Beautiful and hard.

I wrote a note to a Black man. One of the joys of my work. Knowing men next to mamas preparing to be fathers, right beside her - husband. Sometimes he runs his own company. Sometimes he dedicates much of his toil to some other. He is often the picture of Black men I know, coming from stern mothers and you better be home before them street lights hover. He is not the one that white/coats walk into delivery rooms and assume can’t be, what we all know good and durn well - he is - her man, good man, and he’ll soon be the wonderful Black father of an incredible Black male.

And I sent him a book. A newer one I’ve shelved. It’s not about what to expect when you’re expecting or what stage of labor feels like hell. It’s a narrative prose. An exploration of story owed. And I wrote to him: this book is beautiful and hard, much like parenting when you begin to travel its boulevard. I know through Black/notes just how comforting it is to see your way through another. Some folks say that takes a village, I say it takes a mother.

She is everything she can. And at times she’ll feel that’s not saying a whole lot but God knows and He has a plan, over her life, the one she struggles through, in dark days and long nights and when tears stream pain and sin and strife. She’ll speak salve over her motherhood ‘cause it’s all that she’ll have, never all the answers, never every plan. She’ll be everything she can, be. So will that man.

I have journeyed with one, he is everything to me. Just tonight we laughed hard laughs and I cried tender tears over the whirlwind of living we did in one day and had done through all these years. The children we’ve made and the parenting it’s summed, more than either of us could have ever imagined, more than we ever thought could ever be, Done. One thing we’ll never be. I’ll tell them to commit, above and between, together, ya’ll and forever over anything. Through thick and through thin. Just like the OG’s say: when the going gets tough, shit, find another way din. And you will certainly find, just how extraordinary it is to be alive. Through this. To be human, to do what fathers and mothers do. To parent alltheday and 2:00am but call it night - you’ll call yourselves the kids and say you’re doing alright. You’ll survive.

Beautiful and hard, it is always the note that I will scribe.