and if i’m jealous of the Cosbys still
that’s a dead horse
but there’s things I wish i’d had about it
- Charity, “Mr. Time”
lock in with me. i’m just going to write from the heart here. there is nothing about my family dynamic that has ever been…normal. my dad was 49 when I was born. my two oldest siblings were already well into adulthood. my younger sister is 11 years younger than me. I grew up on the road with my parents for a significant part of my developmental years.
yes, it was normal to me…but, not the norm for most.
still, I, like many other children, developed an ideal family dynamic that I wanted my relatives to live up to. and there were times where I felt it did. we had big birthday parties at grandma’s house, sleepovers with pranks played on unassuming cousins, trips with granddad where “no” never even crossed our minds, holiday dinners where my Auntie Lisa would make this strawberry lemonade I still think about sometimes, dance competitions in banquet halls and “go ask your mom if I can stay over tonight”-s turned into “she said yes” celebrations.
we had moments of Black TV family magic that put filters on things like…
my older sister’s struggle with addiction. my parents divorce. uncles being lost to the system. growing up in a city that heeded warnings about “before the street lights come on” and “don’t just get in the car with anybody, even if you know them.” whispers of cousins who’d been molested. the real life that was happening around me was little more than background noise as I held on to the moments that made me feel like Dizzy Gillespie may come to my house and puff up his cheeks in my living room too.
what’s more, I always had two lives happening at once.
one where my father’s role in the Black Arts movement and his achievement as one of the only Black men in history to have multiple shows on Broadway brought me face to face with cultural giants and my mother’s work as a dancer could very well have me at Anita Baker’s house doing my homework after school. but we weren’t rich. so I quickly learned to tuck in any pride I felt about what my parents had accomplished and the life that I led for the sake of not having to explain our comfortably middle class existence. and life for some of my closet family members didn’t resemble mine at all. so, in an effort to not “think you all that", I held back to fit in.
never mind the summers spent in Los Angeles at my godfather’s horse camp. or the summers spent selling cookies with my cousin to afford penny candy from the neighborhood kid hustlers. nor how I loved them both equally.
holding space for all of my realities was something I quickly learned to do with ease.
but as the rose-colored glasses of childhood faded, so too did my ability to sift through and find the Heathcliff and Clair of it all. by the time my father passed when I was 16, there were no glimmers of an ideal family. reality had won and it didn’t matter, it was just the way life works.
since being pregnant; however, i’ve found myself mourning what I never had. mourning a close relationship with an older sister I never really got to know. mourning the holiday dinners we no longer have. mourning the marriages I never got to see work out. mourning the type of closeness growing up in the same household as my older siblings may have fostered. scared of passing down those disappointments to my daughter, hoping that the background noises of her reality are only the world’s failures and not my own. wondering how i’ll shape my childhood to fit an image of my life that she can easily digest. how i’ll explain the absence of the people she’ll see in my photo memories who, though still living, are no longer in the picture.
or maybe, to keep things settled, i’ll just make sure she never, ever watches an episode of the Cosby Show.
Other things I’m thinking about this week:
my first feature film, A Thousand Faces, is available to stream on David Oyelowo’s platform Mansa for free.
one of my favorite artists is prepped to win NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert competition this year. here’s Charity’s entry.
taking my books off of Amazon and solely selling them on my own site now. Bye to Bezos.
that Super Bowl halftime performance. still. every single day.
reaching 500 subscribers!! I really had no goals for Substack besides consistently sharing and building community with other writers. i’m really honored that so many of you are rocking with what I have to say. thank you.
This ideal family dynamic is confusing for people. I think esp black people b/c our families can look so different than what’s been idolized.
Your younger sister is 10 years younger than you