36-year-old Memphis mom is charged with first-degree murder after police say she shot a 20-year-old man in the back of the head after returning home and discovering him hiding under her 13-year-old daughter’s bed. The girl told investigators that she invited him over.
According to reports, he was leaving the home when he was shot in the back of his head on the porch.
Atlanta radio host Big Tigger's estranged wife, Alicia Brown, was taken into custody after being pulled over on I-85.
Police say she was wanted in Maryland in connection with a kidnapping case, and the two children with her were found safe.
You Can’t Save Everyone
The hardest lesson of my life wasn’t surviving poverty. It was accepting that love alone can’t save people who aren’t ready to save themselves.
I have always been a writer.
Long before I became a singer, producer, entrepreneur, or television creator, I was a storyteller. Writers don’t just tell stories they search for meaning inside them.
Looking back now, I realize every chapter of my life has been preparing me for the one I’m living today.
I grew up in Detroit.
I was the little girl who hated walking to the grocery store with food stamps because I was embarrassed someone might see us. My mother was raising three daughters alone while carrying wounds no child should ever have to carry. She was a survivor of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of her own father, yet somehow she still found the strength to wake up every day and fight for us.
I watched her chase her dream of singing in local jazz clubs while trying to keep food on the table. I watched her date men she didn’t love because there were days when survival demanded impossible choices. I watched beautiful moments coexist with heartbreaking ones as she endured abuse from men she trusted.
I also watched resilience.
My mother refused to let poverty become our inheritance. She went back to school, earned her builder’s license, opened resale stores, and began investing in rental properties. My sisters and I spent weekends cleaning those homes alongside her. She taught us that our gifts could become our freedom and that no woman should ever have to depend on someone else for her future.
Those lessons changed my life.
Then one day, everything changed.
I watched my mother attempt to take her own life.
By God’s grace, I was there, and she survived.
But survival didn’t erase what happened.
At 24 years old, I carried a burden that was never mine to carry. My mother told me she had sacrificed her dreams so I could pursue mine. She told me I cared more about my career than I did about helping her. I believed her.
For years, I thought if I had just loved harder, earned more, sacrificed more, somehow I could have fixed what was broken.
Therapy eventually gave me a gift I didn’t know I needed.
I was never responsible for saving my mother.
Around that same time, I learned several of my closest family members had become involved in boosting, scamming, and criminal activity. Many of the young men in my family were either incarcerated or gone forever.
So I did what felt natural.
I opened my home.
At one point, I had two sisters and six cousins living with me. I shared my resources, my opportunities, and my career because I believed that if someone simply had enough love, enough support, enough exposure to another way of living, they could change the trajectory of their lives.
Sometimes they did.
Many times they didn’t.
Looking back now, I realize something that has quietly followed me throughout my entire career.
I have spent much of my life trying to rescue people.
Whether it was family, friends, artists, women navigating impossible circumstances on R&B Divas, or fighting to protect my own intellectual property because I believed creators deserved justice, the motivation was often the same.
Protect people.
Help people.
Leave things better than I found them.
Sometimes that made me successful.
Sometimes it made me misunderstood.
This past week, after finding myself unexpectedly in the middle of another viral conversation about culture, music, and accountability, I found myself asking a difficult question.
Why do I keep carrying burdens that don’t belong to me?
The answer wasn’t complicated.
Because I’ve been doing it since I was a little girl.
But I’m 56 now.
And maybe wisdom isn’t learning how to carry more.
Maybe wisdom is learning what to finally put down.
I’ve spent years believing I could help save my community.