I Dream a World (a.k.a. No Shame November)

It’s November and my birthday was on Saturday the 2nd. Happy Birthday to all born in November! I’ll be celebrating for the whole month, especially since this is my daughter’s first trip around the sun!!!

This time last year I was struggling to sleep through the night, battling Braxton Hick’s contractions and waddling in lower back pain. My baby’s due date had passed, and so had my birthday, squashing any hopes of repeating another parent-child birthday twin pair like my dad and sister. But I secretly wanted her to come on November 8th, to make for a cute little twist of her being born in my month and on the same numeric day as her dad. True to her character, our Lavender Ladybug chose her own date and was born on November 9th.

So much has happened since the last time I wrote. And so much more since giving birth, including my first year of raising a brave little leader, putting a pause on my professional and entrepreneurial endeavors, hosting 14 guests here in Spain since March, cutting off my locs, taking a lot of trips and preparing to move back to the U.S. after living abroad for 5 years. I know I’ll get around to sharing the experiences of the last year (my Jesus year) and the highlights from each trip so stay tuned for alla dat.

But for now, I’m grateful to enter a new month, welcome a new year of life (hello 34!) and to live shamelessly in the process! “No shame November” is my reminder to enter this new year of life with audacity, boldness and grace and to take up space instead of defaulting to my usual contained “stay polite, proper and nice” self. And while I’m still sorting it out (let’s be real, I came up with the phrase because it makes for a catchy blog post title) I will probably hold true to that goal through the end of the year and possibly into 2020. My first of many shameless and audacious moves is to raise my daughter in the spirit of self-love and liberation.

MADRONA

I took the following photos in a cotton field here in Spain. A few years ago, I did my first cotton field photoshoot with my dear friend and soul sister Leslie Dickey of Brown Betty Photography. It was an act of freedom; my bare feet planted firmly in the rocky soil of the cotton fields in a series of black and white photos. I wore expressions of defiance and confidence on my face in honor of those who fought for me to even have a voice. This time, I returned to those fields with my daughter, dressed in matching West African prints, head wraps and earrings. My grand dress, a gift my husband brought back from a work trip to Cameroon, had been sitting in my closet since 2017 when he gifted it to me for my birthday. My original plan was to wear it for Christmas, with its golden bows set against a burgundy backdrop. But that plan got pushed back again and again. But then I thought better of it and wanted to immortalize it in a way. The idea was to recreate the front cover of artist Kadir Nelson’s book “Heart and Soul: The Story of America and African Americans” but instead of golden fields of wheat, my daughter and I would be sitting in white fields of cotton. I decided that, in honor of our birthdays, Lavender and I would do a photoshoot to celebrate life, freedom, deliverance from generational curses and historic bondage as well as a declaration of our legacy as vessels of brilliance, love and light. I’m so grateful to Tyler Lockhart of Lockhart Photography for capturing this in these photos and I’m so grateful for the gift of motherhood bestowed upon me last year on November 9, 2018. Enjoy and stay tuned for the next post highlighting Lavender’s first year of life.