Vanessa Riley's Research and Shopping Blog

There is nothing worse than looking into your child’s eyes and realizing they’ve been struggling—and somehow, you missed it. I know that look. And years later, I still carry the guilt.

I read Nikole Hannah-Jones’s devastating piece in The New York Times, “In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?”

That part—

I could feel her daughter looking at her. “Did you know…when you decided to put me here?”

The question hit me straight in the heart and took me back a number of years to my own guilt bomb.

Flashback: 2023

My dearest darling daughter was in her senior year of high school, and she was flailing.

I can remember her soft brown eyes glancing up at me, filled with despair, like she had just realized her mother was human and not a superhero. In those small irises were water droplets and the look of failure.

Seeing that in your child’s eyes is worse than a nightmare.

My daughter had been homeschooled from the very beginning, and I can still remember clicking through the web searching for school programs, drilling through curricula—from IXL to Abeka—constructing strengths-and-weaknesses charts, researching resources, all nine yards, trying to choose a program that aligned with our family values and had the flexibility to accommodate an active-duty military man and a scientist-type, consulting, writer mom.

Homeschooling fit the demands and worked until about third grade, when I realized Georgia’s limited homeschooling oversight could allow my child to miss key testing and other things. We decided to switch her to public school.

We lucked out and found a hybrid county public school, Connections Academy. They had everything—or at least promise of everything. High praise from teachers and students, a solid curriculum, and the majority of the classes would still be taught in an online atmosphere . My daughter could continue to be at home or travel with me while attending school.

I believed deeply in flexible, in-depth education. I still do. I believe in investing in my child’s education, so when there were weaknesses and I couldn’t help, I found tutors, sought out additional summer programs like Kumon, and did whatever was required to make sure my baby learned and enjoyed learning.

From third through eleventh grade, my daughter got A’s and B’s.

I thought she was fine.

She wasn’t.

In her senior year, my daughter cracked under the pressure. She had a pile of unfinished assignments, grades dipping toward D’s and F’s because of incompletes, and she started talking about not wanting to go to college. Then she admitted she had trouble reading and keeping up and that, when stressed, numbers floated.

I was in shock.

I reached out to the school for help. It took a while for the emails to return from the void, but there was no real help. Mandated county testing for this type of situation wasn’t a priority for them. Perhaps they, too, were shocked that an A-B student could have such problems. It soon became obvious that this excellent school didn’t have the resources or desire to be part of the solution.

My husband and I had to save her on our own.

We worked with our doctors to get her diagnosed.

I was stunned by the diagnosis. My daughter had a learning disability that had gone undiagnosed for years.

I’m not going to get too deeply into her private medical information. But some of its characteristics look like ADHD. It definitely bears anxious fruit, and it can affect her ability to perform certain mathematical processes. She required accommodations and a learning plan. Hubby and I had to implement them to get my daughter back to wanting to learn.

Back to the Present

I read Hannah-Jones’s piece, and my heart broke for her and her daughter.

A mother’s guilt knows no end.

Something inside crumbles, ripping at our insides, when our child is in agony—or worse, when they look up with failure written in their eyes and they see it written in ours.

How did we let this happen?

These kids are right to put some of the blame on us. We are the busy, opinionated generation with all these high moral principles, but sometimes lacking the time to invest, dissect, and implement.

My daughter is now thriving and enjoying her college experience, but part of me still bears this grief.

How did I not see it?

How many years of suffering happened because I missed the problem?

Then guilt joins in:

How could I have spent this much time thinking about my child’s education and not known?

How could I not recognize that she was struggling? Sorry doesn’t cut it. We can’t give time back.

I’ve learned that looks deceive. I had interpreted working around the clock as passion. You simply do that when you love learning.

Maybe that belief kept me blind.

Achievement can disguise struggle.

You can love your child ferociously. You can research. You can advocate. You can pay attention. You can invest time and money. You can believe you are doing everything you’re supposed to do for them and the next generation—and still fail.

Back to Hannah-Jones

In her New York Times article, Nikole Hannah-Jones talks about the battle of advocating against segregated schools and trying to create an equal, common baseline for schoolchildren everywhere. She had to reckon with the fact that schools with inequities based on the complexion of their student body or a lack of a strong tax base don’t always make it up to snuff. Sometimes folks do the bare minimum, not the unpaid extra that can make a difference. Putting middle-class or rich kids into these schools doesn’t automatically change what’s happening.

And she had to trade her fear of putting her kid in a higher-performing school, where rich kids can exhibit both racism and classism, for the opportunity to give her daughter a competitive, quality education.

