Mother’s Day Weekend 2016:
To this day, “Dear Mama” is the only song that has the power to move me to tears.
I only know this because it has on numerous occasions. It’s a testament to how much I love my mother, and how much Tupac Shakur flawlessly captured this emotion when he released this monumental record off of 1995’s Me Against The World, his best album.
This is why the entire rap world mourned the loss of Pac’s mother, Afeni Shakur, earlier this week.
Afeni Shakur was a member of the Black Panther party, and was incarcerated during much of her pregnancy with Tupac. She battled a crack addiction and put Tupac out of the house when he was only 17. While their relationship was strained at various points, Tupac would eventually reconcile with his mother as an adult, having never stopped appreciating all the sacrifices his perfectly imperfect mom made for him.
And who can’t relate to that? Most people tend to think their mother is the greatest, despite the fact our mothers have the uncanny ability to push our buttons in an all too necessary way that only betters ourselves whether we realize it or not.
This is why as a teenager short on cash, I rewrote my own lyrics to “Dear Mama” and performed the poem for my mother on Mother’s Day. I was embarrassed; I recited my rhymes to my mom in private with the door shut. Each couplet resembled the rhyme cadence from the original song, but was tailored to my own relationship with my mother. I don’t remember much of what I wrote, other than I replaced the word “penitentiary” with “university” in the line, “And who’d think in elementary, hey/I’d see the penitentiary, one day?” My mother enjoyed her gift, but honestly it meant as much to me as it did to her, for I always loved “Dear Mama”, and it gave me an excuse to experiment with the pen, which ended up being quite apropos of my upbringing.
As a sophomore in high school, some standardized test results indicated that I struggled with writing and reading comprehension, despite my insistence that the results were erroneous. As a result, my mother forced me to attend extra tutoring sessions once a week for the remainder of the school year. The following year I found myself in honors English, something else she pushed me to do that I saw zero benefit to at the time. Fast forward approximately 15 years and two degrees later, and I’m actually running my own website where I enjoy writing thousands of words every week.
I was fortunate enough to have a mother who was educated, stayed married to my father, always had a good job, was void any destructive vices, and relayed the necessary values to me that grew me into the man that I am today. A mother who identified my weaknesses, pushed me to turn them into strengths, then pushed me even further. And as recently as two weeks ago, she’s given me valuable advice on how to handle a difficult life situation, and warmed my soul with the following text message:
Sidebar: This text was posted to Facebook on April 29 with the caption, “Dear Mama, you are appreciated.”
So I know exactly what Pac meant when he said, “Cause through the drama/I can always depend on my mama/And when it seems that I’m hopeless/You say the words that can get me back in focus.” Afeni Shakur birthed and raised the greatest leader hip-hop has ever known, whose impact has reverberated worldwide for two decades after his death, despite him only having lived for two and a half decades. We’ll never forget how, in such solidarity and grace, she and Voletta Wallace met on stage at the 1999 MTV Awards. She recently concluded her interviews for the Tupac biopic (due out in November), which she was slated to executive produce.
Afeni Shakur was the matriarch of hip-hop, and without her contributions, the culture as we know it would never have been brought to life. It’s fitting we bid farewell to her the same week we celebrate the women who brought us life.
Rest peacefully Ms. Afeni, happy mother’s day to my mother, my wife, and to all the mother’s out there from HHSR.
You are appreciated.