By MARI CHILES

To start this off I just want to say that CHOCOLATE STICKY BREAD IS THE BEST DESSERT EVER! Just trust me: once you taste it, you will agree with me, and you will tell everyone that you know that it’s your favorite.

I first learned this recipe at this awesome summer cooking camp [my mom has probably written about it] called Young Chefs Academy. We get half of our dinner, lunch, and dessert dishes from that place! This recipe is one of them.

Now I bet that at least one of the many people reading this is thinking, “Well, what if I don’t want chocolate in my bread?” There is a solution for that. I just replace the Hershey kisses with small apple slices. Easy as that! And if you don’t want the apples either, then there are, like, a billion other things that you could substitute for the filling! Peaches. Pears. Bananas with cinnamon. Name it, put it in.

Mommy, my sister Lila and I make this for special occasions, but sometimes we make it for no reason on Monday nights! If you could make a dessert this delicious on a Monday night then you know that it is extremely easy to make.

Now that you have heard this and your mouth is watering and you suddenly have this weird craving for biscuits and chocolate—or apples, the way I like it!—you probably want to know the recipe. Well you’re in luck, because I’ve written it out for you. Here it is (adapted from the Young Chef’s Academy of Sandy Springs, GA):

What You’ll Need:
*4 cans of refrigerated biscuits
*3/4 cup of sugar
*1 tablespoon of Hershey’s cocoa
*1 teaspoon of ground cinnamon
*1/2 cup of margarine, melted, divided
*1/2 cup of light brown sugar
*1/4 cup of water
*80 Hershey kisses, unwrapped [optional]; can replace with small apple slices from three apples.

How To Make It:
1. Stir together cinnamon, cocoa, and sugar in a small bowl.
2. In one microwave-safe bowl, whisk together ¼ of the margarine, the brown sugar, and the water. Heat in the microwave on high for 30 to 60 seconds until the mixture is smooth when stirred.
3. Divide the mixture into two and pour each half into two loaf pans.
4. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
5. Cut each of the biscuits in half. Slightly flatten and wrap around one kiss to make a ball. Keep repeating this until all the biscuits are gone.
6. Dip each ball in the remaining ¼ cup of margarine then roll in the cocoa-sugar mixture. Put half of the balls in each pan with the margarine-sugar mixture.
7. Bake for 40 minutes or until golden brown. Cool for 20 minutes in the pan then convert to a serving plate. This recipe makes 12 servings. Eat up and enjoy!

I took Mari—my first-born, my sweet girl, my baby—school shopping this weekend… in the ladies’ section. It seems my days of buying pretty little dresses and jeans embellished with sparkles and rainbows are numbered.

And now, my heart is broken.

And I have the shakes.

Because my Mari—my first-born, my sweet girl, my baby—is only 10.

Ten, dammit.

And I just wasn’t prepared to watch my 10-year-old daughter suffer through the gut-wrenching fitting-room agony of having to squeeze and pull and stretch into a children’s clothing size that officially is no longer available to her. With her little sister flitting about in one super-cute outfit after the other, Mari and I had to fold each of the near dozen pants I’d hauled into the fitting room and put them back on the shelf. Our march from GapKids to just the plain ol’ Gap was a reluctant and slow one; I did a decent job of hiding my tears, but my sadness was unmistakable: When—and how!—did my 10-year-old child get too big for a size 14?

She is athletic and active—a lover of pasta, but also healthy portions of rainier cherries and juicy nectarines, sautéed string beans and okra and even brussels sprouts. She’s not prone to snacking, and would just as soon drink water than suck down punch and carbonated drinks. Even at her tender age, Mari is conscious about how her food choices can help or harm her body, and so really, she’s done nothing to warrant being banished to the land of low-cut tops and barely-covering-the-crack jeans reserved for the more daring—the more adult.

No, this is my fault. My baby’s inherited her mother’s blessed/cursed curves—the wide hips and the thick thighs and the uber-round bubble booty and the tiny waist that render good pants fits virtually impossible, sans a paycheck’s worth of cash wasted on tailors charged with getting the clothes to fit right.

And I feel absolutely horrible about this.

And helpless.

