Dear mom:
These days as I age I begin to think more about my attitude to you when I was younger, when we spent our days in Liberia. You used to tell me that these days were the best of your life while I just thought its an endless suffer of being beaten up and kept myself from bursting into tears. I thought of you as being mean and irresponsible for you tortured me so badly. Now, I start to think more about your dream, you suffer and your feeling of disappointment after not being able to realize what you want. Being an African American woman like you and me has made it especially hard for you. While it was your aim to stand out and contribute to the empowerment of blacks, you were viewed just as tools by other leaders and were used by them only when you performed. Being labelled as promiscuous and irresponsible in personal lives has probably been the greatest misunderstanding of us, black women, that caused you to be abused in your marriage with dad and have no way to express your suffer except for doing the same thing on me, which made I hate you at once and move back to the states to live with dad. Right now, after so many years of not being able to understand you, I’m so glad to see that you can reenter the world of music and no matter what you have done to me, I understand your feelings now. I know what it feels to be a black woman and I sincerely hope that you can one day reclaim your happiness in music.
Yours,
Lisa