It is a rainy Monday, misty and I can hear the sound of the wet pavement as the cars zip by the highway outside my temporary dwelling. The fall colors are emerging and regaling us with the crayon box of God's creation. The temperature is starting to feel like sweater-weather, for real this time.
I gaze out my window and during these last few days of October, my thoughts often turn back to that girl I was when October became the darkest month of my life.
Would she sit with me on the balcony, sipping this brown sugar latte with the touches of nutmeg and cinnamon? How would she tell me about her thoughts and dreams when all around her were the moments of disregard? What did she gaze out over a different balcony into tomorrow and hope differently for her future.
She comes to my find often, these 42 years since her world shifted, and I look back through the lens of time and have questions for the ones who knew - and didn't rescue her.
Growing up Baptist was filled with the do's and don'ts. But only for the girls. The boys were given carte blanche.
I had to be prime and proper, to be chaste and quiet, to be seen and more importantly ,to be a doorway for my stepmother to enter into certain parts of society that her essence alone would not do.
I was the daughter of a Baptist minister.
I was the daughter of a Catholic mother who died far too young.
I was not like the others in my eventual household when daddy remarried.
I grew up from seven-to-seventeen under the unbearable weight of other-people's-stuff.
It was restrictive.
It was even more restrictive because I had a stepmother who didn't love me - tolerated me for the sake of the respectability and economic advancement being married to my father gave her - but love me as a mother, no, that was not in her soul to give. Instead, she gave me torment and intolerance control and manipulation, indifference and jealousy, to the point that I can recognize it in others and have learned to liberate myself from their presence.
But growing up in the 70s in a middle-sized-town in a middle-sized-state in the middle-of-the-country and being a Black girl who was too skinny, too tall, too light, had too much hair, was just too much for some folks in this first step out of Jim and Jane Crow.
My stepmother grew up in a very hard time, I can look at her life with a bit of a Chaplain's grace. I understand the concentric circles she had to navigate, the shame of being a fourteen-year-old-mother when her people were trying to get her matched off to the tall, handsome, studious seventeen-year-old who wore dress shirt and pants to school. She had disappointment. That they even ended up together years and marriages and kids later, is a complete mystery to me.
But looking at her as a girl, I am glancing back through the eyes of some compassion for her before she became the monster.
The same way I am looking back at the scared and alone girl I once was who was in the grip of a monster who eventually took what was most precious from her.
There is nothing in us that can go back and change anything that happened to us, that shaped us, that scared us, that stained us, that stole from us. We can only look back and learn.
So for both these young girls, I want to extend more than the Baptist condemnation that cost them their innocence, I want to give them hope, care, a future with possibilities.
What I am unable to do for them in glancing backwards, I was able to do for my own two daughters facing forwards.
Both my daughters are accomplished young women.
They were able to grow up without being scared, without being harmed in their own homes. They were safe and secure at home. That is not to say they didn't encounter challenges in school - they each did and they each had to learn resilience in the face of racism and disappointment - but at home, they were protected, nurtured, and encouraged.
My young women are almost 22 years old and 24 years old, respectively.
One is a near college graduate (a few more months) and one is a near graduate school graduate (a year). Each found their own path and voice.
The elder daughter is in a five year relationship with her college sweetheart and they seem to be on a path of collaboration that makes me smile. Whatever they decide, being a Gen Z, traditional traditional may or may not happen for them. For now, they are both building financially, navigating long distance while she finishes her MBA and he starts his financial career, and they are intentional about centering what they like. They encourage and support each other and he is not trying to break anything in her.
The younger daughter and last child has all the wanderlust that I saw in her when she was learning to crawl and wanted together outside to see the world. She has traveled to two countries this summer, is a political science major intent on righting what has been so wrong, and she is so much fun. I am enjoying her laughter, how she is enjoying our ancestral city as her college town, and just being amazing.
Both my daughters found their own relationship with God and each has learned to interrogate the text in ways that I didn't learn until I went to seminary. I guess since they went with me and had their own graduation as a seminary kid, they picked up on a few things.
My daughters are not afraid.
That is something that girl, 42 years ago, could not have imagined. There were so many boxes and expectations and "what will people say."
We don't care anymore.
In living life, in becoming, in pursuing what is and yet a purpose for me, I learned to release.
Released expectations that were not mine, released those who harmed, released disappointments, released people who wanted to constrain or control, released the "wouldcouldashoulda", released the "what will people think?", released the "being with the right people" and all the other false notions of what is and isn't.
In doing that, I embraced myself, fully and completely.
I liberated myself.
In doing that, I embraced my writing, embraced my creativity, embraced my light, embraced my dreams.
Dawning on a new chapter in this next third of my life, I have fully encircled myself with my truths. I don't care about celebrity - even in ministry, especially in ministry. I could care less about who thinks they have the power to make or mold someone. I held onto my authenticity, my audacity, my amazingness. I was more than enough.
Asha Bandele in her book, daughters, has a line that has become my personal mantra since 2006.
"I will be a collector of me and put meat on my soul."
That has guided me through navigating later-in-life raising daughters when I was almost finished raising sons. It helped me be an activist, to embrace the prophetic in me, to know that there was still and yet something for me to do. It helped me through being "the president's wife" as if I had no other skills or ambitions besides being pretty on his arm. That line held me through seminary and through the provisional ordination process, through people who thought they could break me.
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| The writer at the National Harbor ©2026. All Rights Reserved. |
These are traits in this Taurean that I know will continue to guide me through the challenging waters this nation faces under the current tyranny.
If I can live through and overcome the demons that tried to destroy me, I can certainly live through this and guide others to a path of light.
We know how to get over.
We know the path to freedom.
We just have to remember.
So, go, look at the trees, sip the latte, write the words, and liberate yourself.
You have always had the power to do so.
That is what I want to reach back in time and tell that young woman.
©2026. Tayé Foster Bradshaw Group LLC.
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