I remember what it was like to have to bypass all the cute, colorful clothes in the Garanimals section at Penny’s and Macy’s and go down the escalator to the junior’s section with my mom; as I recall, she wasn’t too thrilled about the switch, either, and made a point of letting me know this by not-so-subtly suggesting I lay off the Oreos and do some exercise so I could get back into the children’s section. Mind you, I was skinny as a rail, save for the butt and hips, but it was exactly that, I think, that scared my mom. She was a black mom in America, after all, with intimate knowledge of what black men—specifically young black men—lust after: hips and booty. I think that in her mind, the bigger mine got, the more chance some little boy would pounce on her daughter, opening her up to a cascade of hormone-driven, adolescent problems—a literal ticking time-bomb that could lead to, at best, having to mend her daughter’s broken heart, at worst, having to change a grandbaby’s diaper.

Bettye wasn’t trying to be anybody’s grandma—at least not until her daughter graduated college, found herself a good job with a good paycheck and good benefits, and exchanged her “I do’s” with a man who was ready, willing, and able to care for a family of his own.

And so she set about building her own personal dam to stem the tide of adolescence: She commenced to doing everything she could to convince me that boys weren’t an option. By forbidding me to date. And insisting I stay in the house huddled beneath her and my Dad instead of out at the roller skating rink or the bowling alley or the mall with my friends. And by making me feel like my hips and bubble butt were a problem—something that wasn’t natural. That needed correcting. I can still remember the day she came into my room and suggested I walk backward on my butt to make it “flatten out a little.” I can still remember, too, how frustrated and angry I got when, after weeks of scooting across my rough beige carpet, the only thing I’d accomplished was giving myself rug burn and a really bad self-esteem issue that lasted way into my early 20s, when I finally gave up trying to hide all of this under big shirts, thick sweaters and baggy pants.

My ass was—and always will be—big and wide and round.

And there was no amount of scooting or camouflaging that was going to change that.

It is this that I kept repeating to myself as I walked Mari to the women’s section at The Gap—over to the sale rack, in a desperate search for size 0 women’s shorts with kid, not adult, price tags. It is not her fault that she’s got my hips and thighs and butt. And there is nothing I can do to change them.

What I can do, though, is encourage her to accept and love the curves God’s thrown her way, all the while helping her to hold on to that innocence. Nick and I are doing a pretty good job of it; when we recently asked her to describe herself in a word, she said, “strong.” This much is true: She gleefully dives into physical competitions with her precociously athletic cousin, and even sometimes bests him. She also loves to sweat, and run, and make her body do things that most 10-year-old girls already are too self-conscious to try. Right now, she’s focused more on all the great things it can do, rather than the problems it can cause.

I’ll help her keep her eyes on that prize—to help her sidestep the black girl booty baggage, even as her 10-year-old body does its not-so-slow march to Beyonce bootylicious womanhood. Thank God, she still enjoys wrapping herself up in the intricacies of a new SpongeBob episode and the wonder of erecting a fantastically colorful chalk city in the middle of our concrete driveway.

She is still a little girl.

And for this, I am grateful, even if we do have to bid size 14 a sad farewell.

My Mari’s always been the quiet one.

Not the shy one, really.

Just quiet.

The kind of kid who’ll sit back, survey the land, and make a very sound, very rational, very mature decision about whether she wants to be bothered with the other kid’s mess. More than likely, she doesn’t get involved. And I’m okay with this.

But I find that in her quest to be the surveyor/play the rear, she often goes unheard… won’t raise her hand, won’t answer questions (even when she knows the answers), won’t speak up. It’s more comfortable for her, you see, to just… be… quiet.

She’s been like this since she was lil’ ol’. I remember when she first started big girl school–kindergarten; I’d dress her in these super cutie outfits and put fancy barrettes in her hair and tell her she was beautiful and pump her up all the way from our garage to her school… “you’re fantastic, baby girl–the smartest little girl I know.” She’d climb out of the car with a wide grin on her moon pie face and I’d kiss those beautiful brown cheeks, tell her I loved her, and implore her to “be fabulous, because who are you not to be?”

I was reminded of this just this weekend when I attended Odyssey Network, an annual conference of high-powered black women who come together every year to network, bond, and have an amazing week of sisterhood; one of the keynote speakers quoted the passage from which I borrowed liberally to inspire my baby; it’s from inspirational writer Marianne Williamson’s “A Return to Love,” but was catapulted to fame when Nelson Mandela quoted it in his 1994 inaugural address.

Use it to inspire your babies, too… maybe even yourself.

Welcome.

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”