Mama Bear

by Shirley Smith

  Dedication

  This book is dedicated to my mother, Bertina Marie Harris. Without your life I wouldn’t have a story to tell. You are forever in my heart. Thank you for your life. Thank you for your struggle. Thank you for your strength and thank you for your transparency. And of course to my three D’s, my cubs, my beautiful virtuous daughters—Demi, Dakota, and Denver. As long as God gives me breath, I will do my best to show you the best version of myself and be an image that you will be proud to look up to.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Part I: Maternal Instincts When Nothing Else Makes Sense 1: Kota Bear

  2: Binge

  3: A Baby Story

  Dropping Jewels: Repairing Maternal Instincts Interrupted by Disease, Drugs, and Poverty

  Part II: Community as the Fish and the Loaves of Bread 4: Liquid Gold

  5: Reaching Out to My Othermothers

  6: Creating Community Through Social Media

  Dropping Jewels: Advice for Families Who Are Feeling Alone

  Part III: My God, My Faith 7: A Family That Prays Together

  8: Custom-Fitting Faith for My Young Adult Years

  Dropping Jewels: Keeping the Faith Through the Valley of Shadows

  Part IV: Therapy to Heal My Energizer Bunny 9: One Year, Two Babies

  10: Doing What You Have to Do

  11: Postpartum Times Two

  Dropping Jewels: How to Turn Off the Energizer Bunny and Get Help

  Part V: Peeling Back the Layers 12: Girl Meets Boy

  13: Seeking My Missing Father

  14: Paternity Crossroads

  15: True Father

  Dropping Jewels: Create Your Own Mold of a Good Father

  Part VI: A Retreat to Reconnect My Womb to My Body 16: Finding Myself and Mom in Red Rock

  17: Closing the Gap

  18: Dakota’s Voice

  19: My Voice and My Mother’s Voice

  Dropping Jewels: Reconnect to Heal from Loss

  Acknowledgments

  Resources

  References

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  This book was brewing in me since my days of being eight years old and hiding in the closet writing in my little diary. But it was a cold Sunday, in February 2018, a little more than a year after I’d given birth to Dakota and she’d survived 141 days in the NICU, that solidified the call for me to write my story. My ten-year-old Demi, my one-year-old Dakota, and I were away from our faith community in New Jersey, the Love of Jesus Family Church. We were in Ohio for JR’s season on the road with the Cavaliers. I was pregnant with our next child, Denver, overwhelmed with postpartum blues, pregnancy blues, mama-of-a-preteen blues. Needless to say, it was a time when I needed God’s guidance.

  On Saturday, the day before, I had a feeling and a push that said, Get into the house, meaning the church. I had a feeling to go to this different church, not one in Ohio I had tried visiting a few times. I was like, Really God? An hour drive to church? When I didn’t receive a reply from God, I knew he wasn’t playing. I felt the urge to invite my brother’s girlfriend Jasmink to come with me. I thought to myself, God you are on a roll ain’t you? I don’t even know if this girl goes to church.

  I did as instructed, and when I did, another weight was lifted. When I called Jasmink, she responded with joy, “I sure will. I need to go to church.”

  In the middle of the night that Saturday, I realized the devil was trying his best to keep me from making it out of the house to church the next morning. Dakota was off the hook the whole night. She was restless, congested, irritable, and I barely got any sleep. With JR on the road for work I had to cover the twenty-four-hour Dakota shift solo, alone.

  Then, buzz, buzz, buzz. I was like, I know that is not my alarm going off already. You’ve got to be kidding me. Then I thought, Eh, I can just go next week. I battled with my thoughts for about thirty minutes before peeling myself out of bed. I felt like crap and looked like Beetlejuice. What pulled me through was how good God has been to me and my family during those months that things were touch-and-go with Dakota’s life. I realized that the least I could do was go into “the house” and personally thank him. Besides, I was always taught that there is a blessing in your pressing. I got my pregnant self up, got Dakota dressed, told Demi to get ready, got Jasmink, and got on the road.

  All sorts of foolishness was going on as we drove to church. My Bluetooth connection was cutting on and off, so the gospel music we had planned for the hour drive was a no-go. It was freeze-raining, making the roads treacherous, and it was ten degrees. Then, we got lost.

  We finally made it to the Burning Bush Church in Akron, Ohio, and skated inside to catch the tad bit of praise and worship that was still taking place. We were an hour late, but on time for what was next to come.

  The minister talked about power moves and how it was time to breathe life into any dream you thought was dead. I will never forget how specifically he said, “It’s time to write that book!”

  All I could think was, Wow God! This is why you were pressing me.

  All I could remember was standing there like a statue with Dakota on my hip, Demi at my side, and my new baby, Denver, in my womb. I was standing in the moment of grace and purpose after everything that I had been through. All I needed to do next was be obedient to God’s plan.

  This book is so important to me, because I want to help shed light on an issue that is foreign to many people. Black American women are twice as likely to lose their babies to preterm birth than their white counterparts—and almost four times as likely to experience maternal mortality. We have a 50 percent greater chance of dying in the period immediately following childbirth than our mothers before us. Basically, our children are endangered before being born.

