They say it takes a village to raise a child, but what happens when a piece of your village is tucked away in memories, or across an ocean, rather than in the neighborhood around the corner? When Azalea was born, I remember holding her in my arms and thinking about all the voices that would one day try to define her. The world is loud. It tells children who they should be before they even understand themselves labeling them, sorting them, and pushing them into boxes. It teaches identity through trends, opinions, algorithms, and stereotypes before they are old enough to protect their hearts from it. As her mother, I knew something deeply in my spirit: I never wanted the world to introduce my daughter to herself before we did. So, from birth, Montell and I made a covenant. We looked at this beautiful, perfect blend of us and decided to start early. Not perfectly. Not extravagantly. But intentionally. Because identity does not begin when a child becomes a teenager; it begins in the small,...