Kate: What do you do with a childhood that wasn’t? What if your first lessons in love were much more about survival and silence than about belonging? If you’ve ever carried the ache of feeling unchosen or growing up, learning how to disappear, today’s conversation is for you. I’m Kate Bowler, and this is everything happens. Today, my guest is the New York Times bestselling author and poet Nikki Grimes. Nikki is prolific, and her writing has won just about every award there is to win, like being inducted into the Black Authors Hall of Fame in 2023. Some of my very favorite of her works are her book of poems called Glory in the Margins, her completely adorable kids book about a grandma and her granddaughter called A Cup of Quiet, and her brave and honest memoir, Ordinary Hazards. It’s all about her growing up with a paranoid schizophrenic mom and her absent father and the unthinkable abuse from her mom’s boyfriend, where she was not protected and she should have been. Today we’re gonna talk about what it means to live through the hard beginnings, to wrestle with memory, to still believe that there might be beauty even in the wreckage. So if that sounds at all like your story or someone you love, you’re so welcome here. Nikki, this is the best part of today. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me. There are some people, when you talk to them, they just get it. And you, my dear, just get it. You understand life as fragile as a soap bubble. And so much of that awareness started when you were really young. Could you take me back to your childhood and tell me about what it was like for the very youngest, Nikki?
Nikki: Oh gosh. It was rough. It was challenging. There was lots of movement. I was in and out of foster care, trying to get a handle on what was going on with my mother, who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and was also an alcoholic. So I had those things going on. And sometimes my mother would be talking to people who weren’t there and trying to make sense of that. And also beginning to get a sense of the cycle of her illness and when she’d be well and sort of seeing signs that she was moving in that direction and, you know, getting a sense of what mother I was coming home to the next day.
Kate: It sounds like you were very sensitive and attuned and like aware of the smallest thing. It’s wild sometimes how this youngest self is sometimes shaped some of our greatest—like what we think of as our greatest gifts now.
Nikki: Even at a very young age I could sense if I was around somebody who was in any kind of pain or loneliness, whatever. I was the kid who would notice that kid and go over and say, “Are you okay?” Or befriend them because I sensed it. I might not be able to articulate it, but I could sense that need was there. And that was my own experience that built that in me, that planted those seeds.
Kate: Some childhood memories are so surreal that they almost feel like fever dreams. And in the way you write the memoir in these beautiful stanzas, I think one of the things that’s so compelling about reading it is it offers these little snapshots of your life. And, but just like every childhood memory, it hides as much as it shows. We only kind of remember these little sort of flares.
Nikki: I think that’s true for everyone. I used to think that only people with traumatic memories would lose their memories. And I have since learned that we all do have memories we hold on to, and others that just get lost along the way. Who knows why? And they’re not always bad memories either. One of the things that happened for me when I was writing my memoir is I recovered a memory that I didn’t even realize I’d lost. And it was a good one. So I was like, well, why did I lose that?
There was a piece I was trying to write about my father’s last gift to me before he died, which were ice skates—brand new, beautiful white ice skates. And I was writing a scene about that, and I suddenly wondered why he bought me those skates. Because I had no memory of skating. I’m like, these are expensive. This is an expensive gift. Why did he get these for me? And then I called my oldest childhood friend and I said, “Deb, did we ever go ice skating?” “Oh yeah.” And she launches into memories about all these times when we’re on the ice and having chocolate on the side and how she spun me out in the middle of the ice because she had dreams of Olympic skating. So she loved to skate. She named the rinks we went to. And so within the next forty-eight hours, I started getting flashes of memories of ice skating. I’m like, well, why did I lose those? Those were great. Yeah, I’d like to have kept those.
So it’s not only the bad ones that you lose, you can lose good ones too. And that makes a memoir always challenging because you want to be as honest as you can. But there are these things that you know, and then there are things that you don’t know. And the perspectives are always shifting. If you have five people who have the same experience, they write about it or tell about it in five different ways. It’s because how we internalize or experience something has everything to do with our own personal history and our own experiences and what we bring to that memory, what we bring to that event in terms of how we keep it, how we hold on to it, what the details are for us. And so it’s not the same for any two people.
Kate: There’s one thing I really enjoy, Everything Happens community, which is that they really know a lot about befores and afters—like processing very difficult times and then really holding on to the moments that sustained them. And you had this season of beautiful belonging with the foster family, the Buchanans. And I wondered what they taught you about what it means to love and to feel cherished.
