My mother’s love is incapable of bounds, conditions, and expectations.
My mother’s love is relentless, fierce, and sage.
My mother’s love is willing to console with compassion, reprimand with understanding, and educate with kindness… unless you cutting up the yams wrong on Thanksgiving. Then that kindness u-turns real quick.
Aside from #CuttingBoardChronicles, my mother has taught me about the endless powers of empathy.
Your graciousness to others can be life-changing when it comes from a place of pure kindness. It can allow someone to truly feel seen in a time of loneliness or heard in a time of helplessness. Showing another that you care about matters that are important to them doesn’t cost you a penny. In fact, it only strengthens a relationship. From complimenting strangers to taking the time to put herself into the shoes of others, my mother shares love with everyone who’s crosses her path.
She’s also never hesitated to defend the difference between showing empathy and codling malice behavior, whether intentionally harmful or not. Despite being repetitively undeserving of God’s grace, love, and forgiveness, we reap its fruit with every day we’re granted. That alone can encourage us to show compassion to others. Everyone could use a break every once in a while, and I’m sure we’d be appreciative if our loads were lifted now and again. Why not be that relief for someone else? There’s a difference, however, between being kind hearted and allowing your feelings and desires to be trampled on for the sake of others. The way that my mother has used her voice to take a stand against the intolerable, and speak her reality without harming others, has taught me that using my voice as a means of self-expression can be powerful. I haven’t always known that though.
Growing up polite and meek, I often found myself observing and processing any given situation before having the courage to respond. I wasn’t hot-tempered or impressively quick on my feet, but rather strategic and calculated. I was bound to hit where it hurt and leave a mark, but on my terms and when I was ready. That typically left me harboring feelings long after the moment passed resulting in an unhealthy mechanism for processing my feelings: silence. Now y’all are probably expecting me to say that I’ve conquered my voice to be the woman I am today! Relax. We ain’t there yet.
In fear of disrupting the peace with the ones I love, I still have trouble speaking my most authentic feelings (… implying that, no, I do not have any problem giving folk I don’t know like a piece of my mind.) Through my struggles, my mother has always been in my corner encouraging and supporting the strong, outwardly opinionated woman I’m destined to become. My mother’s unwavering belief in all that I’m capable of has been a motivating factor to continue expressing myself through writing. Her empathy and love for myself and others have given me the courage to speak my mind through a medium that feels most natural, and I can’t thank her enough.
Happy Mother’s Day, Ma
