn't look at the pictures I sent you.

Speaker 1 2:18:22

No, I didn't. Those are nice. But Tiana has sent me plenty of pictures from y'all day at Arlington and stuff. But please, before I get to look at your pictures while Tiana is talking to grandma, tell me.

Speaker 4 2:18:41

Do you know who's in your class?

Speaker 1 2:18:44

You don't know any other friends that came that you're gonna see in your classroom? If I'm thinking correctly, they're gonna have a lot of people.

Speaker 3 2:18:50

Is there anyone that you did see that you're looking to go to school with next year? Because the way that you pull in, it's like you pull in, you got the small high school with Ian?

Speaker 1 2:19:00

Okay, was he happy to see you? Oh, you know, Ian gave me a hug last year and was crying, you remember? So I'm thinking if they because he thought he was gonna be moving, probably gonna have to and that they weren't gonna be here anymore this year.

Speaker 3 2:19:13

And it's like a little like you're gonna be able to do it.

Speaker 1 2:19:14

He told me they were moving away, and he was very, very sad about it. So I'm so happy that he's gonna be back at school this year. Okay. So that's cool. Because he cried and gave me a hug because he was worried about not being able to see his friends and see you and come back to school. So that's nice. Are you going to go clean your face?

Speaker 4 2:19:40

Blow your nose, babe.

Speaker 1 2:19:42

Okay.

unknown 2:19:44

Drama. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 2:19:49

Please show me what Arlington pictures clean up.

Speaker 3 2:19:53

Oh, the Arlington pictures are of the first ones I sent you, but then walking into it.

Speaker 1 2:19:58

Yeah, I've seen it. I seen what you sent me.

Speaker 3 2:20:00

Oh, those are the rest of the pictures.

Speaker 1 2:20:02

Yeah. Okay. Mm-hmm. I know. I'm looking at them with Kylie real quick.

Speaker 4 2:20:12

Glory holding hands. Nice. Such a cute picture. The back of it. Yeah, that was wonderful. Oh, I got big, great picture. Holding hands.

Speaker 1 2:20:22

Your first pictures of the school year marching into the school. All in town. Would you like to look at the pictures? We'll later. You can look at the pictures later. Tiana sent them to me. And we can look at them.

Speaker 4 2:20:39

I like that one at the back.

Speaker 1 2:20:41

Oh, what the?

Speaker 4 2:20:42

Holding hands.

Speaker 3 2:20:44

Yeah, that was awesome.

Speaker 1 2:20:45

Um, did you get to talk to Miss Freeman?

Speaker 3 2:20:48

Oh, this one? No. I love that picture. That's so cute. They were talking the whole time. Well, who did you talk to, guys? Glory was like, girl, I'm trying to protect you. He's like, give me your hand. They were arguing about holding each other's hands.

Speaker 2:21:03

I'm sorry. I can't hear.

Speaker 1 2:21:06

Oh, I'm sorry.

Speaker 6 2:21:09

All right. That's fine.

Speaker 4 2:21:12

Glory's day. Okay.

Speaker 1 2:21:16

Yeah, you'll have to make her understand. That was nice.

Speaker 4 2:21:23

Alamo. What's up there? Honey, he done found a barbecue spot.

Speaker 1 2:21:26

Well, who did you talk to? Tell me, what did you do? Did you bring anything home for me to look at? No paperwork, just this right here, the school period for achievement contact. You'll probably go to school and get some stuff when you get to school. What'll happen is I'ma work on y'all's school supplies. You'll have to um help me, you know, with the kind of things, make a list of the things that you know you want to have. Like, and then hopefully you can pick out like once we learn what kind of pencil case and stuff you can have, you can pick out your own paper. And um, you know, or pick out whatever color, you know, folders and notebooks and stuff, you know, that you want to have. Okay, well, you you want to go out there and get it? Okay, well, go get you go put something on your booty and something on your feet. No, she was just like when they when she came in, I was only concerned about Gloriana and not her. So I had to correct that because that's not true because I told you to wait and I was talking first. Yeah, that was all. Where my you know where my kids at, right?

Speaker 3 2:22:51

I put them back.