She thought she was doing the right thing by placing her only daughter, her only child, in her neighborhood public school. She may have been deluded into thinking that the predominantly Black neighborhood school wouldn’t play in her face because she writes for The New York Times.

Unfortunately, she found that some allowed neglect to fester into behavioral issues at lunchtime; she found folders of ungraded schoolwork, which made it harder to ensure a student corrected mistakes and learned. Hannah-Jones’s daughter fell behind and needed many tutoring sessions to catch up.

The Ruby Bridges Interlude

On September 8, Ruby Bridges turned seventy-two. She was the famous six-year-old who, in 1960, became the first Black child to integrate William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans. Federal marshals escorted her past screaming white crowds to get her into the building.

I made a birthday post about her, and more than a hundred thousand people on Instagram (and Facebook) have viewed it.

We know the picture.

The little Black girl.

The white dress.

The braids.

Or maybe we know Norman Rockwell’s rendering of that walk, The Problem We All Live With.

But what I wanted people to remember was what existed outside the frame, beyond the braids and the federal marshals.

Picture the crowd.

The slurs. The angry men and women screaming at her. The death threats. The image of a Black baby doll in a coffin. Ruby had nightmares about that.

White parents who defied the boycott and continued sending their children to William Frantz were threatened too. Federal marshals also escorted white children into the school.

All this chaos because people wanted a better education for their children.

Sometimes history is easier to tolerate when we crop the photograph and look at the child, not the system.

Many of us have had to deal with the system, particularly when it comes to education.

We celebrate that courage now because of the success of school integration. But most of us don’t have the guts or the fearlessness it took to be Ruby—or any of the kids who attended with her.

Back to the New York Times

Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote an extraordinary and painful essay in The New York Times titled “In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?”

Please read the whole thing.

Don’t read only a headline. Don’t read a social-media snippet. Don’t even rely on the pieces I’m quoting here. Read the essay.

Hannah-Jones wrestles with something that I think is far more complicated than a debate about public schools, private schools, integration, vouchers, property taxes, or school choice.

She’s wrestling with what happens when our ideals collide with our children.

Hannah-Jones deliberately chose a public-school education for her daughter, Najya, while advocating for educational integration and equality. Looking back years later, she confronted the possibility that her daughter had borne a cost for that decision.

Najya told her:

“Sometimes I wish instead of always thinking about other kids, you would have thought about me. I never really got the education I wanted.”

Wow. She might as well have said that she did not get the education she deserved.

I know that Hannah-Jones had to herself:

Why didn’t I see it?

Hannah-Jones apologized to her daughter and admitted that Najya “had borne the cost not only of our unjust society but also of my ideals.”

That’s a transparent admission.

It holds a lot of grief and what-ifs.

I think we are all okay if our values or busyness cost us something.

We are destroyed when they cost our children.

There’s another little girl from New Orleans, Leona Tate, who integrated McDonogh 19 Elementary School at the same time Ruby Bridges integrated William Frantz. She was another of the little Black girls helping to dismantle Jim Crow, but the victory we inherited was purchased partly with their childhoods.

When Hannah-Jones asked Tate about her parents’ decision to put her on that front line, Tate did not condemn them.

She said:

“Somebody had to do it.”

She’s right.

Somebody had to do it.

But I don’t know how any parent can stand by and let their child be miserable for the greater good.

On The View, the ladies discussed Hannah-Jones’s essay, and the conversation quickly exposed how complicated this becomes for actual parents. Sunny Hostin talked about making a different decision for her own children: predominantly white private schools where they excelled academically but encountered racism and struggles around identity. Ana Navarro raised questions about Florida’s voucher system and who can actually afford private-school tuition even with a voucher. Alyssa Farah Griffin talked about choosing public school while also acknowledging that her family chose to live in a well-off community with excellent neighborhood public schools.

Those aren’t identical experiences.

They expose the dilemma.

We want to repair systems.

But we also want to protect our babies.

These two desires will always be on a collision course.

Here are dilemmas I didn’t have the strength for:

If my child could help integrate a school, but she’d be bullied, threatened, psychologically or physically wounded, do I send her?

No.

If my child’s presence could make things better for the children coming ten years later, twenty years later, sixty years later—how much of her childhood am I allowed to spend purchasing that future?

That one, I don’t know.

I simply don’t know.

I want to tell you I would be brave.

I want to tell you my convictions would hold.

I want to tell you I would stand against the darkness and raise a light high enough for everybody behind me to see.

But when it comes to my child?

I’m not a lantern leading the way.

I’m not a flashlight with a steady beam.

