Black women make the worst mothers.
Its true though! And it is only via acknowledging our universal truth and accepting fault that we start the healing process. Remember I say this as a fully black girl with a black mother and a black father.
So why do we black women make the worst mothers?
The truth? Overcompensation.
Rarely do you get a stable woman, with a stable man producing 2 stable kids. In any race. But more so with black people.
Black women are almost always overcompensating for something.
If you are a working mother, you shower your kids with material wealth in order to compensate for the fact that you are never home. Working 2 jobs to put food on the table because the kids father left/doesn’t provide for his kid.
If you are a stay-at-home mother you are spoiling the devil out of your “BAAEBIES” to compensate for the love you never got from your parents.
If you are a mum entrepreneur you are pressuring your children to be a perfect extension of yourself. All smiley happy brady bunch. We forget that children are not an extension of ourselves (white people do this too) and that their behaviour doesn’t impact on your worth as a person. Your 7 year old has a tantrum in Tesco? That’s fine. That kid had a whole day too with things that upset and triggered it and until you understand what pushed that kid over the edge rather than letting out your own frustrations, you will continue to reap the same results.
The need for perfection is way more acute in black mothers than other mothers. We’re already seen as “dirty” or “disfunctional” or purely sexual beings and as a result, motherhood doesn’t come natural to us. Coupled with a west African culture which is mainly practical based and not emotional based.
My parents fell into this trap for perfection. My dad became a minister when I was 13 and I have always stated it was a lifechanging event. Not for the better. I was robbed of my childhood in an instant. I became and extension of his ministry and as he’d often say “Caesar’s wife must be beyond reproach” i.e. because we were black in a white community we needed to be whiter than white so that people couldn’t say things like “black people were X or Y” I was, at 13 being made personally liable for the success or failure of my father’s ministry. Immense pressure to put on a child. I love children and I used to work closely with them. I became my father’s “eyes and ears” I’d remember names, birthdays and interests, I’d buy easter eggs with my own money to distribute, I planned really great Sunday school events, such as making Michelangelo’s “last supper out of cake and gingerbread men. As well as “prayer rockets “ and a last supper tea party, complete with cuddly toys. These were part of my personality. But they were robbed of me and became my father’s achievements and not mine because I was subsumed into his ministry. My uncle Claudius came to the UK when my dad got ordained in Blackpool. I remember it well. My uncle remembered the day of the ordination fondly, a moment of great pride. I remember it being one of the worse days of my life. The doom really set in. I had to travel 4 hours (each way) to stay in a hotel room with my parents (couldn’t afford an extra one as there was my uncle to accommodate.) to spend a weekend with people I didn’t know and had to pretend I liked and be nice to. I didn’t smile until I got home. I was miserable. Worse still, no one cared. No one cared if I was miserable as long as I smiled in the appropriate places. As an adult I can empathise, my parents too where under immense pressure to be perfect. I also consider that to not be my problem. Children are human beings with rights to self actualise, and that sure as hell wasn’t happening in a house that I was repeatedly reminded wasn’t ours, I couldn’t decorate as I pleased, it was a public house, so people could come and go as they pleased because after all, they were paying for it. Therefore I lived in a world where I wasn’t even safe in the 4 walls of my own home. I wasn’t able to put down the mask, ever. As a result I made some deeply disfunctional decisions in an attempt to escape my predicament (i.e. marry my abusive ex husband)
Because black women are often sexualised, we lack the tenderness to be soft and gentle with ourselves and with our children. Its another form of performance, this one is simply sexual. Have you ever seen Beyonce with her hair a mess and wearing comfort clothes? No because she’s a sexual being and so everything she wears and is has to be catered for the male gaze. She gone from “sexy woman” to “sexy mama” but hasn’t dropped the “sexy” Its boring. There is no such thing as woman who is turned on 100% of the time, that is a fantasy for teenage boys. We need to kill that fantasy.
As a result we are robbing black women of depth, if we make women one dimensional, we rob them of their humanity too. They are just playthings. So motherhood becomes one dimensional too. With special emphasis on “Looking right” rather than “being right”. Instagram is killing us. Because we have this massive chip on our shoulders we are far more performative than our counterparts from other backgrounds.
