Glass Half Full Pollyanna Robot Mom… Cries by Pamela Francis

The 1st time I’ve cried during this, the most recent and devastating Black Lives Matter entry in our race’s tattered diary of The Historical Peaks and Valleys of Our Civil Rights Odyssey was on my 53rd birthday. That would be yesterday.

The 1st time I allowed myself to cry.

It was after I heard my son’s musical arrangement inspired by the George Floyd atrocity.

My son is 17 years old. Opting to start his own business last spring of 2019, rather than go out and get a summer job — which he also attempted but was quickly turned off by the lackadaisical and less than forthcoming (a.k.a. ethnocentric and race-averse) responses from local business owners in our Long Beach, CA neighborhood, he began creating, promoting, releasing and selling beats on Instagram.

My son’s home-based business generated a revenue so substantial I ceased having to cover his needs and wants. My child became financially independent of me inside of a summer.

While all of this was happening right there in front of me, I would eavesdrop on his conversations… marvel at his business acumen. His customer service is impeccable. His ability to communicate with, and in some cases firmly but cordially part ways with would-be business partners, was jaw-dropping. My kid kicks entrepreneurial ass. I don’t know if I particularly care for this “genre” of “music”, I mused, but I’m loving what I’m hearing and even more so, what I’m seeing come through our Cash App, Venmo, and PayPal accounts. That fabled “passive income” we’ve all heard about.

Anyone who lives with a creative family member knows you can go for days hearing the same piece seemingly ad nauseum while the artist is banging it out. I’ve been there with Malachi. We’ve always made sure he never ran out of earbuds or the latest in headphones because, let’s face it, half the time, I don’t wanna hear it.

But this time was different.

I’ve always said the way I can tell a song will be a hit is if I find myself singing, dancing to, or mimicking it after only 1 hearing. The melody I woke up to in the middle of the night the other night had me sitting bolt upright in bed. I must have been hearing it in my sleep because I woke with the words “that’s dope” on my lips instead of “turn that shit down slash off.” Yes, I literally say that to my kids from time to time. “Turn that shit down slash off.” (I can be a very wishy-washy parent sometimes.)

I awoke, went to the bathroom, and began looking for an excuse not to go back to bed, rather than berating him for waking up the household at 2am. I wanted to keep hearing this melody. This beat… It’s only a beat. Tracks you lay so that artists can sing or freestyle over them. It filled me with a tremendous sadness. And I normally don’t like sadness.

The sound was not raucous or grating. My kid is very easygoing. Mild-mannered, even. And listen, as a Black teen of the 80’s I respected and appreciated the Public Enemys and Rage Against the Machines of our music world. What they had to say… What they stood for… And how they did it… made me want to head bang. But this was not that. This made me want to cry.

I can be very glass-half-full in the face of inequity. Because I detest the kind of emotional pain that comes from the inexplicable, the unfair and the unavoidable, I have constructed an almost impenetrable force field of positivity and optimism around myself. My own mother, a die hard New Yorker, has even jeered at me, calling me “Pollyanna”. My emotional no-tip threshold is legendary and has caused me to sometimes be dubbed “robot”.

Well glass half full Pollyanna Robot mom felt tremendous sadness on her birthday when her 17 yr old African- American son came out of his walk-in closet recording studio and said that his latest beat… The one that made her sit bolt upright in bed at 2am… And has haunted her with its weeping melody for 4 days and nights… Was dedicated to this George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and Black Lives Matter moment in our lives.

And she cried.

Tags: #Ahmaud Arbery, #Black Lives Matter too, #BLM, #Breonna Taylor, #George Floyd