Nikki: So much. One of the things—the gift that they gave me—was that when I left, even though I went back to a bad situation and continued to have really horrendous experiences, I was able to walk through them because I knew I was loved. I knew I was capable of being loved. I knew that the kind of love they shared existed. So I wasn’t jaded in that way because I had seen it. So I knew there was this other kind of life that was possible because I had lived in it, I’d witnessed it. And so that gave me a great deal of hope.
It was also the first place that I experienced the church community. I went to church for the first time with them and sang in the children’s choir. So those seeds were planted in me there as well. And so all of that stood me in good stead for years after. And my oldest foster brother kept in touch through the years and we’re really close now.
Kate: Is there anything that you read that reminded you of your time together?
Nikki: In The Road to Paris, there’s something that is connected to him. What I like about it—we had this conversation because I came to that home with a lot of fears. I was very much locked into myself when I first got there. And it took me about a year to let my guard down. And one of the things I was afraid of was the dark.
And I asked him, you know, if he was ever afraid or something. And he said, “Yeah, but whenever I’m afraid, I just think about God being in my pocket.” “God in your pocket? How is God supposed to fit in your pocket?” And he said, “No, no. It’s just the idea that I think of him as if he’s that close, if I need him. And when I remember that, I’m not afraid anymore.” I said, “And that works?” And he said, “Yeah.” So then she takes that with her and it comes up again in the story.
Well, one day I was doing a presentation at a library. The classes who came to the library had just read The Road to Paris. And one of the girls in the class came to this presentation with a basket in which she had taken like plastic disks. She had painted the word “God” in gold on each disk. She handed this basket out so that everyone could take one and remember the God in their pocket. So she had completely taken this thing to heart. And then she shared it with her class. I tried not to cry. Wow. Yeah. How powerful.
And that was about my brother Ken. He always was looking out for me and reaching out to me and kind of—he was just a real caretaker. He had like a real nurturing kind of spirit about him, always did. And his father had that, his mother had it, but especially his dad. But Kendall has always had that and he was that for me.
Kate: I’m so struck that that was the place where you had your very first birthday cake for your seventh birthday.
Nikki: Birthday cakes—birthdays in general—are still special to me. A lot of times I travel so that I’m not home to worry about if somebody remembers to call or whatever, because I’m not used to my birthday being remembered. So when I turned 60, I decided I was going to do a big birthday bash. And one of my friends said, “You’re spending all this money for a birthday.” I’m like, “Oh no, no, no. I didn’t grow up with everybody celebrating me like you did. This is a big deal, and I’m doing it. I don’t care what it costs.”
It’s such a different story if this is the norm of your life—your family celebrates you and people call and all this kind of stuff. I didn’t have that. So I have a whole other perspective on a birthday. And so I was 60. I’m like, I’m doing this blowout thing. And I did it at one of my favorite restaurants and went all out. Friends who were there, musicians played, and I asked everyone to bring a poem—a favorite poem.
And I was really surprised. Some people wrote poems for the first time. I was expecting them to find like a poem that they loved to read, but a number of people wrote their own poems and they’d never written one before to share with me. It was such a gift. So these are some just gems that come from a not-so-fun story. You know, you can turn almost anything around.
Kate: Sometimes I wonder too if being able to easily recover the feeling of being a child—the feeling of not being able to secure your own safety or like the love and stability of parents—it really gives you this deep empathic knowledge of exactly what that age feels like. Like the fact that kids are simultaneously immersed in a parental world they’re not choosing, and yet also just like on a sidewalk having their own adventures. And somehow both are their reality.
Nikki: We have a double reality as adults too, because our child is still alive and alert. We don’t let that child out very often, but we do have that duality as well. Children just don’t bother to hide it. They’re much closer to it and will show that duality much more easily. I think because children in general are braver than adults are. Learned not to be. Yeah, they are brave. We look back on our childhood and the things that we tried and did, and we’re like, “I don’t believe I did that. And I’m still here.”
Kate: We’re going to be right back after a break to hear from our sponsors. Don’t go anywhere.
There’s a very sad moment that many of us face when we stop expecting normal things from our parents. Stop expecting them to show up when they should or to try or to change. I think one reason why as adults we don’t often talk about it or be as honest as you’ve been is that we will hear from other people, “Well, they did their best.” And I thought Tara Westover just said something really powerful, I’ll never forget about it. She just said about her dad, like he did the best with what he had, but his best was devastating.
Nikki: That’s interesting. Because what I was thinking when you were saying that is like in some cases they didn’t do their best. Yes, well thank God for saying it. Yeah. And you have to forgive them anyway—for yourself. You know. That’s one of the reasons there’s so much disappointment, because sometimes you look at them and you know that there’s more to them, you know that they’re capable of more, and yet they’re not doing it. And that’s disappointing. Like I wasn’t worth taking that step, doing that extra whatever. And so there’s that disappointment because you’ll have glimpses of those things in them that you wish you saw all the time, or at least more often. So you know it’s there. So it isn’t necessarily a question of they were doing their best. Sometimes they were, sometimes not so much. But whether they were or not, we still have to forgive them.
