I believe I only began to understand the idea of sacrifice when I became a mother.  From the day that our flesh was combined, and I became their first home.  My heart grew larger, and beat faster to fill their veins. 

Perhaps I do not understand and may never understand firsthand the terror of racist violence upon my babies. 

I pray that I never do.

But I do know that I would tear my heart in two to keep them safe. 

This is the truth that connects us, mothers.

An assault on our children is a direct assault on us: be it physical, spiritual, mental, or emotional.  I would not for one second hesitate to lay myself down if it meant I could keep my children from harm.

Everyone has a mother. 

Breonna Taylor. George Floyd. Bettie Jones. Atatiana Jefferson. Dominique Clayton. Tamir Rice. Every single life.

For every murder, there is a mother weeping.

I am thinking of all of the Black mothers who have lost their babies. I am trying to put myself in the darkness that must surround them after such excruciating loss.  To have to watch as their children act as martyrs for a cause that seems to resurface time and time again over decades of repeated history.  To have to watch the life you created extinguished, and added as a data point in some statistical chart somewhere. 

Their name, that you once so sacredly uttered while rocking them to sleep one night, written as a red headline. 

Were I to lose my child, what I would not give to embrace them once more — to hear their voice, but not as a scream.  To hear them laugh.  To feel their chest heave as a sign of life against mine as they embraced me. But all I would hear are their cries for help echoing in my mind forever, and how I was not there to lay my life down in their stead.

There is no such thing as justice for a grieving mother.  

You cannot make amends for a child torn from her.  There is no punishment or reprieve from the hole inside of her.  There is only the numbing of a deafening guilt that she brought a child into the world that she was powerless to protect and defend.

The world keeps spinning and she doesn’t understand how or why, because hers has stopped. The anger and the noise of the crowds slowly softens and dissipates, but for her, there is no returning to normal. 

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Mothers for Black Lives Matter.

Since January 2015, 1,276 Black lives have murdered by police, according to The Washington Post’s database tracking police shootings. 

SOURCES:

Washington Post Database:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/

NPR:

https://www.npr.org/2020/05/29/865261916/a-decade-of-watching-black-people-die