Dear Future Family: Letter to My Daughter
Image: Ebony Magazine Dear baby girl, When I look at you, I am almost bursting with joy! Wow! I am thankful for you and I cannot help but bask in the awesomeness of having someone like me spring forth from me. To have the opportunity to influence you means the world to me. I love you baby girl! I have to let you into some of the drama you might face as you chart your way in the world. First, I am not going to start you off with such nonsense like, ‘girls should or shouldn’t…’ There is absolutely nothingthat you can’t do! So if you want to play football (though dad and I will prefer basketball), go to military school, be an astronaut, engineer or play with dolls and make-up, we will support you. The only thing we demand of you (and your brother) is that you study and research every single day! Be assured that I will start reading to you from the womb and from age 1, you will probably start reading yourself. As you grow older, people will tell you that it is your place to do house chores; to clean, cook, do the laundry and whatnot. Well, they are wrong! It is not your place to do that! In our home, we will alldo chores; dad, you, your brothers and me. Chores will not be something we do out of duty but out of love for one another. I will not have you cooking while your brother is playing games. You will both be with me or dad in the kitchen whenever we are cooking until you are old enough to be on the family cooking schedule. You need to know that you are beautiful just the way you are and no one could have put it better than Bruno Mars. No matter where your skin color falls on the human skin chart, YOU ROCK! Don’t let anyone tell you that you are ugly because you are African. Trust me, they will try! You need to know that your skin, be it anywhere from albino to dark-skinned, is glorious, beautiful and blessed! You don’t need a lighter skin to be beautiful. Hence, it will really disappoint me if you decide to bleach your skin to fit into the warped views of people who know no better. If you come out carrying my kind of hair, hair that has been called ‘nappy’, ‘unprofessional’, ‘unattractive’, ‘unappealing’ and in some cases, ‘disgusting’, I will like you to embrace your it just the way it is. Almost everyone will tell you to relax it, cover it with a weave or wig or just keep it under a scarf. They will want you to do anything but rock your natural hair. Pay no mind to them! You can wear your hair in an afro, braids, Bantu knots, twists, twist-outs, dreads or even low cut. Thankfully, there is a natural hair movement sweeping across the globe and even cultural appropriative people are jumping on it. What I am not sure of is how long this will last. In spite of whether it is trending or not, I want you to always know that your skin, hair and look is a beauty ideal. If you want to wear makeup, that is fine by me. If you want the whole nine beauty yards – nails, lashes, skin, makeup and hair – then be sure that we will provide them for you as is reasonable. I just don’t want you to spend two hours doing makeup when you can be doing so much more. I want you to know that no matter how beautiful you look with makeup, if you are not comfortable in your own skin and natural self, then it is all for naught. In my view, beauty companies thrive on the lack of self-confidence of women and in many cases, perpetuate that lack of self-confidence. Beauty, baby girl, is transient. Knowing this will make you more accepting of the person you were created to be. I will teach you about modesty in dressing because personally, I like conservative wears. I am very self-conscious about my look and easily get uncomfortable when people are staring at me. That is why I dress modestly. That doesn’t mean that if you wear revealing clothes, you are a whore. Every woman has the right to wear whatever she wants. I want you to know this however; there are many sick people who think that your cloth is an invitation for them to harm you. You have to realize that they are wrong! However, there are appropriate clothes for different occasions and I will teach you to be able to decipher what to wear when. Some women believe in trading sex for what they want in life. The world has a name for them; I don’t. It is their choice to be whomever they decide to be. I would however not want you to do that. I want you to know that you can be whomever you destine yourself to be, have whatever you want and achieve anything without doing so on your back. Sometimes – heck whom I am deceiving! MOST TIMES – you will have to work harder than men in the same position as you but guess what? You are equipped for it! I want you to look at the likes of Oprah, Beyonce, Debra Lee, Ava Duvernay, Shonda Rhimes, President Hillary Clinton (she will always be President to me regardless of that travesty of an election), Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, Aisha Mohammed, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Omobola Johnson, Madam Marie Curie, and other women who have done well in their chosen fields. They worked hard at being the women they wanted to be and the world celebrated their genius. I won’t lie to you that women who have lived on the backs are not celebrated too. It takes a great deal of sexual appeal to be a Marilyn Monroe or a Cleopatra but I would prefer that you walk a different path.
