Singer Kehlani said she has been healing her own little girl while raising a little girl, and she said it on a series about incarceration and healing that she helped produce.
“Both of my parents were incarcerated,” she said in the first episode of Live From the Hole, a digital series from JJ’88 and Richie Reseda. She joined it as an executive producer. “I do not actively process my parents.”
She was plain about where that left her. “We don’t have a relationship at all,” she said. “I was raised by my aunt.” Her mother was in and out of prison, and the little hurt girl in her, she said, had to come do visits.
Speaking with the women in the episode changed the shape of it. “I saw my mom in everybody,” she said. “I saw my mom in everyone.”
What she did with that is the part worth holding. “My mom probably wanted to raise me,” she said. “She was just dealt a really crazy hand.” She did not say the relationship had been repaired, because it has not been.
And on raising her own daughter while all of this is still open, she used six words and no caveats: healing my little girl while raising a little girl.
It has been a process, she said, which is the only honest thing anybody says about it.