  There are many factors that contribute to infant and maternal mortality that disproportionately affect Black American women, like early life traumas of physical abuse and neglect, and ongoing life stressors including experiencing extreme and moderate racism on a regular basis. Living with that kind of lifelong stress impacts Black American women’s ability to fight off and recover from disease, and puts us and our infants at greater risk of losing our lives during the physical stress of childbearing and labor.

  Living with childbirth as a health risk seems unthinkable in the age of modern medicine in America. But recent articles and studies have brought this issue of racial disparity in infant and maternal mortality rates to the public eye.

  No one is immune: Both tennis champion Serena Williams and six-time Olympic track-and-field gold medalist Allyson Felix experienced life-threatening complications during childbirth despite their health-conscious lifestyles and professional and financial success. Beyoncé appeared on the cover of Vogue in September 2018 and detailed in its pages her experience with toxemia and the birth of her premature twins.

  I am the wife of NBA Champion and All-Star JR Smith. I am yet another Black woman who despite doing everything right found myself stretched beyond endurance by the health complications of a severely preterm birth.

  In this book, I offer the 141-day ordeal of fighting for my own life and that of my second daughter, Dakota, who is among the world’s youngest preemies ever to survive. I parallel this journey with the story of my early life. Born into a childhood struggle to survive my mother’s drug addiction, I had to take care of myself and my brother.

  It is my story of loss, resilience, and the maternal instincts I gained over a lifetime that made all the difference when I entered the emergency room at the end of my twenty-first week of pregnancy on New Year’s Day. I didn’t bring my child home until
May of that new year. The joys and pains of my life continue, but in the midst of it all, I hold to my belief in God, my family, and my love of journaling as the beacons to guide me in moments when I feel lost from myself.

  I have written this book because it sheds light on the mind and body of someone who has lived the life that studies have concluded leads to maternal health issues and preterm birth. My story humanizes this Black-woman reality.

  It is good to understand the whole journey of preterm birth so that we can look back and acknowledge the pain and make a promise to our bodies and to our children that we will heal and help them to see a brighter day. We can’t help it that we had limited tools. We can’t help it that our bodies held all of that multigenerational pain and disease. But we want our children’s bodies to be the vessels of God’s will. So we have to tell our complicated birth stories and tell the complicated life stories that led to that moment. Through sharing my story, I know I can lift someone up who is experiencing the same life challenges.

  This book is more than the story of giving birth to one of the world’s youngest preemies. I offer hope through the wisdom I gained by surviving childhood hardships. I offer my stories of looking for love, and eventually building love, with my husband, JR. I run the hope straight through the hardship to the day I thought all was wonderful in my life, where the difficulties of growing up with a mother on crack and an absent father seemed like they were behind me, only to have a stomachache in the middle of my pregnancy that turned out to be my daughter Dakota’s birthday at only twenty-two weeks. I offer you the story of the Black superwoman breaking point. That breaking point was the moment that gave me the courage to look back at the building blocks of my life and heal, for myself and for my children. It was the point from which I gained the strength to start a nonprofit, My Kota Bear, that helps other families with preemies.

  When I am doing my work with My Kota Bear, I am a vessel distributing the gifts and donations that folks have offered to other families of preemies, distributing the resources, the sense of community, the hope and resilience that I sometimes had and other times sorely needed.

  This book is my way of continuing to be God’s vessel. My story within the pages of this book is a shout-out to the power of maternal instincts, God, and therapeutic healing.

  So yes, I offer the story of giving birth to one of the world’s youngest preemies and being Black and the wife of an NBA All-Star who has to be on the road away from home all of the time. But while doing so, I let folks into my living room, welcome them into my home and to all of the things in my life that make me who I am. I want people to know how to create some self-care so they don’t hit the wall of breakdown as hard as I did.

  No shame. I have put it all out there in this book, but I don’t leave people hanging. I share how I got through to this place where I have forgiven my mother and father for what they did and didn’t do, forgiven myself and my body for what it could and couldn’t do, and to this place where I am living a blessed life with my daughters and am able to help others do the same.

  With this book, I take the miracle of my and Dakota’s survival and use it as a tool to help other women understand how our bodies struggle to bring a new life into this world. I want families to know that they are not alone and that we can help each other raise our children.

  Part I

  Maternal Instincts When Nothing Else Makes Sense

  A body doesn’t just randomly break down and struggle with childbirth the way that mine did. We go through things as Black girls where we are born into the same hardships that our mothers were born into. The body holds on to all of that pain of the racism that it experiences every day, of the shame of poverty and not having what you need, of the secrets because some male family member or some boy at school touched you the wrong way. The body holds the time you were left alone because your parents didn’t know any better or were caught up in their own storm of survival. And we have to root about to reconnect our instincts by writing in our journals, connecting with God, staying tight with our communities, and making new bonus family where we can.

  Some maternal instincts are just there on the ready when you give birth; you are just born with them and they kick into action when it’s time. Other maternal “knowhow”? Well, you just have to find your way back to that, because childhood trauma can block instincts or mess with the body’s stress levels so much that you don’t know up from down.

