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She who mothered me - her husband's outside child
and yes, she was a mother hen | | |
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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.
*******
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.
*******
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.
*******
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?"
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