The moment you know you are pregnant is a moment you can taste especially if you are a mother like me who documents, note takes, and records everything not because I am absent from the moment but because I am trying to capture its essence before it slips away from me due to the unexpected deaths and losses in my life

I am the camcorder our grandparents carried attached to the inside of their right palm recording moments before time could steal them away

Maybe that is why I notice changes so quickly

Why I taste shifts before they fully arrive

Why my body whispers things to me long before the world has language for them

You know the taste

Suddenly it is as if you swallowed nail polish remover or a mouth full of copper pennies

You drink milk, chew ginger, eat ice cream, brush your teeth three times over, yet you cannot escape it

It is more than your senses altering themselves

More than hormones disrupting taste buds

The taste is familiar

It rises from the root of the tongue near the pit of the mouth where bitterness first settles and where life itself seems to announce its arrival before the body can fully comprehend it

At first, the taste feels bitter

Hard to escape

Hard to wash down

Because motherhood cannot be watered down

And neither can purpose

Do you taste that?

It is a taste you can almost smell

It smells like twin boys named Daniel and David

Daniel tastes like faith

Like sovereignty

Like the kind of trust that believes God will come into the lions’ den and shut the mouths of everything sent to destroy you

When King Darius ran to the den after a sleepless night of fasting and grief, he cried out, “O Daniel, servant of the living God, has your God, whom you serve continually, been able to deliver you from the lions?” Daniel answered, “My God sent his angel and shut the lions’ mouths” (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version, Daniel 6:20–22)

That taste is victory

Even Next Friday understood the language of tasting survival when Mike Epps joked, “Taste it, taste good don’t it?” (Next Friday, 2000)

And yes

Faith does taste good after surviving what was supposed to consume you

Then there is David

David tastes like the overlooked child

The son his own father failed to call into the room when the prophet came searching for a king (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version, 1 Samuel 16:1–13)

I know that taste too

The taste of being underestimated

The taste of grieving someone while simultaneously grieving who they never allowed themselves to become for you

David was hunted by King Saul, a man he once admired

Saul chased David through wilderness after wilderness attempting to destroy what God had already anointed (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version, 1 Samuel 18:10–11; 1 Samuel 19:9–10; 1 Samuel 23:14–15)

Yet when David had the opportunity to destroy Saul, he spared his life because David understood something many wounded people do not

“If the Lord has put you where you are, you do not have to destroy people to prove it”

David refused to kill Saul inside the cave at En Gedi even after Saul spent years pursuing him because David still honored the fact that Saul had once been anointed king by God (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version, 1 Samuel 24:1–12)

What you do with betrayal is up to you

As for me, I seek more education, read more books, write more honestly, and become more disciplined because the healthiest form of processing pain, trauma, and betrayal is transformation rather than retaliation

I believe God and education are among the greatest forms of therapy

Both teach you how to digest the strange taste of life instead of spitting it out simply because it arrived bitter

Healing itself has a taste

Because healing is confirmation that something is growing inside of you even before the world can see it

And this time the confirmation came twice

Therefore twice, I, Tiara declare:

To God be the glory

Twin boys already named Daniel and David because before God formed them, He knew them (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version, Jeremiah 1:5)

Future protectors, brothers, and part of the village surrounding Elizabeth so she will never lack love, covering, or protection

And after everything life tried to make bitter

Yes Mike Epps

I can taste the air now

And it does taste good, don’t it? (Next Friday, 2000)