I’m barely a candle.

A little one with a flame cupped between two hands, trying desperately to stay lit in the wind.

That’s why I research and write about the women who were lanterns and steady flashlights, who made sacrifices for the race, for women, for all our children.

The Wrap-Up

I understand the argument for equity in the school system. I understand the argument that every place of learning should have excellent teachers, sufficient resources, and genuine expectations for every child. I understand why people advocate for integration, for school choice, for charters, for vouchers, for greater investment in neighborhood schools—and why other people challenge those approaches or their consequences.

Those are public-policy questions, and they deserve serious debate.

But parenting isn’t a policy paper.

Parenting is looking at one particular face.

Your baby’s face.

And catching those eyes.

As for me and this house, my child’s eyes can never hold that type of failure again.

This week’s booklist includes:

The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story by Nikole Hannah-Jones & The New York Times Magazine

A collection of essays, fiction, and poetry that places slavery and its continuing consequences at the center of the American story—and provides essential context for Hannah-Jones’s thinking about race, opportunity, and education.

Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? by Beverly Daniel Tatum

A foundational examination of racial identity and the psychology of racism, particularly valuable for thinking about what Black children experience while navigating integrated educational spaces.

The Sum of Us: Adapted for Young Readers by Heather McGhee

McGhee examines how racial divisions have shaped American public goods—including schools—and argues that inequality ultimately extracts a cost far beyond the people initially targeted by it.

Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom by Lisa Delpit

Delpit examines the disconnect that can arise between educators and children from different racial and cultural backgrounds and asks what genuinely effective teaching requires

Writer in Residence by Rhonda McKnight. A struggling novelist escapes to the South Carolina Lowcountry hoping to recover her words, only to find romance, buried family secrets, and teaching opportunities.

FoxTale Book Shoppe, has signed copies of Rhonda McKnight’s books on hand.

And FoxTale Book Shoppe has a few signed copies of Fire Sword and Sea and my other titles.

You can also try one of my partners in the fight, bookstores large and small, who are in the trenches with me.

You can find my notes on Substack or on my website, VanessaRiley.com, under the podcast link in the About tab.

Hey. Let’s keep rising and creating together. I need you. That’s the truth. Like, share, subscribe, and stay connected to Write of Passage.

Thank you for being here.

I want you to come again. This is Vanessa Riley.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit vanessariley.substack.com/subscribe

Merriam-Webster defines dissatisfaction simply as “a lack of satisfaction.” And yes—that’s accurate. But if you look a little deeper, you’ll find another definition, a lack of contentment, a restless aspiration.

Aspire means to breathe in or out, to draw something toward you or release something from within. So dissatisfaction becomes this restless desire to pull something in or push something out—and that restlessness can freeze you in place.

In the writing world, dissatisfaction usually means that I’m staring at the words on the page, and they’re not capturing the story I know I’m supposed to be telling. Something has failed. And now I must go back, line by line, analyzing the bones of the narrative and examine every part of the story structure.

And for my new writers out there, yes a story or novel should have structure, a framework that keeps the momentum and holds the theme together.

In this analysis, I look at each main character—and often the minor ones too. I check their goals. I review their belief systems. I trace the web of their relationships: who cares for whom, who fears them, who hates whom, and who is silently holding the line of loyalty. All of these connections form the living body of the world I’m creating.

And then there is the lie. Every character has one—the bit of disinformation they inherited or bought into, the wound that warped their worldview. It’s the thing they must confront and be healed of. If that lie isn’t strong enough, or the character has drifted too far from it, the story loses its heartbeat. In my process, that’s when the words feel stuck. I struggle with word count. And I must figure out why.

That’s Vanessa’s writing world.

But in the real world, dissatisfaction hits differently. When I feel that restless ache, I have to look at the characters I’m connected to—the real-life individuals doing life with me or choosing to let me do life with them. How are we connected? Are we missing something? Are there obvious signs of hurt or neglect we haven’t addressed?

Or is it the circumstances we’re all tangled in that’s causing problems?

Let’s be honest: the world is heavy right now. Yes, the government may be back to work, but people are still waiting to be reimbursed for the days they’ve labored without pay. Folks who need food assistance are facing real disruptions. And Thanksgiving is approaching—a time when people gather to share a meal, which becomes complicated if there are fractures sitting around the table. It’s hard to taste turkey if you’ve still got beef with somebody sitting across from you.

And yes, Thanksgiving is about turkey. But if you’re carrying beef, that’s another heavy protein to digest.

The truth is, if we don’t figure out why we are dissatisfied, it will take root. It will grow into bitterness—and bitterness is a treacherous ground to stand upon.

