“Mama, who’s that?”

Nia, the soon-to-be second-grader, has a never-ending thirst for knowledge and stays in perpetual question mode these days. “What do you mean, Nia?”

“That baby in the picture.”

My gaze follows her arm across the living room and rests at the vintage, sepia-toned photo on a shelf. “It’s me.”

“You?” I watch her take in my solemn toddler expression, the romper dress covering my knees and and the huge Afro at my crown. “I didn’t know you were little like that.”

“Wow, Nia, really? All of us were babies at some point.”

I watch her take the framed photo and examine it closer, silently reminiscing at how many changes have occurred since then and how that baby girl grew up, married, bore a son, divorced, found her career path, remarried and had two baby girls of her own. Multiple roles have developed, expanded and even clashed with one another as I came to be the woman I am and the mother my children know today.

A family conference I attended recently, “The Challenge of a 21st Century Woman,” brought those dualities into focus. It cautioned against how stress levels can increase when our awareness levels decrease and we find those many titles — sister, wife, mother, friend and beyond — disrupting our flow.

“We’ve been afforded opportunities that our ancestors could only dream of,” our instructor acknowledged. “But with those opportunities come extra responsibilities and challenges. It becomes a balancing act to keep everything together on both the inside and the outside without letting the expectations of others dictate the directions we take in life.”

When Nia tells me what she wants to be when she grows up — and with her, the choices can switch from week to week — I tell her that she has the potential to be whatever she decides once she puts her mind to it. I hope she is blessed to live and grow before concerning herself about a career and the family she plans to have.

I hope that she adjusts, like her mom has, to the art of managing the duties of life and multitasking or pulling back when necessary. True, she may never know the anxiety that builds when I have to pick her up from school, fix plates for dinner and stall until I can get to the recorder because a performer or author is on the line for an interview, but I hope she appreciates the effort.

There’s no way to compare the struggles and the situations that my great-grandmother Mary Irby endured. Writing and raising a family from the comfort of suburbia is hardly as labor-intensive as growing fruit and raising livestock and eight kids on a farm in rural Sandusky, Ohio, while using a wood-burning stove to cook and heat a home. But I’m sure she couldn’t have anticipated the daunting dilemmas that the 21st century would create.

It’s been decades since I’ve called Cleveland home, and I may still be little, relatively, but the titles I hold are anything but. Looking in the mirror every day means seeing traces of that long-ago toddler in an adult face, and these days, I hear my childhood nickname of “Lo-Lo” a lot less than I hear “Sweetie” and “Mom.”
But even as I juggle those identities, I cherish them all and hope to explore even richer roles — like “grandmother” and even “great-grand” — in the years ahead, while watching our kids in their chosen paths.

Nia ponders the portrait only a moment longer before returning to her role of Big Sis and running off with Layla for another game of tag. Meanwhile, I return to being “Mom” and making the meal in progress, hoping that the toddler captured in that long-ago lens shot would be proud of the woman she was destined to become.