  Dakota’s birth taught me that when my own maternal instincts don’t kick in, I can’t go around confused and in pain until one of God’s helpers shows up. Sometimes, I have to holler for help, holler like I ain’t never hollered, in order to do my part in making sure one of God’s helpers can show up and help me push the reset button on how to nurture myself and my children.

  1

  Kota Bear

  You can never take for granted those times in life where you get a little peace in the middle of the storm. Those times when everything is great. It’s like the body gets calm and feels safe and it knows that it is okay to get real. And then, everything that’s been holed up in your body for so long feels comfortable enough in all that peace to unleash.

  Broadview Heights, Ohio, December 31, 2016

  It was New Year’s Eve, and everything was sweet. Lauryn Hill was playing through the Bluetooth speakers. My mother-in-law, Ma, moved around me. She was my elder, and the queen in my kitchen. She gently coaxed, “Shirley, stir the greens. Stir the black-eyed peas, Shirley.” Stir this, stir that.

  “Yes ma’am.”

  We moved like yin and yang, humming one tune or another. The things we didn’t need to talk about put us on the same accord: we both loved to cook and entertain family and we both lost our mothers at a young age. That song came on: “That thing, that thing, that thing.” I did Lauryn’s rap. Ma did the beatbox. She cracked me up when she just about spit out the black-eyed peas she was tasting to get down in the beat. Her shoulders all hunched up.

  I had on my makeup and earrings but never managed to change out of my blue satin bathrobe or my headscarf, and that was okay because everybody in the house was family. My father-in-law, Pop; JR; and JR’s friend Big Nick were in the den watching the game. JR’s brothers, Chris and Dimitrius, were in the living room with our daughter Demi. JR and his brothers got their height from Pop, six foot seven, a muscular build, easily a 260-pound man. They were all tall, protective men, hanging out with Demi, who was curled up in her mermaid sleeping bag watching the Disney Channel and playing cards with her uncles, multitasking at eight years old like the best of them.

  I rubbed my little baby bump so Dakota could get some of that love. I had seen our Dakota in the sonogram. She had JR’s long forehead, and the shape of my high cheekbones. “Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah,” I said to Ma when Lauryn got to singing “To Zion.” I felt a chill go through my body, like Lauryn got it. She understood what it meant to come through a life of struggling to survive and put God and family first, to know that God is telling you everything is gonna be okay; even during those times when you have to eat the ashes of the earth to feed your family, everything is gonna be okay. Lord knows I had seen some troubled times, but God’s grace held me in gratitude in that moment.

  “A gift so great, is only one God could create.” Ma sang along. Sing it! I held my hands on my Dakota under my robe. It was one of those moments where everything in the world feels like it’s in the right place at the right time. One of those moments that I always wish I can hold still and cherish, because whenever it’s like that, hell is just peeping around the corner.

  The house was a blanket of humid mouthwatering smells: sweet cornbread that sat on the back of my tongue, onions, and Ma’s secret ingredient of cumin in those black-eyed peas that woke up the sinuses. She liked to put a capful of vinegar in the greens that made you want to start chewing before the fork even got to your mouth. In my womb, Dakota was kicking like crazy to tell me to hurry up and eat.

  We got in a circle and I said grace. We were about to s
ee ourselves into a new year of new beginnings for our family. “Heavenly Father, bless this food, the friends and family around this circle, and the new life that is growing in me.”

  “Amen,” and everybody got their plates and settled in either at the counter, the TV, or the dining room table. I took my plate to the counter with Ma and Pop and ate good listening to whatever Ma was saying, “Yes ma’am,” listening to Demi giggling at whatever was on TV.

  After the meal, the grown folks sat down at the dining room table to play the card game Boo Ray. So much for all of that peace; we were about to get loud. Big Nick, who we call the class clown, dealt the cards. “Empty ya pockets, Big Nick is in the house!” He was only five foot eight but was a seriously big man. I was ready with my mouth half-open waiting for him to shut up, so I could come back at him and raise the laughter.

  Suddenly pain ripped through me worse than any pain I’d ever felt, and I grabbed Big Nick’s meaty arm. I tried not to puncture his skin but was holding on tight. Everybody stopped looking at their cards and turned to me all concerned. When the stabbing pain released, I let go of Big Nick and just laughed it off. “I’m just having some tummy trouble. I done ate too much, trying to keep up with Big Nick. Y’all come on, let’s play.”

  Another pain hit me like a jolt of lightning. I just stopped moving for a minute. While everybody put up their bets, I pushed through it. I didn’t want anybody worrying over a bellyache. I felt nauseous, so it had to be a bellyache.

  JR looked at me across the table with a slight pinch in his forehead. “You okay, babe?” I don’t remember a New Year’s Eve when I was able to have him home. It was a fluke that he broke his thumb and had to sit out the end of the season. He scratched his forehead with the cast on his right hand, trying to make sense of his cards before making a bet. He asked again without looking at me, “Ya good, babe?”