Kate: For ourselves. That’s an—I mean, it’s an incredibly brave thing to do. When did you decide that you needed to forgive, like, say, your dad for yourself?
Nikki: Oh, he was easier because he’s my favorite. He was the caretaker of my art, and really he introduced me to so much of the art world—took me to my first ballet, my first art exhibit opening, introduced me to my first theater director, and got me involved in theater, which is why my voice in literature is as strong as it is. It’s because of my theater experience. He introduced me to that.
But forgiveness in general, yeah, it’s something I came to later as a believer. You start to realize you can’t just walk around with all this stuff clutching your heart. Really, it hurts you more than anybody else. And while you’re busy being angry and fostering all this anger, it becomes poison for you. The other person is not affected by it at all, but you are.
We wander around with this idea that we should only forgive somebody who’s deserving of it, or because they asked for it. And it’s not about any of that, especially if the person is passed on. But whether they’re still in the world or not, we need to let it go so that we aren’t poisoned by it. And so that God has an opportunity to heal our hearts. We gotta let that stuff go.
It also shifts how we think about that person too. Because then we’re able to recognize their flaws for what they are and their weaknesses. And where there are places where they were indeed doing their best, we can see that. But that doesn’t become possible until we let go of our own anger and leach that poison right out of us. So that we can have the joy of being healed and being freed. You don’t forget—you have all the memories still—but you’re not bound by them anymore. You’re not imprisoned by them anymore. You can go ahead and live your life and live it with joy. Who doesn’t want that?
Kate: I’ve been working on a project on joy and it is just—it’s such a yes to life. There’s so many people who feel like they’re unable to let go. And I’m just wondering if letting yourself feel more and more loved kind of nudged you along the way. You’re someone who has felt God’s love very early on in her life. And I wonder if kind of this unfolding sense of feeling loved helped you make less and less room for anger over time.
Nikki: I think so. I also made some choices early on to surround myself with people who had their own dreams and their own goals and were in pursuit of something higher for themselves. Because then they would support me and encourage me and it would be this kind of two-way street. Kind of opens you up to more love.
While there were all kinds of issues with my mother, I had some wonderful surrogate mothers—mothers of my friends who were encouraging to me and supported me. And I was really good at getting adopted by other people in a way. People who were there for me, who loved me, who encouraged me. And having them became more important than resenting the fact that my mother wasn’t that person. There was certainly some of that, but that became less important when I was getting the love I needed and opened myself up to that and was willing to receive it.
Kate: I love that you say you don’t believe in luck, but you believe in grace. Like that God kept saving you.
Nikki: Yeah, it always rubs me wrong when people talk about, you know, “Oh you’re so lucky.” I’m like, no, this isn’t about luck. This is about grace. I’ve never had a sense of anything good falling in my lap. Things are falling—not good ones. So, but grace, yeah—grace has always been there, always been part of my story. And by the end of the day, it is the story for us all, is grace. Not getting what we deserved, getting what we don’t deserve, which is God’s pleasure to give us good things that we haven’t earned or deserved in any way, but he gives them to us because he loves us and he chooses to lavish us with good things.
Kate: We’re going to take a quick break to tell you about the sponsors of this show. We’ll be right back.
You really think a lot about joy.
Nikki: I do think a lot about joy.
Kate: Why do you think it is that joy is so much more—I think more satisfying to think about than just like happiness or having already had life figured out by now?
Nikki: Happiness comes and goes, you know, so we’re happy if good things are happening and if they’re not, we’re not. Joy isn’t dependent on those ups and downs. Joy is just always there, always available, and it has a depth available from the heart of God 24-7. It’s just always there. We can always tap into it if we open ourselves.
There are so many things on a daily basis that try to steal our joy and distract us from joy and try to convince our souls that everything is desperate and dark, and we start to believe that and act accordingly. Everything is hopeless, and then God says, “Hello. Still here, still on the throne, still making joy, still ready to give it to you anytime.” It’s there all—like, oh yeah, it’s still there. Just tap into it and let it bubble up, and then share it.
Joy becomes our fuel. And hallelujah, at times like this that are so dark and so challenging and so contentious, we need that fuel. We need that fuel, that joy, just to get from this step to the next. It’s the one thing that a person needs to feel lighter and to realize, “Oh, I can move forward, I can do this. I can tackle this, I can face this.” And to be light enough and rejuvenated enough to take whatever that next step is—to resist, to act, to be more loving in their own circle, to reach out to that person that maybe they didn’t feel strong enough to reach out to before. Whatever it is, joy fuels us. Nothing fuels us like joy does.
