Friday, May 1, 2015

Mothers' Day



She who mothered me - her husband's outside child
and yes, she was a mother hen





A very long time ago, when I was at CPTC, I spearheaded a video program of readings to celebrate Mother's Day. At the time we were locked into JBC and they had to approve the program before airing it. The program had several writers reading both poetry and prose. I remember items by Kamau Brathwaite and Velma Pollard. And M'bala, (early days for him), accompanied by his drum, did a thought provoking piece about an old woman sitting at the street corner, abandoned, was somebody's mother, too.

One of the JBC officials who had to vet the program took umbrage at this. Mothers' Day, she said is about celebrating mothers and nice things about mothers. So they didn’t carry that segment.

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For the brief period that I attended what was then called elementary school, in Kingston, the easiest way to get into a fight was to "tell somebody about their mother" (say something bad about a student's mother), even if that mother was obviously ill-treating that child).

There is something sacred about that person who carried you for nine months into life and cared for you through the stages when you couldn't take care of yourself.

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Actually, there are all kinds of mothers in this world – mothers are people too and feel all the emotions that people do – not only love but the burdens, the stress, the anger, depression, and they sometimes snap, sometimes they can't carry on, sometimes they do bad things to their children. Enter the mother who didn’t give birth, but takes in a child and does all the caring a real mother could give - sometimes more.

So, mothering is about more than merely giving birth. After all, when 'THEY' finally produce a new life outside of a parent human being, somebody is going to have to take on the role of mothering or 'humans' will be even more neurotic than they are now.

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My new ebook on amazon 'My Three Moms' is a novel in which Destiny tells how she found out what 'mothering' meant, after the devastation of discovering that the person she thought was her 'real' mother was not. Her journey to discovery is hampered by determined kidnappers, and having to adjust to different lifestyles, but in the end she finds the answer to her question – "Who is my mother?"

Remember you don’t have to own a kindle device to read the amazon ebooks. There is a FREE app for your computer and other devices. Information on download is on the page Get your copy of My Three Moms here: 
www.amazon.com/My-Three-Moms-Hazel-Campbell-ebook/dp/B00UMAA300 


www.amazon.com/My-Three-Moms-Hazel-Campbell-ebook/dp/B00UMAA300
www.amazon.com/My-Three-Moms-Hazel-Campbell-ebook/dp/B00UMAA300


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