Be A Mother, Not A Friend.

{image via weheartit}

As you all know, I love my kid. I adore my kid. I think that she is the best thing since sliced bread.

However, I am not her friend. And I surely do not want her to think that she is mine. Nor do I want her to describe me as her "best friend" when she is older. 

Do I want us to have an open and supportive relationship? Absolutely. But will I be sharing everything with my daughter? No.

I think the "friendship trap" is something that a lot of single mothers fall into. The dynamic between a single mother and her daughter is bound to be different. However, the boundaries must be established. Whenever I hear a mother-daughter relationship described as "best friends", I always cringe a little inside. I want for AB to know that while I love her dearly, she is not my partner or my equal. There will be no clubbing or bar hopping nights in our future. I will not be crying on her shoulder about any future heartbreaks. I'm her mother. Not her friend.

As mothers, I believe we do our daughters a disservice if we blur those lines. Our daughters should see us as their rocks. This is not to say that we should be entirely devoid of feeling or a complete stick in the mud. However, I believe that we should not be sharing all of our lives with our daughters. Our daughters do not need to meet every gentleman who takes us out on a date. Our daughters do not need to hear about how much their fathers hurt us or how badly they screwed up. Our daughters deserve to have mothers who provide stability, authority and structure.

Be her protector, her confidante, her role model. Be her mother, not her friend.

In The Absence of Kinks.

AB's  hair is chestnut brown with streaks of auburn that only show up when in the right amount of light. Her curls are loose yet defined. They are the curls that the kinks of my hair long to be. Her hair can be brushed into subtle waves. When wet it will spring back into its natural curl but longer.  Thankfully, she will never experience the burn of the hot comb, curling iron or relaxer. I live vicariously through her and let it lie as she flips it back out of her face with a grown up flair that it is apparently inherent in those with blessed with long hair. My mother worries that AB will become vain about her hair, while I worry that I will become (or have already become) vain about her hair.

While pregnant, I wondered incessantly about what she would look like. What would her coloring be? Would she have her father's blue eyes and my kinky 'fro? Would she be a beautiful mix of the two of us, or would the concoction of the two of us come out all wrong, uneven, a sign of our failed relationship?

I gave birth to white baby with straight hair and big brown eyes. I deconstructed her parts into mine and his until she was no longer a baby but simply another belonging to be divided. I got the eyes, the nose, the smile. He got the ears, the eyelashes, the feet, the build. We split the hair - the curls from me, the texture (or lack thereof) from him. Her complexion has darkened thanks to sun and age; however she is still, and forever shall remain, darker than him but lighter than me.

Despite finding these elements of me in her, I still fail to see the resemblance. But then, I think about how I don't really look like either of my parents. There are no "spitting images" in my family. There are glimpses and fragments that  appear and disappear. Wispy ghosts of resemblances.

This hair gives her anonymity. I like that she can slide through cultures with an ease that I cannot. She has been mistaken for a Latina (Dominican, Spanish, Mexican, you name it), an Indian (her surname, apparently, is quite common in India), and a Native American ("Oh, she's got that Cherokee blood, right?").

This mixture of African, Irish and Italian has given her a worldwide hue. I imagine her with her long multicultural hair tied up in a knot at the nape of her neck, backpack filled to the brim, notebook and pen in one hand and a camera in the other, traveling the world. I imagine that I have presented her with a key that will allow her to traverse this globe and be accepted by all. I picture her slipping in and out of cultural identities as she currently slips in and out of imaginary play  worlds.

She is the physical manifestion of what I wanted to experience in my youth. There is no pressure upon her to be black. There is no pressure on her to be white. She can be a chameleon and choose whatever she wants to be. This is my unintentional gift to her. This freedom that stems from the absence of kinks.

