417. Mama Essie

Nora reads a remembrance about someone’s former foster mom.

Read more about Mama Essie. 

Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.

NORA: I’m Nora McInerny, and it’s going to be okay. It feels silly to say that sometimes because so many things are not okay. But the point of this podcast and the point of that phrase is to help tune ourselves to the small, okay, things that are all around us so that we do not lose hope. Today’s okay thing actually comes from a place that is deeply not okay.

Twitter, I’m never gonna call it x and that is my small act of, I don’t know, pettiness. It comes from Twitter. This is a story that I stumbled upon. I talked to Marcel about it over on our  YouTube channel a few weeks ago, and I thought I would share it here because it’s such  an IGTBO. 

It really is. Okay.  I’m going to read the post  that this woman posted in December of 2023.  She wrote,  I was 12 years old when my mother lost the ability to parent me safely. I was taken from her and put into a huge, scary children’s shelter. It took a long time, but they finally found someone who would take in a deeply troubled, rather wild child like me. 

Mama Essie was a Black woman, and I had a Black foster sister, too. A second one came later. She had three of us little hooligans, and oh, what a hooligan I was. I wasn’t all that nice to her. I stole from her. I ran up her phone bill, calling my boyfriend. When she put a lock on the dial up phone, I broke it.

I was a mess and a handful. I eventually ran away and was put back in the shelter and never saw her again. I’m sure I broke her heart.  And.  I fucking hate these construction guys so much.  The foundation of everything I know about grace, about dignity, about fashion, makeup, hair care, I still use a pick.

Elegance, excellence, self care, patience, love, goodness, generosity, and fierceness in the face of pain came from my mama Essie.  She was one of the highest ranking civilians in the military in the U. S., female and black no less, in the 80s. She had severe eye issues, maybe even a glass eye. She single parented three hurting foster teens.

She owned her own house.  In the 80s, she took in a wild, ignorant, white child. Y’all, it wasn’t the thing done in that area. Talk about badass.  Whatever good there is about who I am, where I am, how I am, it is due to the foundation she laid.  She showed me kindness, wasn’t bowled over by my sass, and taught me things my own mom never did or could. 

I don’t know why she came to mind today, but the tears are rolling. The heart is welling and I so want to honor her today with this little public remembrance. I tried to find her and haven’t yet.  Mama Essie, if you’re still with us or peering through the windows of heaven, thank you. From the bottom of my heart, I heard you, I saw you, you made a difference, more than you’ll ever know.

Um, this is an okay thing from, this is actually more than an okay thing. This is a beautiful thing that somebody did in the 80s and almost 40 years later,  it’s still echoing in this woman’s life. The woman who posted this grew up. She has a good life. She is a therapist. She has dedicated herself to helping other people because of the kindness of this woman  mistreated in her own pain and hurt and was loved anyway.The even more beautiful thing about this is that the internet did  what it can do on its best days and it found Mama Essie and the two of them reconnected and we will have a link to that story in the show description so you can see it if you’d like to. But whatever small thing you are able to do today for somebody else, you have no idea what kind of impact it might make on them.