Mothering—new millennium style - Sisterspeak - Brief Article

Ebony, May, 2002 by Joy Bennett Kinnon

I am reviewing college catalogs and day care centers. Why? Because I am the mother of three girls, ranging in age from 2 months to 17 years old. I also have an 18-year-old stepdaughter. Lately, under the effects of acute sleep deprivation, I'm concerned that I will enroll my oldest in day care and the baby in college!

The sage Black historian says that everything has changed and yet nothing has changed for Black people. That can also be said for raising Black girls. The last time a doctor said to me, "It's a girl," rap music was in its infancy and Whitney Houston was a teenager. In the 1980s, pregnant women who wanted to breast-feed were encouraged to use the "cigarette" hold for their infants. In the new millennium, it's the "football hold." In the 1980s we "old-school" mothers would liberally dust our babies' bottoms with talcum powder. That's a no-no today. As my Sister pediatrician advised, "Don't treat her like a chicken wing!"

In 2001 as I labored to deliver my 9-pound girl in a hospital room that was bigger than my first apartment (and better furnished with color TV/VCR, stereo and bathroom), I thought about my grandmother who labored in her own home in rural Alabama with a granny midwife to deliver a 10-pound daughter. Family folklore says that by the time the doctor arrived, the baby was dead and my grandmother was nearly dead. As I plan my baby's christening, I think about that child, the aunt I never met, laid out in her white christening gown in my grandmother's living room as a horse-drawn hearse waited to take her to her grave. We lost a lot of babies and mothers in the last century. Thankfully, we don't lose that many today, but we still lose too many Black infants.

So much has changed in child-rearing since I last fed a baby at 2 a.m. But the intricate task of raising strong Black women hasn't changed. What we mothers on either side of the millennium want for our daughters hasn't changed. We want to see the hopes and the dreams of the slave women fulfilled--women who without education planted their dreams in dishwater and cotton rows and raised Kings and Queen Mothers.

We want them to follow Sankofa--to reach back and reclaim the strength, the values and the principles of our foremothers, on whose backs we stand. We want them to sit at the feet of their grandmothers and great-grandmothers, either literally or through books and the Interact, and absorb the values and spirit of a people who, as the great preacher Dr. Gardner C. Taylor says, were "crashed but would not fold; killed but would not die; scandalized but would not be shamed."

In the 1980s, I gave my daughters strong African names. Nekesa, my oldest, my "first fruit," and Imani Nia, which means Faith and Purpose, have names that embody guiding lights I want my daughters to have.

In 2001, I named my newest daughter for strong African-American women, the woman who wrote the poem, Phenomenal Woman, Maya Angelou, and my mother, Gloria, who is a phenomenal woman. Remember the women like these in your life, in our history and call the roll for your girls: Tell them about the revolutionary women like Sojourner and Harriet, Ida B. Wells, and Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks and Betty Shabazz.

I want my girls to read their Black Women's Bible, especially the gospel according to Aretha on R-E-S-P-E-C-T; the gospel according to Billie Holiday on God Blessing the Child who has her own; and the new epistles of self-love and respect from millennium homegirls like Lauryn Hill, Jill Scott, India Arie, Cassandra Wilson and Angie Stone.

I'll remind my daughters of their "Sister-strength" and encourage them to surround themselves with a kitchen cabinet of women advisors who will uplift and encourage them. Dr. Suzan Johnson Cook calls these women the "collective strength and responsibility we have to and for one another ... the modern-day balm to and for one another." My teenagers say we Black women are still too critical of each other; too quick to point out faults and too slow to support each other, praise each other, affirm each other. Gossiping and backbiting only delay our progress, sap our strength and derail our destiny. I hope to teach my girls to love themselves, love their people, and lastly to love wisely. Mary McLeod Bethune's lasting legacy to Black people was love. The kind of love big enough to build a college on a dumping ground.

Today's daughters are the repository of the hopes and dreams of their foremothers. These Internet babies, wired with laptops, PCs, and all manners of hand-held hardware that goes beep in the night, wander fearlessly into unparalleled futures. No less Sojourners than Isabella Baumfree and Harriet Tubman, these daughters march into a future we won't see, to fight battles we won't face and we must arm them to finish the job started long ago by the cooks and washerwomen, by the freedom riders and sharecroppers and seamstresses. Let them not forget how they got "ovah." Mothering in the new millennium requires mother wit with a dash of hip-hop flavor.