Kate: Yeah, Nikki, I feel like I could hear your heartbeat when you talk about joy. It really sustains you. Do you think kids know more about joy than other people? Because I have this sense about the way that it’s connected to noticing and gratitude and hope and delight. Like these are all things kids are particularly good at. I just wonder if some of that—the particularity of kids’ ability to notice and be grateful and to be in the details—makes them maybe more… I think so.
Nikki: Oh, they really can hone in on things in a way that we don’t. If you really want to see something or you want to see it a new way, look through a child’s eyes. They’re always noticing things that adults miss.
Kate: What do you think kids notice about God that we miss? His person—
Nikki: —hood. Because children are still at that place where an imaginary character is completely real for them. So they don’t have a problem thinking of God as a person or speaking to him. I used to talk to God all the time as a kid, and I thought that was something that everybody did. And I saw angels and I thought that was normal until older people told me it wasn’t. And then I was like, “I guess I better not talk about that anymore.”
But while they’re still children and they haven’t been convinced that these things aren’t possible, it’s very natural. They saw God more recently than we did, so it’s really much real life for them. It’s like, what’s the big deal? From their perspective. His personhood, and that he speaks and he has a voice—those kinds of things seem very natural and they’re not questioned until somebody tells them.
Kate: Question it. I love my son’s prayers. They’re very like, “God, I have received a terrible haircut today. I am working through it.” Like he’s just very frank, very serious, has a lot of mood. I just love it. I love that.
You’ve written Glory too, and I wondered if you wouldn’t mind picking your favorite and reading it.
Nikki: Let’s see. “Holy Architecture.”
“Who of us has never felt rejected, tossed aside, ground underfoot by those who fail to see our beauty? Peter reminds us we were not the first, chips off the old block; we are called to be like Christ, living stones precious to God, designed to fit into the body of the temple, offering our throbbing, broken hearts as mortar for God’s holy architecture, unless we stubbornly refuse to be used. What if Joseph had declined to serve in Potiphar’s household, or Moses had said, I prefer Egypt’s bread, or Mary had said, Not me, Lord? How foolish to refuse to allow our rough edges to be chiseled smooth by the royal carpenter, or to decline to be arranged in the precise order El Shaddai had in mind from the first. He alone can make of us a mirror of the light and mercy. Diseased world will surely die without…”
Kate: Thank you, thank you for sharing with us your profound joy, deep attention to what it means to sustain a life of curiosity and kindness and radical attention to the things that make life worth living. It has been such an honor to talk with you.
Nikki: Yeah, it’s been mine.
Kate: Maybe you didn’t get the childhood you needed. Maybe the people who were supposed to love you couldn’t or wouldn’t. But even so, you’re here. You found your way forward with a heart that still hopes, still breaks open, still tells the truth. So may you find pockets of joy you didn’t see coming. May you keep the parts of yourself that stayed soft, even when the world asks you to be hard. And may you know deep down that your story in all its complexity is worth telling.
So I usually end these episodes with a blessing, but we have a poet among us, so I asked Nikki to read one of her poems. And it’s part of her collection of Sunday poems called Glory in the Margins. This poem is called “Habitation.”
Nikki: “The father has a penchant for fixer-uppers. We humans houses with peeling paint, rusted pipes, cracked shingles, faulty wiring, and shoddy foundations, desperately in need of reconstruction. No point in us beating our chest or patting ourselves on the back after Christ is done renovating our souls. He’s the one who gets credit for making us beautiful. Don’t forget, we started off poor in spirit, meek and mourning, parched and panting. Before we could even imagine inheriting the earth, we had to sink low enough to comprehend the wisdom of looking up. Once we did, we found the Lord waiting and ready to make our fleshly houses suitable for his habitation and his gift of joy.”
Kate: So hey, if you want more blessings and reflections, I am really enjoying my time at Substack. It’s katebowler.substack.com and you can find, in my opinion, the internet’s kindest people over there. And if you wouldn’t mind leaving us a review on Apple or Spotify, it would really help more people to find us. And hey, come watch me on YouTube, where you can see every episode. I’m at KateC Bowler.
Everything Happens is made with help from Jessica Richie, Harriet Putman, Keith Weston, Anne Herring, Hailie Durrett, Megan Crunkleton, Anna Fitzgerald Peterson, and Katherine Smith.
This is Everything Happens, with me, Kate Bowler.
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