Speaker 1 2:22:52

Um in the middle, you know? Okay, make sure you bring them back. Yeah, that just made me really feel bad because I know I wanted to talk to him, you know, and I know a lot of it was sadness already, yeah, and it's projecting onto me like I didn't care about her day, and that's not true.

Speaker 2 2:23:14

Because I asked you first.

Speaker 3 2:23:16

Yeah, that's just her little kid brain, and how how you know, rationalizing it that way, and also just having to like just I think to make an easy target. So that made her really understand like, damn, my sister gone. Um, I think that's all it was, and just she didn't also focus like because you know, she's been at Arlington. This is her last year, so she's seeing all the fun and excitement that are getting ready to happen. So it's kind of just she's just like, oh nobody's like that excited because it's part of the 10 again, you know. Yeah so she's just she's ready, but I'm like, no, you're not. And it's like, I'm like, honey, you yeah, this is your year. This is your year, glorient year. Okay, you don't have not saying that that's how it is, but just it's a chance for her to show, you know.

Speaker 1 2:24:02

Show them who you are. You have anyone left.

Speaker 3 2:24:04

This is your year, it's gonna be okay. But I yeah, I think that's the keep her encouraged, and she was so enthralled by the cheerleaders. That's good. She was so happy to see that she was literally walking behind her little tour guide, like so.

Speaker 1 2:24:19

But in a way, that's good because I need her to get it together before middle school. I told you, this year is gonna be vital. We have to get her ready mentally um before she hit middle school. Because hunting.

Speaker 3 2:24:37

You just gotta be on your stuff.

Speaker 1 2:24:38

Yeah. Yeah, we're gonna she's gonna do good with Miss Freeman. I think Miss Freeman is gonna be the one that really that's what you went to my car for not for the notebook before the gun. Really? What you doing in my seed getting my gun, Kylie? Huh? What what you told me you was going to go get a notebook. Are you feeling better now?

Speaker 7 2:25:02

Well, I mean, yeah.

Speaker 1 2:25:04

Good. It's hot. Don't ever don't don't don't don't hurt mama's feelings like that. And don't ever think that I care more about one child than the next.

Speaker 2 2:25:14

Okay. You I understand that's how you processed it because you were already sad when you were leaving. You were already feeling this way when you came in, because you didn't come in happy, you didn't come in excited. You was just like, well, guess what? We got a new science lab. And I'm like, What? Okay, that's awesome. And when I want to ask about it, and who you I asked about every you wasn't listening. And yeah, if somebody says something like you do, you interrupt all the time when somebody's talking, it's a happy day. Everybody's excited to go back to school. But you, you know, you shouldn't want to go to that school right now because you're not ready. You see what just happened?

Speaker 1 2:25:55

You're not ready mentally to go to that school right now. This is your year to prepare for middle school, okay? You need to learn how to stand on your own two feet, Kylie. Everybody, every warrior has to do a test, okay?

Speaker 2 2:26:11

Just think of it like an Abby, all right? You have to get yourself together, big girl status before you move on to middle school next year. We need you ready for middle school, and that's gonna take you growing up and being a big girl, all right, and doing better at home and at school, taking your education seriously.

Speaker 1 2:26:33

That means

Setting New Internet Boundaries

Speaker 1 2:26:34

taking notes, getting help, doing your homework. A lot of things is gonna change this year in regards to y'all being on YouTube, in regards to y'all being on the internet and on that Xbox and on Roblox all the time. It's coming, so be prepared. Not just you, but your sister as well. So, with that said, this is your time to show people who Kylie is, to be an individual and show us who you are.

Speaker 2 2:27:02

Okay? We are waiting. You've been a baby for a long time. We're waiting to see the big baby. You know what I mean? Let me see who my big baby is. Tiana is my baby girl, Gloria is my baby girl too. But you, you're the baby, period.

Speaker 1 2:27:17

So we need to know what the big baby looks like, okay? And I can't wait to meet her. All right. We're gonna grow up this year, and then next year you're gonna be at school with your sister. And you might get to be on the dance team or the cheerleading squad. That would be cool.

Speaker 3 2:27:36

I won't be on the dance team unless unless if they um unless they if they um if they what we listen to k-pop.

Speaker 1 2:27:48

But that's not how it works, honey.

Speaker 7 2:27:50

No, I'm not going in.

