.261 mommy & me

i've always been awkward...and low-key insecure.

when i hit my twenties i went inside myself. gave up meat and nasty vices. prayed daily at 4AM and fasted each year, faithfully, for ramadan. as time progressed, i opened up. became a nude life model for art classes and up-coming photographers, began to LOVE myself in the simplest form. i couldn't even see my flaws, because i was on such a "happy to be in my skin" natural high...(finally). 

but after childbirth, and the aneurysm and turning thirty and medicines and life making me look...different...i am back in that place of settle insecurity. not to the point where i loathe myself, but enough to make me a little less comfortable in my natural genetic make-up. see that chip on my front tooth? got it from falling off the monkey bars when i was 8. never bothered me until now.

so...now, i take A LOT of photos that i never post. in fact, i wouldn't have even posted these, except, i am tired of running from my own reflection. just want to look myself square in the face and say "this is who i AM". and that is what these are.

toots came in my room while in the midst of taking them...and i was pleasantly pleased for the tiny interruption. i'm in love with her. and just the way she looks at me...like mom and god and life all mean the same thing...aides me in seeing myself the exact same way.

.145 day 128

i grew up with images that looked just liked me. 

doll babies and artwork and books by brown authors, all the time my world full of color, all the time untainted by anything that stripped away me'ness.

(the first time i experienced harsh racism first hand, my heart sank with confusion)

tonight, sitting in my mother's basement, statues of masai warriors towering over room (they belonged to my father), i smile in a memory. she never stood on a soapbox, but all my life she has been standing for us, the cocoa, the brown, the so black they seem blue, type people. silently expressing her deep love for those people. i look around. figurines of black mothers with black babies taking walks along bookshelves, slave papers and auction ads, frayed and hanging on walls. she bares her heart, gracefully silent, silently bold, each statue like a piece of her very own soul...