{Originally posted on Black Girl Investing}

AB Pic of the Week

International Women's Day

In honor of International Women's Day, check out these inspiring and thought-provoking stories:

• 10 Suggestions for how to commemorate International Women's Day {The Washington Post} 

• Vital Voices Global Partnership honored 6 women from around the world who are protecting and empowering women in their communities. {Marie Claire}

• "Symbols and Strength": Tina Brown's editorial letter for the Women in the World issue of Newsweek. {The Daily Beast}

• The Top 100 Women in the World {The Guardian}

• "So where do we go from here? As a development practitioner overseeing the gender portfolio at the World Bank, I can tell you that International Women's Day on March 8th should always serve as a reminder of this vitally important issue. But there are another 364 days of the year where we have to take action -- both at work and at home, both men and women, fathers and mothers. This is not the time to be complacent; this is a time for us all to be concerned. Only if we can lead by example and 'engender' the attitudes of our children, will boys and girls become equal partners in the future. " -Otaviano Canuto {Huffington Post}

Because I am a woman, I must make unusual efforts to succeed. If I fail, no one will say, "She doesn't have what it takes." They will say, "Women don't have what it takes." - Clare Booth Luce

The Program of Serious Reading.

{image via weheartit}

One of my resolutions for 2012 was to read books of a more "serious" nature. (And by "serious", I mean more literary and more difficult. The kinds of books that you would find on a college syllabus, shortlisted for literary awards, and/or written about in The New Yorker.) I started off the year wanting to read harder books. Books that challenged me. Books that I was not able to finish in two days. Granted there is something quite satisfying about the easy books that you can finish in a day. They have a predictable story line written in a rather simple style. While, I do enjoy those books, I found that I read too many of those books. Simply for the fact that I wanted to add yet another title to the books that I read that year. Looking back on that list, I was rather disappointed in myself and The Program of Serious Reading (PSR) was born.

Unfortunately, of the 17 books that I had read so far in 2012, I would only consider two of those books to meet the qualifications of PSR. As a result, I decided that I need to be more structured if this resolution is going to actually be successful. I created a list of books that I intend to read in 2012 (in no particular order)*:

1. Bleak House by Charles Dickens
2. Middlemarch by George Eliot
3. Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
4. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
5. A Room With A View by E. M. Forster
6. Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
7. The Wapshot Chronicle by John Cheever
8. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
9. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
10. Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner

Wish me luck.

*As I reviewed this list I realized that I had only one female author and no authors of color. PSR fail. However, this is not an exhaustive list. It is simply a list of books that I have always wanted to read in their entirety and needed to document for personal accountability . I reserve the right to add/remove titles, of course. :-)

Book Review: Extra Yarn.

AB and I love knitting and we also love to find our names as characters in books. (i.e. The Doll People by Ann M. Martin with main characters named Tiffany and Annabelle.)

So, it comes as no surprise that we are in love with the picture book Extra Yarn by Mac Barnett. It is a book about knitting and the heroine is named Annabelle. What more could you ask for?

There are many reasons to love this book. First, Jon Klassen's illustrations are fantastic. Second, the villain is an archduke. My kid now know the word "archduke" and uses it while playing. Score. It's just such a fun word. Third, it features yarn bombing. That's right, adorable little Annabelle becomes a guerilla knitter thanks to her extra yarn and desire to prove a naysayer teacher wrong. Last, but definitely not least, it teaches a great lesson about honoring your gifts. You may look at someone else's talents and envy them. It may seem that their process is simple and ordinary.  You may attempt to imitate, but it just doesn't work. It doesn't look right. It doesn't feel right. Why? Because it's not your. Like the archduke,  you have stolen the extra yarn only to wind up staring into an empty box. Instead, find what makes you truly happy  and you have found your own gift that looks right, that feels right, that works.

Knitting + heroine named Annabelle + happy ending = a favorite book.

Garden Surprise.

{image via we heart it}

                                                                                                                                 

This afternoon, I watched as AB flitted around the backyard like a woodland sprite, gathering flower blossoms, pebbles, pine cones, leaves, and blades of grass into her basket. These were the ingredients for her famous dessert, "Garden Surprise". Every so often she would pause, step away from her "work", and twirl as fast as her little feet could manage until she collapsed onto the grass, giggling uncontrollably in the hazy sunshine.

I marvel at her ability to find such joy by simply combining nature with the limitless possibilities of imagination.

Oh, to be six years old again.