09/30/2026
Yesterday, our 4-year-old son watched his mom walk onto the field at Truist Park and throw out the first pitch before an Atlanta Braves postseason game. ⚾️🩷
That alone would have been a memory.
Then we walked through the stadium and found Hank Aaron.
I stopped.
There, larger than life, was a Black man who looked like my son.
So we told him who he was.
We told him that Hank Aaron became baseball’s Home Run King. That he accomplished something extraordinary. That he did it while facing obstacles that had nothing to do with his ability to play baseball.
At 4 years old, Deuce cannot understand the full weight of Hank Aaron’s story yet.
That is okay.
What matters right now is that he sees him.
Yesterday, our son saw a Black legend celebrated on the walls of a major league stadium.
He saw his own mother standing on that same field.
He saw her name on the jumbotron.
He watched her throw the first pitch.
Then he watched the Braves win. 🙌🏾
Representation is not only telling our children, “You can be anything.”
Sometimes it is allowing them to repeatedly see evidence that people who look like them have already been extraordinary.
That is what made yesterday so special.
Tiana was invited to participate as part of AbbVie’s Striking Out Cancer initiative with Major League Baseball (MLB) and Stand Up To Cancer. For our family, cancer is not an abstract cause. Neither is the work of helping more people prevent it, detect it earlier, survive it, and live full lives afterward.
Yesterday brought together so many pieces of our lives:
Family. Cancer. Purpose. History. Atlanta. Representation. Baseball.
Perhaps the moment I will remember most was not the first pitch.
It was walking beside our son afterward and realizing that, in one afternoon, he had seen his mother celebrated for her life and impact, and a Black man from another generation celebrated for his greatness.
One is helping shape the man he will become.
The other helped change what generations of Black children could imagine becoming.
One day, I hope he understands just how special that afternoon really was.
Until then, we will keep putting him in rooms, on fields, and in front of stories that remind him:
People who look like you have been here.
People who look like you have changed the world.
There is room for you to do the same.
Thank you AbbVie, the Atlanta Braves, MLB, and Stand Up To Cancer for giving our family a day we will never forget.
T, watching our son watch you was everything. 🩷🙏🏾
