"She Was Mean, But She Was Ours"

Holding space for both joy and struggle

My brother is in town visiting from California. It’s been almost four years since we’ve seen him in person, and the joy of his presence has been immeasurable. You know how it is—when someone you love comes home, even for a little while, the air shifts. The living room fills with laughter, old memories bubble up, and the past walks into the room uninvited. Some of it good. A lot not so much.

We were sitting together the other night, just being family. My daughter was curled up next to me. My brother had his usual mischievous grin, and the stories started rolling like waves: who got in trouble for what, how we survived growing up Pentecostal, and that infamous moment we finally got a television in the house.

That’s when it happened.

He looked at my daughter and said through laughter, “Your momma was mean. But she’s silly now.”

I froze.

It wasn’t the first time this week I’ve had to catch my breath. It seems to be happening a lot lately—these moments where memory, truth, and time collide.

He went on to tell the story of how we finally got a television when I was 11 and he was 9. For years, we weren’t allowed to have one in the house. We were raised strict Pentecostal, and my parents believed the TV was a portal for the devil himself. But eventually, they gave in.

And when that “devil box” entered our home, I took to it immediately. Shows like Three’s Company, The Monkees, and The Dukes of Hazzard became my escape hatch.

He told my daughter—laughing the whole time—how I used to beat him and our other two siblings up just to control what shows we watched. “Your momma was mean,” he said again. “But she’s silly now.”

And then my mom added, “She makes me laugh all the time. That’s one of the things I love about her.”

And again, I had to stop myself from rushing in to say, I wasn’t mean! I wasn’t!

But I was.

Photo by Tarun Savvy on Unsplash

I was mean. I was angry. And more than anything—I was scared. I was just a child. We were just children. Our dad abandoned his family for another soon after we got television. He left us to poverty, to hunger, to predators. Television wasn’t just entertainment. It was refuge. I got meaner after he left us. I was mean. It was the only way I knew to disappear into a world where the fridge wasn’t empty and the man next door wasn’t watching my sister and me walk home from school like we were prey. Those mysterious knocks on the door after our mother left for work and I – as the oldest – had been left to babysit my siblings.

Somewhere between my brother’s story and my daughter’s stunned face, I realized a painful truth: I had used meanness as a shield. I fought because I was scared. I controlled what we watched because I couldn’t control the fact that our world was coming apart.

I looked at my daughter and told her the truth.

“I was mean.”

It was the only emotion I had left that made me feel like I could protect myself—and them. But I learned something as I got older; we can hold both struggle and joy. Laughter is a release valve for pain. It reminds us we’re still alive. We can still feel.

Healing hasn’t been easy. Don’t let me fool you. It’s a long road—especially when trauma has been your companion since childhood. Therapy wasn’t even a word in our house, much less a tool available to Black children in poverty in the 80s. My lived experiences had to become my therapist.

I made a conscious decision to let go of the mean once my first child was born. To stop letting fear define my love. To choose joy as a radical, daily practice.

I still fail at it sometimes. But I always return to it.

My brother closed the story with something else that shattered me—in the best way. He said to my daughter, “Your momma may have been mean, but she was our mother when our mother couldn’t be. She got us up for school. She cooked our food. And she fought anyone who messed with us. I love my sister for that.”

That right there. That complex, messy, beautiful truth.

The dichotomy between meanness and love. Between joy and struggle. There’s something there we need to sit with more. Not just individually—but collectively.

Because our children need to know that love looks different under pressure. That survival doesn’t always show up soft. That healing is possible. And that joy—that deep, radical, soul-sustaining joy—is still our divine birthright.

So, whatever you’re carrying today, sis—please know this:

You are not the worst thing that ever happened to you.
You are not too far gone to laugh again.
You can still choose joy.

And no matter what the world says—
You are worthy of love, softness, and peace.

I love you, sis.

~Rebekah

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