Shifting away from chemical straighteners or heat damage to embrace locs, afros, or twists is often the first visible marker of reclaiming selfhood.
My father passed away eight years ago from a sudden heart attack. For the first five years of her widowhood, my mother didn't so much live as endure. She wore beige cardigans. She watched HGTV on repeat. She went to bed at 8:30 PM. Her world had shrunk to the four walls of that house, and any attempt I made to pull her out—a painting class, a book club, a dating app—was met with a polite but firm, “Oh, honey, I’m too old for that.”
But here's what I've come to understand: black is also the color of depth. Look up at a clear night sky, and the blackness you see isn't empty—it's the backdrop against which every star becomes visible. Black holds everything. Black contains the potential for all light. Watching My Mom Go Black
The hardest part of "watching my mom go black" is often the subtlety of the beginning. It rarely happens overnight. It starts with a flicker—a missed phone call, a change in tone, or a uncharacteristic silence. The person who was once vibrant, warm, and nurturing begins to withdraw.
What I have watched is something more subtle and more beautiful: a person becoming more fully herself by expanding her understanding of the world. My mother didn’t abandon her white identity. She added to it. She still loves her 1970s folk music and her garden and her annual trip to the state fair. But now she also loves gospel brunches and talking about reparations at the dinner table and watching Marcus coach his teenage players with a tenderness she says reminds her of my father. Shifting away from chemical straighteners or heat damage
I developed rituals to survive. Every morning, I wrote down one thing I remembered about who my mom used to be. The way she laughed with her whole body. Her insistence that toast should always be cut diagonally. The song she sang while folding laundry—"Que Sera, Sera," always slightly off-key.
This often manifests as embracing natural hairstyles (like locs or afros), adopting traditional styles of dress, shifting speech patterns, or actively engaging in ancestral storytelling and community activism. The Impact on the Family Dynamic She wore beige cardigans
Witnessing a parent undergo a severe physical transformation is traumatizing. Children naturally view their parents as anchors of strength; seeing that strength replaced by physical decay triggers profound psychological distress.