50 Cent says his mom used to pack toys into his socks to provide a little added self-defense for him during childhood fights. You may have seen a highly similar tactic employed in a prison movie (and hopefully not a real prison) at some point in your life.
“I got bumped around a lot in the park but I was more afraid of my mom than the people I got bumped around [by] because I could not escape her,” he said. “She being a single mom at that point — she was everything.”
She ended up dying in a fire when he was only eight-years-old.
50, who recalled that memory while talking to Page Six, added that his mom’s ingenuity (that works) served as the inspiration for a scene in the first episode of the Power spinoff Power Book III: Raising Kanan.
“[There’s a scene] from the first episode where [titular character] Kanan gets beat up and he goes back in the house and his mother puts the toys in the socks,” 50 said to the website. “That really happened; that was from my life.”
Recalling more on the relationship between he and his mom, he said that “[s]he was my mom and my dad and she was tough so I didn’t know when it was OK to be emotional and when it wasn’t. She would look at me on the floor [when he was distressed] and say, ‘Get up — what you over there crying for acting like a little girl [for].’
“She would get mad at you and you say, ‘Oh shit — it’s not OK to be hurt this time.’ OK, so let me get up. So she determined when she should be soft and when she should be firm.”
You can see Power Book III: Raising Kanan on Sundays on Starz.
