07/14/2025
If you thought I was coming to play with this second book—you better think again. I didn’t come to sugarcoat, I came to lay it bare. I came to tell the truth about love, loss, and the kind of mother-son bond that don’t die just because one of us did.
This is how The Love Momma Gave opens:
It’s been almost seven years since you died, and I still wake up with questions clawing at the edges of my mind—questions I can’t ask, not out loud, not to anyone who’s still here.
Sometimes I dream that you’re mad at me. That you’re close by but won’t speak. Your eyes are fixed somewhere else, cold, unreadable. I reach out, beg you to look at me, talk to me, touch me. And you don’t. And even in the dream, I panic. What did I do? Why won’t you answer me? Why haven’t you come back?
And then I wake up.
And every single time, for just a second, I forget.
I forget that you’re gone. That you’ve been gone. That the silence I keep trying to outrun is real, and it’s permanent. There’s no text coming. No call. No “boy, what you doing?” No voice rising in laughter. No “I love you more.” Nothing but quiet.
Still dead.
Still gone.
And somehow, even after all this time, that truth still punches the breath right out of me.
I thought writing The Wisdom Dannah Left would prepare me for this. That diving headfirst into all that grief—letting the memories of Grandma raise me all over again on the page—would build some kind of bridge to you. But it didn’t.
Because you and her? Y’all were different.
Dannah was the backbone. But you? You were the blood.
The pulse.
The energy in the room before I even opened the door.
She gave me structure. You gave me fire. She left wisdom. You left a wound.
And if that book was about the lessons I inherited, this one? This one is about the love that refused to be buried.
The love that still wakes me up at night, gasping.
Still curls itself around my ribs when I hear a song you used to play.
Still haunts me in the silence—because you were the noise I didn’t know I needed.
Momma, I don’t know if I’m writing this to honor you or to bleed out what I’ve been carrying. Maybe both. Maybe I’m trying to understand how someone so full of life can disappear and leave this much behind. The guilt. The questions. The stories I never asked you to tell. The ones I’m still chasing.
So if you’re out there somewhere, still watching… I hope you hear this.
Because this time, I’m not asking you to come back.
I’m asking you to listen.
This is the beginning of The Love Momma Gave—a love story.
And this time, it’s ours.
Y’all better get ready.
Because if The Wisdom Dannah Left made you cry…
The Love Momma Gave is gonna reach inside your chest and sit with you in the silence.
