بِسْــــــــــــــــــمِ اﷲِالرَّحْمَنِ اارَّحِيم

As-Salaam-Alaikum Beloved Sisters & Brothers!

Anyone who knows me knows that my Mom and I have an estranged and strained association. I’m not going to even say “relationship.”

I think she’s never liked/loved me because she couldn’t give my sister her fourth birthday party because she was in the hospital giving birth to me. The pictures are so depressing. I think she held (holds) that against me because she never threw another birthday party for any of us.

It’s all good though, because now that I am in THE NATION OF ISLAM, it just made not celebrating birthdays that much easier. Mother’s Day also.

I was kind of destined to have an estranged relationship with my mother. My mother wasn’t speaking to he mother when I was born. My grandmother found out about my birth from her cousin.

I told my hubby how I never felt like my mother ever loved me because she would buy my sister and brother whatever they wanted but not me.

He told me something that corresponds with the Holy Qur’an:

“But she gave you everything  you needed!”

He told me that twenty years ago but it’s just now, that I’m a Muslim, starting to sink in.

So, thank-you Vanessa, for feeding and clothing me when I was little. Even though it feels like you did it out of duty rather than love. I never knew what it felt like to go to bed hungry or without shoes. I had toys and a comfortable bed. A roof overhead and a fairly happy childhood. I thank you for nursing me, enabling me to enjoy good health. Thank you for giving me respectable, somewhat decent boundaries. Thank-you for treating me like a slave so that now housework comes easy and is second-nature. Thank-you for buying wheat bread when my friends had white; fruit instead of cookies & candy.. Oh, and we always had Honey – My favorite – thanks to  you!

Thank-you for that one time we baked Nestle Toll House Cookies, instilling in me my love for baking.

More recently, thank-you for letting me in the house a couple times when I couldn’t get in the shelter. That was a nice surprise after turning me away repeatedly.

However, I wish you had left my father, before I was born. He told me  he left you because of something I had written in my diary! If you had left him he would never had had his nose in my business.

Thank-you for teaching me how to sew up the holes in my socks. I was shocked to learn, after living in shelters, how many women can’t even thread a needle!

But most importantly, thank-you for leaving West Angeles so we could go to Trinity where I Fell In Love With My Prince!

HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY!