Warning: This story includes discussion about sexual assault. Reader discretion is advised.
Then about four years ago, I have these incredible kids and I was focused on being a mother and wife. And I also wondered if my life had happened the way that I remembered it. I think part of me had always known that there was this artist inside, but I was so focused on my family that I wasn't really focused on myself and the artist that I once was.
I went through so many emotions in the discovery of how much I loved people and how I was loved back and how often we don't always see the love around us. And the feelings around guilt and not seeing when friends were reaching out for help, or when they felt like they needed to be heard. It was such a process of working through all of those emotions and so incredibly cathartic.
Absolutely. How do mothers like yourself teach your children to engage with or challenge some of the ideas they might see on social media, or even in traditional media, about young women and sexuality? My father was a civil rights activist. He, Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, and Tony Franciosa had gone to Gadsden, Alabama, to work on equal rights. He was part of the March on Washington. The work that he did around the civil rights movement is the work that he was certainly most proud of. I’ll do these Google searches every once in a while and find photos of James Baldwin, and [my father] is standing in the background. Or him and Sammy Davis Jr.