Wade needed the reminder as she navigated the changes motherhood invited into her life and while she navigated postpartum depression.
She writes about the experience in the collection: “It’s hard to love a stranger. It’s extra hard when change has turned you into the stranger.”
But more than just adjusting to motherhood, Remember Love: Words for Tender Times is about renewing our relationship with love as we grow, change, shift and adjust to the challenges of life.
For Wade, remembering love looked like accepting this new version of herself and extending grace.
“I realized I didn’t know how to love myself when I didn’t feel like myself,” she tells ESSENCE. “If I was moving slower, I was like, ‘Why are you moving so slow? What’s wrong with you?’ I was treating myself like I was broken when really I was just different and required a different type of healing and love for myself.”
From there, she considered all the times where she had to adjust the way she cared for herself. She has a section of the book dedicated to heartbreak, another to letting go.
In another, she discusses worthy rebellions and asks us to consider a series of questions: “In hustle and grind culture, is there room to love ourselves? Does my pace have to be the pace of the world? Because the pace of the world does not leave room for me to love myself.”
Wade hopes that the words found in Remember Love will be timeless, but she also feels that they are particularly relevant right now, when we’re all, as the subtitle suggests, feeling tender.
