I Met the Girl Before Mrs. Garrett
A Mother’s Day reflection on community, history, and discovering who my mother was before she became “Mrs. Garrett.”
My mother was a public school teacher in Richmond, Virginia for more than thirty years.
And for as long as I can remember, strangers have been stopping me to tell me some version of the same thing:
“You are so lucky to have Mrs. Garrett as your mother.”
Former students. Parents. Teachers. Adults who still called her “Mrs. Garrett” twenty years later.
People would light up when they said her name.
Some would laugh before telling me she was their favorite teacher. Others would describe how strict she was before immediately following it with how much they loved her.
As her daughter, I grew up inside her impact.
So none of that surprised me.
What surprised me was realizing there was an entire version of my mother I had never fully met and who I desperately wanted to meet.
Not Mrs. Garrett, the legendary teacher.
Not the mentor who spent decades convincing children they were capable of more than they believed.
Not the woman who raised me to believe I could someday work with Beyoncé and LeBron James if I wanted to.
I met the young Black girl who would eventually become her.
And I met her after she was gone.
My mother died on October 25, 2024.
And like a lot of people who lose someone central to their life, I thought I had asked enough questions while she was here.
I thought I understood her.
Not perfectly. But enough.
I understood her discipline. Her intellect. Her awareness. Her ability to command a room without needing to dominate it.
I understood that she had somehow managed to raise an emotional, hyperactive, procrastinating child like me while simultaneously making me believe I could become anything.
Even as an adult, she used to say things like:
“When you work with Beyoncé and LeBron, tell them your mother said….”
And I would roll my eyes every single time because the idea felt absurd.
But that was her gift.
She spoke to people as if their potential was already visible.
Looking back, I realize she did that with everyone.
Her students.
Her family.
Her church community.
Complete strangers sometimes.
A few weeks ago, I attended a Black history event in Powhatan County, Virginia, where my mother grew up, put on by the Powhatan African American Cultural Arts Museum. One of my very best childhood friends and the founder of PAACAM simply texted me the flyer below in late March, and since I was free that weekend, I agreed to attend to support. No biggie, right?
I thought I was walking into a small community program.
Something reflective and educational.
Instead, I walked into my mother’s civil rights history.
The event focused on the forced integration of Powhatan County schools in the 1960s.
My mother would have been around eleven years old when the major court decisions were happening and entering her teenage years as the lived reality of integration reshaped her school experience.
She was not a grown woman reflecting on history from a distance.
She was a child inside it.
And the people sitting on the panel — telling these stories publicly for the first time in this way — were her classmates.
For two and a half hours, I sat in a room listening to stories I had wanted from my mother for years.
Stories I now understand she may never have been fully able to tell.
Because this wasn’t just “schools integrated.”
Black families in Powhatan County, including my mother’s community, had to fight for the county to comply with Brown v. Board of Education.
Families were forced into impossible decisions about where to send their children, how to protect them, and what risks they were willing to take in a county fighting integration every step of the way.
I knew the outline of this history.
But I did not know the emotional weight of it.
Not like this.
And then, in the middle of the panel, the moderator paused to recognize someone important to her and to so many others in the room. The moderator, Angie Miles, mentioned that one of the most important teachers in her life had been in the same graduating class as the panelists, but she had passed away and couldn’t be there.
She started fumbling through my mother’s maiden name.
And before I could stop myself, I shouted from the audience:
“Her maiden name was Bartlett.”
My mother.
Mrs. Garrett.
And something in me held together and came apart at the same time.
Suddenly, the room wasn’t just discussing history.
It was discussing her.
The woman speaking in the clip above, Dale, is a very close family friend whom my family (all of us, which is rare) adore.
After the program finished, People started telling me who my mother had been to them long before she ever became “Mrs. Garrett” to hundreds of Richmond students.
Not just as a classmate.
But as a leader.
A mentor.
A friend.
A force.
An intellectual competitor.
One woman looked at me and described how much my mother had shaped her life.
Others laughed as they described her style, her brilliance, her presence.
And more than one person made it very clear that my mother had, in fact, been what we would today describe as a general bad bitch.
Honestly, that felt historically accurate.
Because what I realized sitting in that room was that I had spent my entire life knowing the fully formed version of my mother.
The accomplished version.
The respected version.
The teacher.
The youth ministry and junior missionary church leader.
But I had never fully met the girl who became her.
“I spent my entire life knowing Mrs. Garrett. I had never met the girl who became her.”
The teenage girl navigating forced integration in Virginia.
The girl who had once been on the other side of all those expectations.
The girl who was supposed to be valedictorian of her segregated school, Huguenot, before integration reshaped everything, and she ended up as salutatorian, because racism has always had a way of reshaping outcomes.
My mother never stopped reminding people of that fact, because her petty had no time limit.
The girl who carried herself with enough intelligence, confidence, and presence that decades later, people still spoke about her with admiration.
And suddenly, so many things about my mother started making sense.
Her awareness.
Her standards.
Her refusal to shrink herself.
Her insistence that we dream bigger than our circumstances.
The way she could walk into almost any room and instinctively understand its dynamics.
I left that event realizing something painful and beautiful at the same time:
There are parts of our parents we don’t fully meet until after they’re gone.
Not because we didn’t love them enough.
Not because we didn’t ask enough questions.
But some stories are too heavy, too complicated, or too deeply embedded in survival to be easily retold.
Instead, those stories live in other people.
In memories.
In rooms like that.
Waiting for someone to say a name out loud.
Mother’s Day felt different for me this year.
Not just because the great Patsy Garrett is gone. Not just because this is another Mother’s Day without Ma.
But because I now understand more clearly what shaped her before she ever shaped me.
I spent my entire life hearing how lucky I was to have Mrs. Garrett as my mother.
And they were right.
What I didn’t understand until recently was how lucky the world was to have her long before she ever became my mom.
Everything I am and will be exists in the context of my mother.
And Mother’s Day 2026, more than anything, I’m grateful I got to be her daughter.
