How DMX forgave his mother despite being abused during his childhood
DMX had a troubled life, as his vast criminal record can attest to. But it all started in childhood, when he was exposed to terrible abuse from the very woman who should have been looking after him.
From a young age, X’s mother could be very cruel to him. She physically beat him, which surely is a contributing factor towards his troubles in school. He was expelled at the age of ten, and things never really recovered from there. By his adolescence, he had turned to a life of petty crime.
The abuse he received at the hands of his own mother disrupted his life from its very beginning, but, somehow, X managed to forgive her. “That doesn’t mean I don’t love her,” he remarked to GQ in 2019, speaking of his mother’s beatings.
He even acknowledged how tough life had been on his mother, showing sympathy for the woman who’d done him so wrong. Pointing out that “children don’t come with a fucking instruction manual,” he acknowledged how young his mother had been when she had him and his siblings before wondering if, maybe, she had just been too young to know “what to do” with her son.
The extent of his mother’s abuse, however, could be extreme. X laid out one heartbreaking story in which he, as a young child, encountered his mother’s open notebook. He saw that she’d written something down, but there had been a mistake in what she’d jotted down. Being a young kid, X innocently rubbed out the mistake thinking it would be helpful. He was wrong.
“I don’t know what she thought I was doing,” he reflected. “I don’t know if she thought I was trying to sabotage her or whatever. I don’t know what she thought. But she beat two teeth out of my fucking mouth with a broom.”
The thought of what could have led her to do something like that haunted DMX, with the memory of the incident clearly representing a deep trauma for X. But, despite that, he nonetheless managed to take a step back to forgive his mother’s appalling actions.
“I think a lot of people struggle with forgiving their parents,” he said on the matter. “In fact, I personally struggle with forgiving my parents. But until you learn how to forgive others, you can’t forgive yourself. You can’t forgive yourself if you don’t know how to forgive.”
DMX was a born-again Christian, and he is said to have read the Bible every day once he rediscovered his faith. The man was undoubtedly flawed, but his religion clearly meant a lot to him. Forgiveness, evidently, was a tenet he sought to practice, even in the most extreme of instances.