Dear Future Family: Letter to My Son
Image: Jet Magazine Dear future son, Oh how I love you! From the moment I saw you, I was overwhelmed with such glorious love and happiness. I could tell you would look exactly like your father and the thought of having a mini version of the man I love is pure joy. As you grow into that bumble of joy and excitement that I can barely contain, I want to share some ground rules with you. You need to know that you are born into a world that gives you some advantages. When James Brown said ‘It is a man’s world’, he wasn’t just trying to sell records. He was speaking about a very real situation in the world today. While society has given you certain privileges, I will have you know that I require a different set of standards for you. And as your father will tell you, you better not mess with me. Relax baby; I promise to be nice. For many millennia, men have been told they are the superior gender because they are men. They have been taught that women are less than men on all fronts. You will be told that women are supposed to cower before you or defer to you or obey you. You will hear this from school, the community, religious centers, workplaces and even the internet. Where you will neverhear that is at home. This is because all that load of bull poop is just that; a load of shit! Men are not better than women or superior to women. Men and women are created equal with different physical features like two sides of a coin. That is why the difference ends. You will learn this from science. You will learn that the brains of men and women are not that much different and as such, there is no basis for saying that women are less than men. You will learn to respect everyone – be they male or female – and you will learn to treat them as the human beings they are. We will not permit you to be discriminatory to anyone. You will learn to respect people regardless of their faith, belief, ideologies, gender, class, abilities, sexual preferences or orientation and race. Every person is a full human with their own agencies and you will treat them right. I am not saying you should agree with everything they do; not even close. I am saying that you should respect their humanity always in spite of these differences. Every human being has rights and dignity and when you know this, you will never knowingly hurt anyone. We will support you wholly to become anyone you want to be as long as you are not hurting any human being. You have to learn to live for more than just yourself though. Your life needs to be shaped after solving a problem for humanity. There are so many problems in the world today and you stand a better chance of leaving a legacy when solving problems is your mantra than if you live for yourself. And the best principle is creating a need and solving it. You can be better than Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King Jr. and even a combination of all of them and more. Whatever you become is all up to you. I want you to be the best version of you and your dad and I will ensure you have the best support system you can possibly have. Be assured however that I will not condone a life formulated after Hitler’s, Stalin’s, Trump’s, Idi Amin’s or Femi Fani Kayode’s. From age 7, I will expect you to start doing chores. We will start with simple things like washing your underwear, cleaning your room, doing the dishes, sweeping certain portions and cleaning surfaces. As you get older, your chores will increase. Also from age 7, I will expect you to be in the kitchen anytime dad and I are cooking. By 13, you would be expected to cook part of the family meals and by 15, you will be placed on the family cooking schedule. This will teach you to be responsible for yourself and others at all times. You don’t need a woman to take care of you. You are a fully functional human being and should be able to function as such. I want you to learn work ethics and discipline. If you work for someone, don’t ever short-change them. Go to work on time, stay in the office for as long as your contract says, and give your best every minute of the time you are in the office. Don’t use your position to abuse the trust your employer or clients place in you. And if you choose to work for yourself, be diligent in your duty to your dream. Wake up every day eager to do more for your goals and stay awake many nights to ensure your vision and dreams translate to tangible reality. You owe yourself that. You do not need to stick to the status quo of society. Be innovative, creative, exploratory, curious, eager and desirous of new things. The environment can be a huge motivation if you look inside out! As you get older, I will teach you about your sexuality and what sex means and doesn’t. You will hear so much about sex and society will tell you that you can get away with so much. Society doesn’t expect you to be chaste; in fact, she will actively encourage you to be anything but. The same standards are not held for women as I am sure you will learn. But this is what I will teach you; if you call an unmarried woman who is sexually active a ‘whore’, then be sure that I will address you the same way if you are sexually active. This means that you must learn to hold everyone to the same standards you hold yourself. And still talking sex, I will never forgive you if