Speaker 1 2:27:52

Okay, well, I guess you you're not gonna do no acting unless it's k-pop acting. I mean, you can't that's not something you you get to control. You don't that's no cheerleading squad does k-pop. I dance dance. No dance squad does k-pop. That's not that's not the school, you know, that's not what the dance class is, baby. Okay, so yes, you there'll be time to figure out the things that you want to do. Okay? What's we dinner today? Y'all get tacos. Oh, can we add our supply list together? We get the supply list on the first day of school. The first day of school, yeah. I just said, no, I just no, we don't need to because I just told you to write down the things you want. You do the same. Go write down things that you know, outside of what that you like.

Speaker 2 2:28:41

No, that's right. Uh-uh.

Speaker 1 2:28:45

Just say hey. She's just saying that's her Korean notebook, okay? But what do you say? Thank you. That was nice. Oh, is that for me?

Speaker 3 2:28:59

I'll put one of my pieces in the okay. I gotta clean this one on my phone.

Speaker 1 2:29:06

Yeah, that do sound good. Y'all all deserve some ice cream. Like whatever you want to not shoes and stuff, but just stuff you want to have. Body spray, lip gloss. I don't care if it's uh chapstick. Um, ain't gonna be no makeup. I just said stuff that you want to have that's not gonna be on the school supply list that you know you want to take to school or need to have at school, new purse or you know what I'm saying, or whatever. Y'all work it out. That's all. Excuse me.

Speaker 4 2:29:38

Yeah, back to normal.

Speaker 2:29:40

Scoot back on over there. Get up, get up and move your chair. Don't screw the track there.

Speaker 4 2:29:49

No, I gotta get it. Brandy don't have no special chair.

Speaker 6 2:29:54

Brandy don't have no special chick.

Speaker 4 2:29:57

Your mom takes back the back over here. I was so out there. I'm sorry. I thought. But it could have been the suction, the door, and then it's a big one.

Speaker 2:30:10

Be sure you put my keys back in the bowl.

Speaker 3 2:30:16

What do I say?

Speaker 2:30:21

Okay, then acknowledge acknowledgement.

Speaker 4 2:30:24

Me and Tim just got attacked by the booze.

Speaker 2:30:28

Attacked. Okay.

Speaker 4 2:30:29

Yeah, no, like our extra garbage. I doubt it. Then oh, but these were flying.

Speaker 3 2:30:39

Oh my god. One of them got it was bad.

Speaker 4 2:30:43

Oh, it's like, no. You know, anyway, we got all that in there. Everything. So we we won't put nothing else out here tonight. Yeah, so it's turned upside down. We grilled. No. It shouldn't say no. We just say that uh we just come back to normal with our garbage. Your garbage picked up on Friday. I know.

Speaker 3 2:31:13

I tell you, you can be grilled on Saturday. You know how much trash.

Speaker 2:31:17

You know how much trash. Ain't nobody here. Tamika ain't gonna be here this week. Yeah, she's coming back. She works this weekend. She'll be back from day. See, she's such a bright.

Speaker 4 2:31:31

Yeah.

Speaker 3 2:31:32

You gonna be such a bright. I don't have it in my mind. I was like, yeah. You're gonna make a pink step. Or okay, fine. We won't grill. How can we do drills and meal?

Speaker 2:31:43

You can't do dressing. Uh you don't want to cook things. Just tell me what to do.

Speaker 4 2:31:51

I'm not you not cooked for that.

Speaker 3 2:31:55

I mean, no, say she just tells me what to do.

Speaker 4 2:32:00

Mm-hmm. I ain't said y'all. But I gotta get that stuff first. Yeah. And they just tag me on uh at work, lip therapy, looking at that bill on the page $90. And I owe $1,200 and something.

Speaker 5 2:32:14

Now you owe $1,200 and $0.200 and something.

Speaker 4 2:32:18

Well, I think I'll show you the tag. I'm gonna show y'all. Okay. But the total bill right now is a thousand dollars and two hundred and something dollars. I don't know. You ain't even been. This what she charging me this hundred dollars is just for June. He said July and August is still pinning.

Speaker 1 2:32:34

But you ain't been going like that. I know.

Speaker 4 2:32:37

July, but you can imagine what it's gonna be.

