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.

One. Two. Three.

Heave.

How can I breathe through contractions

when I’m about to throw up

I wonder who convinced a generation of mothers to

never have a say or a break.

I wonder what my mother’s full recovery would look like?

But i’ll be at work, probably won’t think too much

about it while your workday awaits you.

‘You could die, the baby as well' he explained, ‘you need to be admitted immediately’ he continued. My worst nightmare was coming to past, I didn’t want to be cut open. Most importantly I also didn’t want to endanger my baby or myself. Sure this pregnancy had seemed to span years especially in the last trimester.