Connected

 I've been thinking a lot about legacy.

No, not planning on leaving this Earth anytime soon - God say the same.

But the reality is that I am 61 and in February, my husband will be 65.

We are in the final third of our lives. 

It is a sobering thought. Neither of us feels like we are finished yet, even though he has uttered a bit about retirement. For me, I feel like I am just getting started.

For the past twenty-two years, at least, my life was wrapped up in making sure the human beings that I bore on this earth would make it to adulthood relatively unscathed. 

Now, no parent is perfect and no one raising children in even the best of circumstances can say that they reach that ripe age of twenty-one without a few bumps and bruises. 

They all do.

Mine did.

But I can say with complete confidence that I poured everything into them that I could.

I completed that assignment of parenting, the last one of the bunch graduates college in May of 2026 and with that, the active stage of every-waking-moment-being-about-them comes to a close.  

So my husband and I are entering a new stage of life.

Every new chapter is an adventure, a becoming.

It is finally my time.

Like a lot of women, we have had to make choices along the way of career and family. That is just the way the cards are dealt. We moved for his career, not once but twice. We adjusted. We found new communities and revamped our skillset to remain "marketable" in a changing career landscape. 

But now, at this age of wisdom, wrinkles, and what color is my hair now, I am looking through the mirror of tomorrows and wondering what I want to be remembered, said, and done.

Not world famous by any extent, and why would I want to be in this age of social media cancel culture and instant tear-downs? I don't do TikTok or really IG for that matter aside from a few coffee or book posts or reposting cultural thoughts. I don't have a huge following.

We do need to be connected to other human beings in this life - that is after all why the Creator God of the entire Universe Created Humankind - but is our joining together in this life meant to only be in cyberspace?

What have we loss in the neglect of fact-to-face meetings? In neighborhood coffees or book chats? Simple walks down the street?

The things we have lost in trying to be a culture of influencer as a career are insurmountable.

Like, when did the purpose of existence be about having the cameras on for every intimate moment of a couple? Or every oops of one's child? Are we commodities to be consumed?

My husband told me, about thirty-years-ago, "you don't owe anyone your story, Toni." 

That was the most powerful and affirming thing anyone had said to me.

After living life, overcoming insurmountable odds, healing, and taking a journey, I had been "brought up" in that false religious premise that women, especially, had to be the ones standing in front of the church to atone for the sins that were done against them and their persons.

He renewed me in a lot of ways and is forever my hero for that.

I think of his words often whenever I sit down to write. 

My older son, who will be thirty-nine in January, tells me, "Mama, write your story, it is powerful and will help somebody." 

It is written in various ways, in essays, in sermons, in poems, and in a collection of thoughts called "Evolve." 

As an avid reader, I am always inspired by the stories of women who took journeys in this life, many of them hundreds of years before my birth. I only know of them because they or someone who knew them, took the time to record what they did. In those ways, I am connected to women like Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Zora Neale Hurston, Ann Petry, Ida B. Wells Barnett, and so many other women whose stories I've read, whose words inspire me, whose legacy lives on. I feel connected to them through the power of writing. 

Maybe that is what I am thinking about more. 

We are in the most troubling, dangerous, and harmful times in our nation. I would say it is literally crumbling, on the cusp of the 250th year of this country, the things that were held as solid, are proving to be not so. Even at this writing, the occupant of The White House took a bulldozer to The East Wing of the People's House, honestly, out-of-spite. The guardrails are proving weak and so many are sitting back letting it fall to see what crumbs they can pick up instead of standing together to keep the foundation strong. We will see what happens.

What I know is that I come from a people who know how to sing Zion's songs in a foreign land. We've survived the unspeakable and will live to renew and rebuild.

I hope to be one of the Mwalimus standing around pointing to a better option.

Like everyone sitting around the table and sharing this plate of biscuits I made this morning that accidentally ended up joined together, needing to touch each other to be formed and complete. 

We don't fully know.

What I do know, even as I look into the distance of tomorrow, is that what I am trying to leave behind and build for, is a place stronger and better not just for my children's children, but for all of them. 

I think that is the point.

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Sitting at my computer, looking at life passing by, watching the colors change on the trees, sipping a latte, pondering tomorrow.