Speaker 1 2:32:40

Yeah, if you keep going, you might have to do it. You might just have to do stuff at home. I think I don't think they what are they doing that you can't do at home? No, no. Are they doing any massaging or anything like that?

Speaker 4 2:32:55

The girl last time baby.

Speaker 2:32:57

I got to look, I got my exercises you can do mine. Yeah.

Speaker 4 2:33:01

I got the thing, everything that I do.

Speaker 1 2:33:03

Resisting men, you know. We just gonna have to do them together when I get better. Yeah, and you can start.

Speaker 4 2:33:11

I can't, I can't, I'm gonna end up with two or three thousand dollars. Hell no, Mom. I don't think they have three or four times. Ain't no way I can't afford it.

Speaker 2:33:21

I know. It's just you gotta be, it's just hard. And you you really have to be, it's what I've learned during my journey through all I'm going through, is you have to be intentional, you know, about your health and just do what you, you know, need to do.

Speaker 1 2:33:42

Yes. Right. I just said just in regards to picking and choosing, you know, fuck that therapy.

Speaker 2:33:54

And white folks are raping you with your money, and there's stuff that you can do at home. Okay. The therapist is coming to my house and they're doing the same exercise. There's a whole bunch of them that I gotta work on. They add more every time. So you can, but you what I mean by intentional about your health mom is that if they say you gotta do the exercises at home, you gotta do the exercises at home. To get better, that's all. Can you help me with the creamer?

Speaker 1 2:34:28

That's all. Like I have to force myself to do my exercises when I don't have therapy.

Speaker 2:34:35

I gotta do them twice a day every day. And I I skipped out one day and I felt so bad. But then she told me I'm doing too much.

Speaker 2 2:34:44

To not overwork, you know, my hidden win.

Speaker 1 2:34:48

When? So but you can look at mine and we can you can come in there and do them with me, or we can do them together in the mornings, you know, and we make the routine. You know how I can go and you can walk.

Speaker 2:34:59

Yeah, I can't afford to go to the park and walk.

Speaker 6 2:35:04

It's not beautiful.

Speaker 1 2:35:07

I'm sorry that you can't shit that's the way in the world and make it so hard for people to get healthy and be better. They don't want to pay nobody a living wage, but to support themselves. What do you mean you're being home?

Speaker 4 2:35:25

She said something about you didn't have they didn't have to take your uh what they didn't have Walmart. Oh wait, they didn't have to know what it was.

