Dear Mama

her life following her divorce. Her and my dad are in a good space right now. And just a brief update on me and my dad. We are communicating now. I'm so happy about it. He texted me and told me Happy Mother's Day. Yass out yet, you know I was happy as hell. Japa for joy. No one wants to be without their dad if their dad is alive. No one wants to be without their dad if their dad isn't alive. You know what I mean. In most instances, you don't want to be without a dad. So I'm

so happy that that man reached out to me. That was a quick update. Now my mother, I got to see her smile so hard. I got to see her glow like right before my eyes. I got to see her just thrive off of herself and be in her most comfortable space and her most confident state. I've got to see that she has lost weight. My mom has one of the most beautiful smiles, she has the prettiest skin like. She's just a radiant, beautiful black woman. And it really blots here to my eyes on actual Mother's

Day because she was so overwhelmed with happiness. Okay, So I had a show at the Mirrage on Friday. Now, y'all, I don't think it was gonna be a good weekend because this is the first time I haven't sold out a casino in Vegas. Now, I want a couple of months ago me and ch Go being co headlined together at the Mirage. But every year before that, I've sold it out every time. And this particularly year, Chris Rock was right across the street. That's Heaser was doing his

show Friday and Saturday. You know, so surrounding all of his controversy, you know, with the slap and everything, people are curious to see what he has to talk about on stage, although he told everyone that he's not even talking about getting slapped and ship until he gets paid. I don't know who he's suing or who's paying him, but he said he's not talking about that ship, which I can respect. But people wanted to just see if

he would even briefly touch on it. So of course my show was shortened by people who wanted to go see Chris Rock. I ain't gonna lie. I wanted to go see the Nicotu. But um, overall, the show was sevent sold out. I wish it could have been a hundred, but I'm still blessed in Holly favorite to say that I put seventy of the whole capacity, and the seats that night on Friday, they all came to laugh at

the infamous jet hilarious. So I do think everyone that came out, and all the people who bought their moms out to my show. Like I said, I didn't think it was gonna be a good weekend because I hate under selling, but my mom's happiness made up for that. We landed Friday. I took her to restaurant that she's never even seen. I took her to see Bruno, Mars and Anderson Pack, you know, Silk Sonic. She sat right next to Titia Campbell, Gina from Martin. A lot of

people don't know her real name. I don't know how you can't, but yeah, she had a blast. She had a ball. I was very excited for her, and for the first time I felt like her parents. Growing up, all my mother did for me and my brother was trying to make us happy, worked hard day and day out. Her and my dad. No, we really didn't get to travel. I mean that really wasn't on our palette growing up, small family from Baltimore. However, me and my brother were

still spoiled. We just never really got to travel a lot of places, just because that just wasn't my family's thing. So as I stepped into my stardom and I started traveling, my mother became very curious. But she was always scared to get on a plane. She never wanted to ste on a plane for longer than an hour, so you know,

she just never flown as much. When I say this woman had the time of her life, and me watching that, it was like she was just reborn again, the happiness across her face every day, every day we did something. I took her to Madam Two Sides, the Museum you know, a lot of y'all probably already went there. She could not believe it. She's never seen a wax figure in her face before. Just the smaller things made her so appreciative. I took her an s t K, one of the

best steakhouses in Vegas. In my opinion. STK is beautiful. I took it a Benny Hanna you know she had She's had hibachi before, but it was just a different experience. The chef that we got, he was a comedian, actually an influencer, you know, this Asian duty was hilarious, funny as hell. The food was good, the atmosphere was banging, you know. With at Benny Hanna's you made get seated with strangers unless your party is big enough to take up the whole table. Me being just hilarious, I don't care.

I'm a people's person. Anyway, we set with strangers. This woman had a smile. I know, her cheekbones got to be hurting. Okay, she had so much fun and like I said, for the first time, she wasn't making me happy. I was making her happy. It was just making me happy to see her smile. All my mom has done has lived her life for her children and her family, like she just always was a provider and a caretaker for us, where she kind of like forgot about herself

throughout the years. Because even her job consists of taking care of kids. She's a childcare administrator, she has a preschool, she takes care of children. So she's been taking care of people her whole life. Not to mention her mom, who was now deceased, my grandmother, Arline, she took care of her too, So that's all she's been doing. And she's been just the most selfless woman up until now. It's never too late to start living for yourself. Never

too late. My mom is fifty four. She has so much life left that she didn't even realize until she started living for herself, until she started taking risk, until she started living spontaneously and just being more outgoing and not worrying about failing, and not worrying about who's watching, and not worrying about the validation of other people. And in that I'm not even talking about social media. WI hasn't talking about her family, you know, trying to look perfect.

