Raised by Hip Hop

Did you hear about the rose that grew

from a crack in the concrete? 

Proving nature's law is wrong it 

learned to walk with out having feet. 

Funny it seems, but by keeping it's dreams, 

it learned to breathe fresh air. 

Long live the rose that grew from concrete

when no one else ever cared. 

Tupac Shakur

There are times I wonder how I've managed to do it. No one really cared much. The few that did seemed so far away at times. No one tended after me or pulled at the weeds that threatened my existence. I was rarely watered or nourished and most times I was trampled on to the extent that my growth was stunted time after time. But I continued to reach for that sunlight. The few times it rained that beautiful cool rain I absorbed as much as I possibly could because I knew it never rained for long. And although the odds that I would make it seemed grim I continued to believe in the beauty that would one day bud and blossom. So I had no choice but to persevere. Keep tending to myself. Every once in a while I could feel it happening but something always happened that would make it hard to carry on. But I kept going all the while being encouraged by people like Tupac. You told me that I could be this rose as long as I kept my head up and when the road was hard to never give up. So I listened. Big Poppa told me that the sky was the limit and if I kept pressin on I could have what I wanted and be who I wanted. So I listened. Lauryn Hill told me that change would come eventually but she also told me I was never going to win if I wasn't right within. So I listened. And because of Wu... because of Wu I went through life knowing I was nothin to fuck with and pretending that time would change the ending. And every time I listened I waited. I knew if I could just be patient enough, the words of the wise ones would eventually ring true. And now here I am. The fresh air is nice Pac, thank you. I pressed on Poppa and you should know Lauryn I am finally starting to get right within. And thank you Wu, because of you I know that time will eventually give me the ending I deserve. You'd be proud to know I'm still nothin to fuck with :)

Monsters

As children we all know what its like to be afraid of the monsters we believe are lurking in the shadows. We imagine them to be in our closets, under our beds, or behind our doors waiting for their moment to jump out and do their worst. We picture them in our minds; big, ugly, menacing. Its amazing to me how often we fear the things that don't exist. As a child myself though I was never afraid of those boogeymen. I knew they didn't exist, and besides I was afraid of the realities. I knew that people were far more menacing than any imaginary monster ever could be. Instead I feared the night time because I was fully aware of the people who would be waiting for me in the darkness. When you grow up in a scary world filled with evil people you learn very quickly to not trust. You learn that everyone no matter how nice they might look has an evil dark side just waiting to be revealed at the most unexpected of moments. You learn to never truly sleep. You learn that sleeping with one eye open is actually possible and if you are ever dumb enough to put down your guard you will live to regret it, if you're lucky that is. So this was how I grew up. I grew up knowing that I had a mother whose concern was not for my safety and well being but for her own. She threw me to the wolves many times and each time she did I felt the betrayal of it all just that much worse. Eventually though, I became numb to it all. I would simply detach myself and go somewhere else. I am fascinated by how resilient the human spirit can be. Even as a child I realized that if whatever was happening was to horrific for me to handle all I had to do was let go and take myself away from it all. I could go to this beautiful place that existed only in my thoughts. A place where people were kind and loving, a place where night didn't exist and everyone basked in the glory of the sun. If I shut my eyes tight enough and was able to really escape I could even feel the warmth of that sun. Somehow that got me through some of the most horrific nights and some of the worst pains. Now I'm an adult but the reality is that very often I am still that scared little girl in the night. It affects my ability to sleep and so for 25 years I have struggled with insomnia, a condition I forced upon myself for so long that now I am at the point where my body knows no other way to live. Eventually I hope to find an inner peace that will undo all of that damage but until then I wait. Now that I myself am a parent I watch my children be afraid of monsters in the closet. It is such a relief to occasionally have to check for those monsters to relieve their innocent fears because it tells me that their childhoods will be completely different from my own. They will never experience those horrors or know what its like to have to face real monsters every night. Just knowing that is finally making it a little bit easier for me to sleep at night.

The Roads Less Traveled

For some reason we have all had moments where we have thought about giving up on something. The sad thing is that there are many people who choose to do just that. They give up imagining the journey is just going to be too hard and it won’t be worth it. But I believe if we really truly want something, then we are more than capable of getting through all of the hard moments to achieve the dreams we are waiting for. As I get older, I realize that the things in life that are easy are easy for a reason. They don’t require that much energy, they don’t require too much time, and they because it’s so easy to achieve we often do it halfheartedly going through the motions. But those hard things to achieve they take a lot out of us. We must be willing to give all of our energy, our time, patience, and willingness to face the crappiest of moments just to get to the other side. But once we are there we seem to appreciate it so much more. Maybe it’s because we remember just how hard it really was and the harder we must work to achieve those goals, the more meaningful it is to us that we made it. It is those achievements though that we relish the most, and are usually the most proud of.

In life I have been offered many roads and yet for some reason I have always picked the hardest ones. Many times I imagined I must be crazy, who would so willingly take the hardest, roughest, steepest paths in life? I watched the many around me choose the easy roads and sometimes I envied how easily they navigated through this world, with small triumph after small triumph. And there I was muddy, exhausted and still so far from my own triumphs. But I kept moving down my path no matter how hard it ever got knowing that eventually I too would be there. And now after all of these years and all of those struggles along my hard to travel roads I have finally realized why I have always chosen them over the more traveled roads. One day I will be sitting perched upon the highest mountain taking in the most breathtaking view. I will be bloodied, filthy, and exhausted but the struggles would have been more than worth it because the view from those roads will be spectacular. And when I look down and I see all of those people so far below enjoying their meager view of this world from the easier roads they traveled I’ll feel sad for them knowing how much better the view is from up here. They may get there faster, they may be more rested, and maybe even more put together but they would have been cheated from a miraculous journey. When I was a child Robert Frost encouraged me to choose my roads carefully. So that’s what I have done. Mr. Frost, you were right. I have taken the roads less traveled and that has made all the difference. 

Imperfection

Life has the weird way of changing when you least expect it. A year ago, I was a happily married woman with two beautiful children and I couldn't have been happier. Sure things were not perfect but life isn't perfect. I had accepted all of the imperfections life had thrown my way and had mastered the art of turning them into something beautiful. For each pain, each depressing moment, there was a beautiful reminder I had created to remind me that I had somehow conquered. But eventually that wasn't enough. It wasn't enough to keep it from falling apart anyway. I was so busy trying to keep life moving I didn't notice that some of those around me had been left behind. My pace was too quick and my intent was so focused I had created more imperfections than I had started with. So now I sit here in a broken life. I still have two beautiful children and boy am I grateful. In a world with so many imperfections, the fact that I have managed to create these two amazingly unique beings astonishes me still. They remind me that I don't have to try to make everything beautiful, the beauty is already there. Maybe those imperfections were beautiful all along and silly me, I was just to busy to notice. Maybe this broken life  isn't so bad after all. The longer I sit in it, the more beautiful it becomes :)