Hearing Yourself With New Ears

Momba 2:36:17

Wow. Yeah. I ain't even gonna lie. That was a roller coaster of emotion for me. Before I even pressed play, I was scared of what I might hear. Scared of what it might reveal. Scared of who I used to be, scared of whether I would hear damage or truths I no longer agreed with. Or worse, truths I still did. I was terrified. And honestly, what shook me most wasn't even hearing some terrible mother. It was hearing a human being, a woman trying, a mother trying, someone trying her best in real time while carrying the weight of all four worlds at once. It was devastatingly emotional in the best way. Heavy but beautiful, humbling as hell, because hearing yourself frozen inside an earlier version of your life is a strange kind of confrontation, almost violent in its revelation. You hear the fear differently, the urgency differently, the love differently. You hear the places where you were growing and didn't even realize it yet. The places where survival mode was talking and emotion took over logic. And somewhere inside all of that, I could hear growth happening before I even knew growth was happening. It made me realize how much life can change in what feels like such a short amount of time. How much growth can happen quietly in three years while you're busy just trying to make it through the day-to-day. Not just outside in the world, but internally, as a person, as a mother, as a spirit being living the human experience. Because three years really ain't that long until you hear what time silently did to everybody involved. My girls changed. I changed. The world changed. Crazy how one accidental recording managed to preserve all of that in real time without me knowing I'd one day revisit it on a completely different timeline of this life. That's why I say ordinary moments deserve more reverence than we give them. Nothing is ever just a moment. Not really. Conversations become memories. Memories become patterns. Patterns become people. Everything leaves residue that can never truly be wiped clean, just painted over, blurred stains. It's also why I believe that's a big reason why memory matters so much more than ever now. Why reflection paired with documentation matters more than ever now. Pen and paper never meant so much to me as it does right now on this timeline. Slowing down long enough to honestly witness ourselves. That matters too, because without memory, people lose the ability to track patterns. Personally, collectively, historically. And I can't stress it enough. Black people cannot afford disconnection from memory on a timeline like this. That's also why I think reading memory and hearing memory are just as equally important because they do two completely different things to the body and mind. Reading creates distance, it slows you down, lets you analyze and notice things like patterns, language, narratives, contradictions, emotional shifts, but hearing something, especially an unfiltered moment frozen in time, forgotten, that hits different. Because you can't hide from tone the same way you can hide inside text. And tone reveals all. That's why we tell our children, it's not what you say, it's how you say it. Hearing forces you to be a witness. You have no choice but to sit inside the tone. The fear, the tenderness, exhaustion, frustration, love, just the humanity of it all. And somewhere between hearing and reading is usually where deeper understanding resides. Sometimes you can't get that full understanding of who you are until you see the version of yourself that existed before this current today version of you arrived. That's why I wanted to leave both intact. Because if one preserved conversation from three years ago could reveal this much about a person, a family, a mindset, society, or culture, then imagine what a multitude of ordinary moments would reveal about all of us if we slowed down long enough to actually confront them, honestly. And maybe that's the deeper undercurrent of what this whole episode really is about at the end of the day. A timestamp, a snapshot of consciousness, a recorded moment of becoming, proof of what survives us, what changes us, what memory really reveals once enough time passes, and whether we are brave enough to confront ourselves honestly when evidence of who we used to be resurfaces. That's what all of this became for me, at least, and why I wanted to share it with you all. This isn't just a meditation about motherhood, but memory itself, what we inherit, what we normalize, what we interrupt before it reaches the next generation, the everyday invisible labor of trying to remain human in Empire's Hunger Games. So, if you sat with me for this part, thank you again. Seriously, not just for listening, because I know it was long, but for still having the patience and emotional capacity to sit inside something this layered in a world training people out of listening and reflecting entirely.

Sit With It Before Scrolling

Momba 2:43:20

If this episode activated any thoughts, memories, discomfort, questions, or reflections in you, I would genuinely love to hear what surfaced for you. Because conversations like this only deepen when people are willing to think together instead of just consume and move on. Memory requires participation, you know. But first, sit with them for a while before rushing back into the noise, into the endless scroll. Let yourself think for a minute, feel for a minute, allow your thoughts, your discomfort, and whatever reflection rises up in your mind, a chance to breathe. And if after you find that you want to deepen the rabbit hole further, over on my substack, Digital Disobedience, lives a companion reflection with a full, readable transcript of what you just heard, made available for you to experience the difference between hearing a memory and physically reading it for yourself. Sit with both versions. Now that you've heard it, read it. Notice what changes between the two. And if you're anything like me, a mind thinking several moves ahead, you'll also take note of what all this means in regard to data and surveillance. How there is never room for nuance with the machine, with empire. That's the connective tissue. And there is so much more. More than a mind can comprehend. The infection of empire is ancient. They too have stains painted over since the beginning of time. I can see why the story of Noah and the Ark is relevant. There is nothing the world can do to wipe out this plague. It has fused itself into the very soil. Its root system spans the globe, and now they are reaching for the stars. But I digress. I told y'all your girl can go. I thirst for conversations like these, and since they're hard to find, I have to have them with myself, with you. I've always been told that I talk too damn much, and now I can talk as much as I want to. And somebody shuts me off. How would I know? Why would I care? They ain't my audience. You are. So once again, thank you so much for sitting with me through this experience. Thank you for your time, your presence, your willingness to still jump down deep rabbit holes with me and trust me to get you on the other side of it safely. Make

Companion Transcript And Staying Connected

Momba 2:46:14

sure to stay tapped in with me through my websites, Substacks, socials, books, all of that. You can do that by scrolling up or down, depending on where you're listening from, to the show notes. There, you'll find links that'll take you directly to the companion reflection as well as all the ways to support and stay connected with me. Be sure to click those links now and share this up. Help content like this reach new ears. Until next time, kings and queens, you know the drill, be good, stay safe, and stay healthy. But also protect your mind, protect your spirit, protect your memory, and don't forget to drink your water. Purified. Water is life. I love y'all. Peace.