She's always been the perfect mom to me, but now she's more perfect than she's ever been. If you love me, You'll listen to this commercial and then we'll be right back. Mother's Day I got to spend it with my mom out of town and another element, so that made me feel good. But I also wanted to make up for her being without her mom on Mother's Day. My mother and my grandmother were very close. My grandmother had other children, but she was the closest to my mother, and it

was very hard when we lost her. It was hard for my mother, and she still didn't shed one tear in front of her children. She's just been the backbone for the family since I was born. But I know

it hurts her. I'm grown now and I can think back on things, and I'm like, I remember hearing her cry at night, she would close her door, stuff like that, just struggling, not having her mom, not being happy, not you know, but she will wake up and put that smile on every day where now she doesn't have to wake up and where a mask for a smile, It's

genuinely there. I want to pay how much to the people who have lost their moms as well, just like my mother, he gets very hard being without the person that birth with you, especially if you were very close to them. I have friends who don't have their moms anymore. I have x Is who has lost their moms. I have family who has lost their moms, and it affects them all differently. I see Ashton's dad, he doesn't have his mom. It affects Rome tremendously that he doesn't have

his mother. Keisha was his everything. He found his mother dead. That's a story that he tells quite frequently, and it hits him like a ton of bricks every time he's telling the story, whether he's drunk or sober. He hasn't moved on yet. Rome is thirty. He lost his mom twenty years ago. Some people never get over that hurt of losing someone. That's why he feels abandoned in certain relationships. That's why he feels abandoned so much. That's why I'm

always there for him. That's why he's never gonna stop being my friend, my closest friend. Rome is like my best friend. We're not attracted to each other at all, but I would give him my last I would do anything for him that he needed me to do within reason, of course, you know, and I know he would do the same. He's a very fragile person. He's a great person and he has great intentions, but he's a very damaged person. He's so fragile, and that comes from losing

his mother. I remember having a conversation with him where he actually had blamed her for leaving. You know, you can start actually developing that in your mind, developing a certain blame on the person that you lost in your mind if you feel as if you didn't get a proper goodbye. And that's how he felt. That's how he felt for a long time. And he's come a long way, because no, he doesn't feel that way anymore. But I remember when I first met him, it really really hurt him.

We were heading into our twenties. We were both eighteen going on nineteen. Had Ashton when I was twenty, and ever since that year, I just every Mother's Day since I met Rome, I've had twelve Mother's Days with him, and each one is always the same as hard. He'll get flowers, he'll go to his mom's grave and talk

to her for hours, He'll cry four hours. He'll drink that day to try to numb the pain of missing her and reminiscing when I'm trying to tell him, it's okay to reminisce, and it doesn't always help reassuring these people that their mother is in a better place, because that's not a better place to them. The better place will be with them. But things happen in life. You know when you can't either let it scar you or

build you make you stronger. Like I said, I've had exes who has lost their moms and it affects them tremendously because these men don't really know how to love. If they've lost their mom at young ages, the life was cut short, so their mother didn't get finished raising a lot of them, So how would they know how to go about loving and securing friendships and being able to even parent themselves. It affects you in different types of ways. I have a friend she lost her mother

and you would never even know. Of course, she has those days where she she dreads Mother's Day. She has her days where she just feels like this would be so much easier with my mom. But she's such a bubbly person and she spreads love. She continues to make sure she's there for people. She has such a huge heart. Then I have friends who have lost their moms who I know are on drugs now because they can't deal

with the every day being without that person. They were so close to them, they can't let the hurt go. I just want to let you guys know, it gets better. It can get better. You have to be open to things like therapy, talking to your other family members. Talk to your dad. If you don't have your dad, talked to your grandparents, you don't have your grandparents, go look for love and those cousins and your aunt's your uncle's. Family is like the biggest thing you know, and a

lot of times family deceive you. But family is really all you have in this world if you think about it, And that's why you have to try to make the best of it, because when you leave this earth, it's really not about what you didn't get to do. It's about the people that you leave behind and how much they miss you and the memories and the thoughts that they have of you when you're gone. You know a lot of people always say, oh, you didn't care until

