Like the roots of trees, I hold on to thee, you are the reason I stand tall.

You've always been my reason for living, but I ignorantly allowed the evil of our world to convince me not to gift you life.

A waste of time could be unforgiving.

How could I, a creator, forget that I could create something so amazing as your heart, your mind, & your eyes?

Sad mom since I no longer

Recognise my body

Sad to see me change while he remained the same mom

Sad because there is no village to raise this child

Mad because my mom is so far away

Mad mom too tired to soothe the pain away

Mad coz she let herself get this big

One thing I know for sure, each of these stages will also bring tears, joy, and some grief. But that’s okay because I also know that with it will come a deeper understanding of one another, profound conversations, discovery, and spiritual connectedness. And while I know that I will grieve what was, as we all do, I am also excited about what is to come.

don’t know how your grandmother labored with me. But she mentioned once that she did it naturally which I take to mean, without medication. Giving birth naturally was something I aspired to by taking hypnobirthing, creating a birth plan that involved laboring in water, and hiring a doula. I made the preparations to birth you like your grandmother birthed me, with as few interventions as possible. Perhaps you knew I’d soon forget everything I learned in hypnobirthing and recoil at the sight of the birthing tub.

On September 13, 1998, my son was born, after doctors administered spinal anesthesia, I lay fully naked in a room of strangers, a sterile drape covering my view, my body numb from the breast down to my toes. A white male doctor comes in, and the first thing I remember hearing is "They are getting younger." A hummed consensus filled the room. I felt a push and pull, the sounds of metal and a coldness that skulked into my bones. There was an odd sensation of having someone pulled from your body and briefly shown to you before they were taken away.

What would it mean to bring a child into this world? Into a planet we are failing to protect, into systems we are struggling to fix, into communities that may not survive another generation of exploitation and inequality? I don’t say this with despair—I say it with responsibility.

There were days my dreams of motherhood patiently waited in pews, overshadowed by my mother’s shortcomings. Thought it was inevitable to duplicate the recipes that made me.

I found myself mothering anyway.

Mothering, men who once used the little sense they had to trick me into thinking their mother had mothered them properly.

Mothering, my friends whose mothers didn’t have the knowledge they needed as adults.

Mothering, my cat, because boy, don’t loneliness make you think you need to take care of something.

Loving you so crazy, my God, you smile like the heavens

I know it was no accident they sent me you

Too soon

Right on time

You're divinely aligned

You're all mine

You're sunshine out of rhymes

Everything I have, my mother gave to me.

Maami, the ocean of your body was the first place I existed, even as a shadow of myself. Maami, you split yourself open to bring me here. Maami, in every world that exists you are my genesis. The two of us, tethered by all these irrevocable things.

My mother believes she is not worth writing. That her story is not worth weaving into a journey to be published as a thought. A life is too ordinary, too unremarkable to be shaped into sentences, to be held in print. She urges me to write about my father—his brilliance, his achievements, his efforts, his compassion. And I keep failing to convey to her how much I already embody her story as my own. I see her story as a story of community, where people and places and words and songs, fabrics and jewellery, all spin around her like a long song, stretching across a diary’s pages, full of life, yet buried under the pretext of too mundane.

Bianca’s journey into motherhood came just as the world was about to pause.

Two days before the UK went into lockdown, she welcomed her son, Zuri, into a life that had been meticulously structured around training for the Olympics.

In this conversation, she reflects on the surprises of pregnancy, the unexpected solitude of early motherhood, and the challenges of returning to elite running without the support she had counted on.

If I leave too early, will my children feel what I feel?

A visceral pain, too deep to feel real?

Will they wonder how to keep going when everything hurts?

Will they know what to do when their heart threatens to burst?

In the dusty corners of rural clinics, on prayer mats soaked with whispered prayers, and behind the closed doors of family homes, I have met women who are not just mothers they are scapegoats. Their children were born with inherited disorders, and in the absence of answers, guilt found its way to them. Not the fathers. Not the elders who arranged the marriages. Not the traditions that sealed their fate.

The acupuncturist explains that you run hot / and I flush / with epiphany

You the steel kettle / rusting prematurely / thirsting to be poured into / only to rumble a boil so torrid / you yourself shriek unstoppable / unless touch should free you / of the flame you crave / how these wintered hands grew temperate to steam / your handle still reeling to shock a scorch upon a wilted herb / I know why you’ve never been into tea / add ice to everything

This is everything you want.

You want this.

You want this.

You want this.

This work is an invitation to get curious about how we think about family and family making. For those of us who have been separated from their families and land by way of family policing systems, adoption, foster care, and fake borders, I speak directly to you.

Broken homes are deeply detrimental, and I speak from the only experience I’ve known—being a struggling single mother. After a failed relationship, Black men often have an extremely hard time putting their ego aside for the best interest of the child. Too often, they decide the mother should be solely responsible. That decision needs to be studied and confronted, with resources created to counteract it. The thought is, “she’ll suffer.” And she will—her career, dating life, and freedom will all be rearranged around her kids. But the child will suffer the most. That selfish irony is something I will never understand.

In 1961 Mississippi, a hysterectomy was performed on civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer without her consent. She was 44 years old. The act was part of a systemic tool of violence where over 8,000 Black women in Mississippi and South Carolina were given hysterectomies without their knowledge. This happened from the 1920s to the mid-1980s.

Fannie Lou Hamer thought she was getting a cyst removed.

Daughter Heart / Mother Spirit is a conversation across realms, a sacred dialogue between the living and the dead. It is a reckoning and a remembering. A poetic excavation of grief, longing, lineage, and love. In this exchange between me as a daughter and my mother’s spirit, may you witness the quiet power of ancestral connection as a path to healing.