You Are My Seeing

Ma,

Today I have come to you because of a question.

Not my question.

Kelvin's.

He came to me with the kind of question only a true friend with a healing spirit might comfortably pose. Not as a criticism, but as an invitation to discover something about myself that had been standing quietly beside me all along.

He said

"Hakim... I love your stories. I feel like I know your father better, your sisters and your your brother, even Asa Pearl.  But they keep asking..."

"Why doesn't he write about his mother?"

THAT WAS NOT A SMALL QUESTION.

It was the kind of question that follows you home.

The kind that waits until the room grows quiet.

The kind that keeps asking itself long after your friend has stopped speaking.

Especially when it is about a boy and his mother.

But sometimes the people who know us best, the ones who have fought their own battles, survived their own disappointments, and still chosen to love us honestly, and also understand DEEPLY the power of a mother’s love, are sent to return us to ourselves.

So, I have come to stand before you,

in the revealing light of Kelvin's question.

I thought the answer was distance.

I believed writing required me to place someone across from myself and say,

THERE they are!

I could do that with Pop.

With Robi and Trish.

With Ace.

Even with Asa Pearl.

But never with you.

For a long time, I thought that was my limitation as a writer.

Now I know

it was my misunderstanding as a son.

Pop gave me language.

You gave my language somewhere to live.

Pop studied the architecture of liberation.

You became its habitation.

You were the quiet proof that his words could become a home.

He could awaken a room with an idea.

You showed me what that idea looked like when it woke up the next morning, made breakfast, welcomed strangers, protected children, and quietly carried a family through another day.

He taught me how to see beyond the world as it is.

You taught me what seeing requires.

You made my eyes responsible.

Responsible for people.

For family.

For community.

For the child standing alone before anyone else notices.

For the person whose silence is asking for help before their mouth ever does.

For the kind of love that does not stop at beautiful words, but becomes shelter.

Looking back now, I understand that you were never simply supporting Pop's work.

You were revealing it.

You were the place where his convictions learned how to breathe.

The first audience.

The first believer.

The first evidence that wisdom could become a way of living.

So if someone asks me now why it took me so long to write about you...

I finally have an answer.

I kept looking for you in the wrong place.

I kept believing a writer had to stand on one side of the river and place the people he loved on the other.

Now I understand there is a REASON.

When I look across the river

to find you,

I cannot.

You are not across the river.

You ARE the river.

------------------------------------

This one is for Kelvin, one of my brothers

Thank you for continuing to enter sacred spaces in my life to practice your healing. It is a debt I can never repay, but I know that God will.