Bitterness wedges itself into the cracks of your soul, sets up spikes, and ensures that every movement hurts. Bitterness requires a sweet form of medicine or self-care to heal—or it spreads. Bitterness touches everything you make, everything you attempt, and everyone you care about.

Thanksgiving is my holiday. I inherited it from my mother. It’s a big deal for me. If you follow me on social media, you’ll start seeing the sample menus, the tablescapes, the design choices—all the details I pour myself into. It’s part of my self-care—the joy of gathering: the beauty and connection of family and friends around my table.

But as much as we gather, we all must admit the truth: Covid changed us. Elections bruised us. Hardness, fear, and callousness ruined how we move through the world.

As we head toward 2026, I believe it’s time to turn a new leaf. To be better than we were in 2025. The first step is breaking up the bitter ground and letting healing in.

So here are my steps to stop being bitter:

1. Admit you’re bitter. Say it outright. Bitterness can’t heal if you pretend it isn’t there.

2. Identify the source. What is making you bitter? Name it so you can face it.

3. Avoid the triggers. Just say no to people and actions that put you back into that headspace of vulnerability. And if you can’t avoid them, minimize them. If you can’t minimize them, prepare for them. Pray. You never know when they just might miss a flight.

4. Give up waiting for the apology. This is the hardest one.We hold on to bitterness because we want that moment—where the foul person, falls upon bended knees and says I was so wrong. In romance books, we wait for the grovel: the moment when the hero finally admits how deeply they messed up. And yes, that moment is sweet. But in real life? If you get it at all, it’s a gift. And this moment is not a guarantee, that the beef won’t happen again. Your life must continue either way. Your goals must continue. Your growth must continue.You cannot pause your wholeness on hold waiting for someone else to gain revelation.

And let me be clear: forgiving and moving on does not mean continuing in the harmful cycles. It means releasing the chain around your own ankle. If someone has shown you who they are, you don’t need further confirmation. You don’t need to go back to the well, testing the water again and again.

Vanessa, you are so mature. At my big age of 21+, no I am not. Do I feel trifling sometimes? Absolutely. Do I want to complain the whole way through of releasing bitterness? Yes. But staying in that cycle only deepens the pain. And when I stay connected to that system, the person, or the circumstance, it will hurt me again. I refuse to let it continue to win.

It’s better for me and my soul to forgive and move on.

In Fire Sword and Sea, Jacquotte Delahaye has every reason to be bitter. Life delivers blow after blow to this young woman’s life. But the evidence of that life—her legend, her accomplishments—tells me she never stayed stuck. She didn’t wait for an apology. She picked up a sword. She fought her way to the next moment, the next rung on the ladder, until she became a pirate captain. And she brought her crew—her chosen people—along with her.

If you read Fire Sword and Sea and take away nothing else, take this:Success, particularly shared success, is the way to defeat bitterness.

And for Jacquotte’s example, I am not bitter at all:

This week’s books to reflect upon are:

All About Love by bell hooksA profound meditation on how love—of self, community, and truth—becomes the antidote to bitterness and disconnection.

The Beautiful Struggle by Ta-Nehisi CoatesA lyrical coming-of-age memoir about healing, survival, family, and forging meaning from difficulty.

The Body Is Not an Apology by Sonya Renee TaylorInvites readers to embrace radical self-love as a path out of resentment, trauma, and social conditioning.

Rest Is Resistance by Tricia HerseyA manifesto urging us to reject grind culture and reconnect with rest, healing, and humanity.

And of course Fire Sword and Sea by Vanessa Riley. Caribbean women pirates—Black women pirates join French and Indigenous women to sail the seas. Fire Sword and Sea releases January 13th, 2026. If you’re a librarian, vote for this book now in Library Reads in Edelweiss and NetGalley. Indie Next is voting now too.

This week, I’m highlighting Book People through their website and Bookshop.org .

Consider purchasing Fire Sword and Sea from Book People or one of my partners in the fight, bookstore’s large and small who are in this with me.

We are less two months away the January 13th release. Come on my crew. Let’s get excited.

Show notes include a list of the books mentioned in this broadcast.

You can find my notes on Substack or on my website, VanessaRiley.com under the podcast link in the About tab.

If you’re on board my ship, press that like button, subscribe and share Write of Passage. Never miss a moment. We have work to do. And I need You.

Thank you for listening. Hopefully, you’ll come again. This is Vanessa Riley.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit vanessariley.substack.com/subscribe

Originally posted 2025-11-18 14:10:00.