he died, You didn't care until she died. You didn't care, And that is true. I always feel that. So that's why you have to check on your family's You have to stay in better in people's lives. Even if you don't really necessarily deem it necessary, you will when they pass. If they're your family. Everyone who's going through something with their mother, you only get one of those. If there are drug addictions, if they're selfishness. I was just watching

eight miles. That's really a true story because there are moms like that, Rabbit's mom, the character Eminem played, which I believe was his self. That's not what I'm saying. It's a true story. It's a true story because there are really moms like that who depend on men who put other people before their their children, who put habits before their children, who put you know, men, friendships, going out, nightlife, anything,

your children. Remember that. Your children are like sponges, and then they remember and they can one day pull you up on this ship. Hold up, hold up, I know the ship getting good. But listen to just a couple of seconds of a commercial. If you love me, you'll listen. I have family members who don't even have relationships with their parents because of how they were neglected growing up, and I still pushed them to go and make that right.

You never know what someone is going through when you become a mother at a young age and you don't even have the slightest of of a good upbringing, then that's projected onto your children and should is hereditary. That shi is in your blood, that sh is in your personality and traits that are passed down from your parents. So you have to break cycles and you have to realize that you have to figure out ways to do

that methodically. I also want to give a shout out to the moms who can't have children but they still raise children, the moms who don't have children biologically, but they still raise children, because just because you didn't pop a baby out does not mean you are not a mother. My mother is a mother to so many kids that she didn't even biologically have. My mother biologically has two children, but she has so many other kids that she's raised

and she's helped raise. There are women who take other people's kids, and my great grandmother she did. They care for a living. One day, somebody left their child and never came back. She could have took that child to their father. She could have took that child to the emergency contact on the damn card. She took that baby in Richard, he's my cousin and even though my great grandmother raised Richard with all the love and care that she could I'm talking about, gave him everything he wanted,

spoiled him to the point where he was bad. He was bad as shit, and he got away with everything. And that's because he was favored by my great grandmother because he was left there, so she always had a soft spot. She always sympathized with his behavior. She always let him get away with a lot of ship because that was his way of lashing out. He missed his mother. She left him as a kid. I think he was like five or six. That affected him. He grew up and he's now grown grown ass man and he still

has issues, mental issues. But his mother did too. She was a young woman, beautiful young lady, but she had issues and that's why she left her son. She knew he would be safe with my great grandmother. That doesn't justify her leaving him, which as a mother, she still had to make that decision as a young addict mentally ill, she still knew to leave him with someone that she knew would take care of him. But that still affects him even as an adult right now. And it's bad

because he don't know where she is. And my great grandmother has now passed, and he was so bad growing up that he burned a lot of bridges with a lot of my family. So it's just like now he could probably be lost again, you know. So it's a pattern. It's a generational curse a lot, and people go through things. You never know what they're going through and you never

know how they're coping to get through it. So with that being said, I do want to shout out every kind of mother, the biological moms, the foster care moms. That is a hard thing to do, being a foster care more. My aunt has been a foster care mom forever. She has had children that has abused her, stolen from her everything. You never know what you're gonna get when

you adopt. You never know where these people come from, who birth these kids, just how messed up their parents were, what they're gonna be like, what they actually inherited from their parents, You don't know. It's like reaching in a hat with your eyes cloths and pulling out something you don't know what it's gonna be. That's anonymous, that's a gamble, but it's nothing wrong with it. That just goes to

show you people have hearts. If you can really take on the responsibility of raising someone that you did not biologically have, that you know may potentially have problems that didn't come from you, you are a brave ass person. Now. A lot of people do it for the wrong reasons. A lot of people adopt children for money. A lot of people get into the foster care business for benefits, which is fucked up as well. But you do have people that genuinely care for kids, genuinely care for these

orphans and motherless children and perilous children. That takes a certain type of person, And I just want to commend those who do the work because you will forever be blessed in ways that you can't even imagine. And just like that, I'm gonna end this episode because this is very emotional for me. I love you guys. Tune in next week every week. Too Carefully Reckless and in my deepest Pam voice, peace. Oh. Carefully Reckless is a production

of I Heart Radio and The Black Effect. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.