It was Mother's Day morning when I sat down with LaShawn Croom — known throughout Baltimore and beyond as Mama Ngina — and what unfolded over the next hour felt less like an interview and more like a gift. As May opens with Mental Health Awareness Month, this conversation arrived right on time.

Mama Ngina's name is both title and testimony. Derived from a rite of passage experience during her college years, Ngina means "one who serves." It began as Sister Ngina among community brothers who recognized her African name, evolved to Tata Ngina — auntie — when she founded her school, and became Mama Ngina once she had birthed children and stepped fully into her identity as a community mother. "I've been called Mama Ngina for 20 years," she told me with quiet pride. "I feel like I empower that name through the work that I do."

And the work is vast. An educator, healer, Pan-Africanist, Yoruba priestess, published author, and rites of passage facilitator, Mama Ngina moves through the world the way her name promises: serving. For over a decade, she co-operated an independent private school on Baltimore's west side where children from underserved communities learned yoga, meditation, gardening, and horsemanship. Then breast cancer arrived, and everything shifted.

Mama Ngina teaches emotional regulation to a group of students using aromatherapy.

Given 18 months to live by conventional medicine, she chose a radical path: holistic healing, dietary transformation, and a months-long sojourn in Togo. "I just let Africa heal me," she said. "I sat in the sun. I ate fresh fruit. I let the mamas serve me." It has now been 14 years. She is cancer-free.

This is where the mental health thread pulls tightest. Mama Ngina describes her cancer journey not as a medical crisis alone, but as an invitation to finally turn toward herself — something the survival mode of her childhood had never allowed. On her own at 13, a ward of the state navigating high school while working at the Renaissance Hotel, she became an expert at endurance. But endurance, she learned, is not the same as thriving. "I was trudging through things because I was used to survival mode," she reflected. "I had to learn to thrive."

She also carries a moment from years earlier — one she revisited with chills during our conversation. As a teenager standing at the edge of a MARTA platform in Atlanta, she had considered stepping in front of the train. In that instant, an elder woman approached and said simply: "Remember who you are." Then walked away. Mama Ngina stepped back. She got on the train. Years later, facing cancer, those same words returned as an internal anchor. This is what mental health awareness looks like in the lived experience of Black women: not a clinical chart, but a stranger's voice, a platform edge, a choice to stay.

Working with Teen Mom. Own Your Ase and the Bloom Project hosted a surprise community baby shower and parenting class.

Today, Mama Ngina channels that survival — and that healing — into her role as a Sexual Health Ambassador with RnD Associates. Through that work, she has hosted Women's Health and Wellness Summits at Morgan State University, bringing together over 300 young women for honest conversations about PEP and PrEP, consent, and healthy relationships — conversations that, for many, were the first of their kind. She has traveled to Baltimore City high schools where the Department of Health provided on-site STI testing and created peer education curricula that empower young people to become advocates themselves.

She has also navigated the particular challenge of bringing sexual health conversations into culturally African-centered spaces, facilitating sessions where men spoke for the first time about childhood sexual trauma and learned that prevention tools like PrEP are not limited to any one community. "Clarity came about," she said. "And it was contentious. And it was so good."

The thread connecting mental health and sexual health, Mama Ngina says, requires the same foundation: safety, honesty, and the right to know your own story.

At the close of our conversation, I reminded her of the woman on the train and the meaning of her name. "What a perfect affirmation on this Mother's Day," she said softly.

Indeed, it was.

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Michelle Petties is a TEDx speaker, Food Story coach, and the award-winning author of the memoir Leaving Large: The Stories of a Food Addict. After gaining and losing 700 pounds, Michelle discovered the secret to overcoming stress and emotional overeating. Her free workbook, Mind Over Meals, reveals her core principles for losing weight and keeping it off.