Tracy Brice isn't flinching as she sits behind the desk of her home office as her son details the crimes he's committed.

Across the desk in this sleepy Bear development, Michael Brice is opening up about the five years he spent as a drug dealer on the streets, during which he says he made up to $18,000 a month.

He started small, selling marijuana to fellow students at William Penn High School and says he soon ended up on the streets of his old hometown, Chester, Pa. – armed and slinging cocaine in the dark of the night.

Tracy and her husband, Charles, moved away from Chester about 15 years ago since some spots in town were morphing into high-crime areas. The idea behind the move to Delaware was to ensure Michael and his siblings got a better education and weren’t lured by the street life.

It didn’t work.

Soon, Michael, now 27, was making late night trips back north to Chester, where he would sell cocaine on street corners at all hours of the night as his parents slept in their Bear home.

Brice says he gave up dealing drugs about five years ago after the reasons for quitting began piling up: his parents held an intervention and threatened to kick him out of the house, he had seen several close friends shot to death over drugs and he himself had even been robbed at gunpoint.

Even as he says that chapter of his life is now closed, his gun-toting, drug-dealing days live on in his art: hip-hop. Known as Mic Brice, Michael has since formed his own indie record label, Yunion Entertainment, and released his debut album last year, the 16-track “Desk Work,” which is available on iTunes.

Mixed in his quick rhymes are pop culture references, like mentions of the Huxtables from “The Cosby Show,” Donald Trump or Mr. Drummond from “Diff’rent Strokes.” But there are also violent and braggadocious claims left over from his past life.

On “All I Know,” Michael raps, “I display money and I will be damned if I’m gonna let you take it from me/It won’t happen/I’m a shooter/Doubt my word?/Test me watch how I do ya.”

With the street life behind him, Tracy, 53, encourages her son’s music with unending resolve. Actually, encourage doesn’t begin to describe it. She works to make music contacts for him, pushes for media interviews and helps book shows for him. (He’s performed everywhere from Newark and New Castle to Chester, Pa. and Philadelphia over the past few years.)

Since she doesn’t like the hip-hop scene and avoids his shows and even his music, she doesn’t quite fit the role of his manager. That’s why he calls her his “momager” while she does anything she can to help him catch a break in the business.

“I believe in people following their dreams. And after I saw how passionate Michael was about rapping, I decided I’d do whatever I can to help him,” says Tracy, who co-founded her own Chester-based ministry called Christ Temple of Love for All People Church of God in Christ with her husband last year.

After being fired from his first job after high school at the old AstroPower in Newark – he was caught sleeping on the clock – Michael turned to selling drugs full-time, where he says he pulled in anywhere from $1,500 to $4,500 a week.

“It was so easy to fall into it. All of my peers were doing it and the money started getting addictive,” says Michael, who clocked 16-hour days on the street corners of Chester for five years. “I was out there all day and all night. It’s like a drug. You get addicted to doing it and the lifestyle. Why report to a job when I can make more money on my own?”

Depending on how much firepower he thought he needed at a certain time, Michael would be packing an assortment of handguns as he worked. Even as violence swirled around him, he kept on working.

“Just like everybody else, I had the mindset that it can’t happen to me,” he says. “Looking back at it now, it is like I was crazy. It’s a miracle that I’m here.”

One day, his parents finally had enough.

“What bothered me a whole lot was that he’s a grown man in my house doing nothing, running the streets and I’m like, ‘No, this isn’t going to happen in my house. He’s going to have to get a legitimate job or leave my house,” Tracy says.

What they didn’t know is that Michael had been thinking about giving up the life for almost a year at that point.

Even during all of his drug dealing, he would still attend church with his parents each Sunday, and his guilty conscience began to eat away at him.

“It was like I had a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other,” he says. “It was a constant battle. Every time I sold a drug, I would literally ask God to forgive me. Sometimes I even went directly from church to the block.”

The internal battle came to a head one day when he went to his drug stash during a deal and a snake jumped at him.

“I saw that as a sign,” he says.

Since then, he and his girlfriend have settled down in Elsmere and now have three young children. He is currently recording new songs for his next release, along with working with local rappers like Breeze and D-Pat, who are on his label.

He is also set to appear in the independent film “Iniquity,” directed by Philadelphia filmmaker Joshua Coates, and will have a song on the film’s soundtrack. In all, he is taking full advantage of his second opportunity to follow his dream of breaking into the music business.

Even though some of his songs tell the story of his past life, others look toward the future – a future he plans on keeping clean.

“I thank God for letting me see the rainbow because I was on the same boat/Moving the same coke,” he raps on the track “Mind Right.” “Now I got a different dream/Thank God for that dream/Life isn’t as hard as it seems.”