Motherhood, don’t get me wrong, is now an act. God knows how many women actually love their children that they see before them rather than the idea of them. Completely different concept. Take the faux emotion out of your voice, I can always tell. You will either love your child and it will be obviously displayed by your actions or you don’t and it will be obviously displayed by your actions, either way, that “Love” in your voice won’t fool very man for very long.
Next we come for the women who are trying to “Get that bag” at the expense of their children. 100% fail rate. If you try and serve both God and money, you will fail. If you try to serve both money and your children you will fail. Children remember time spent, and love felt. Not money spent. Don’t get it twisted. I was an extremely blessed child because I’d be taken to school by my parents. My conversations with my mum were mundane (no offense to her, we’d just talk about regular things as well as me being constantly scolded because my mum was in a rush, she worked full time and studied full time too.) My conversations with my dad however were elevated. We’d talk of the Tudors and the Greeks and Roman’s he’d buy me books to serve my interests in science and history, and better still, he’d read them himself to educate himself on topics that his daughter cared about. That was the depth of love. No one else I knew had that depth of love. I like to build things. Lockdown 1 I built a house out of air dry clay, hot glue ice lolly sticks and matchsticks (I’ll put a picture of it down below. As a result, my dad gave me powertools to help me build an even more ambitious one. Greatest gift ever. They’re secondhand (3rd hand when they got to me,) but given with love and I love them.
When a black woman has a son, if she isn’t “checked” by the father, it is often an unmitigated disaster. Boys, in the black community, are spoiled beyond recognition. To use my Great aunt Judge Patricia Mcauly (legit how we refer to her) they aren’t fit for “food nor sacrifice” i.e. we raise problematic man boys with a God complex and often unresolved anger issues. Mother’s compensate for the father either being abusive, or emotionally/physically absent. Mostly, these women are unable to teach these boys how to be men because they aren’t men. They turn their sons into their spouse, the spouse that their father was meant to be and when that boy has the audacity to marry… all hell breaks loose. The mother in law from hell. She believes her son is an extension of herself and that her grandchildren by him are her property. Unlimited access (not a problem) and unlimited interference (problem) are commonplace. Mother in laws often break up marriages because they don’t believe anyone is good enough for their son. Wrong. They don’t want her son to marry as strong woman, because that is an immediate threat to her status and her daughter in law will demand that financial and emotional resources be concentrated on her children. A man cannot serve 2 queens. So the mother better be the only queen in town. A weak woman is acceptable, but when the man is weak and the woman is weak, the marriage will collapse in on itself.
Meanwhile when a black woman has a daughter there is a completely different dynamic. My relationship with my mum can be best described as “complicated” She’s caused me a lot of pain. All coming from the pressure to succeed. I remember being 7. I wanted a kitten for my birthday, but we went to the pet shop and I walked away with a pet fish. Rosie. God rest her soul. I walked out mesmerised by this fish in the bag I had in my hands. A real living creature. When it came to the road outside the pet shop I got a bit too close and my mum yanked me closer to the pavement saying “Nor kill me, na you na me Ab Ope” meaning, “don’t kill me, you are my hope.” Technically a loving thing to say as to a child but the pressure of being an “Ab ope” child would scar me forever. Daughters are there to look after their parents when they are old and are groomed for that task. Girls are taught to be “Nice” rather than “ambitious” problematic for a naturally ambitious and assertive child. We are moulded into these little cubes of perfection. Perfect nails, hair, makeup. Amazing jobs (not one of my female cousins on either side isn’t successful) perfect marriages and perfect kids. Disaster, we’re all walking into a big mid life crisis where black women collectively throw away the designer clothes, the pretty nails and the wigs. Why because it is immense overcompensation for the fact that we dislike ourselves. We have a poverty mindset. We’re the Neuveux riche and feel the need to show it. Small dick syndrome but with Gucci. Why do 30 year old black women aspire to wear Gucci when 30 year old white women don’t?
I get it, mothers are the primary care givers and there is so much care that goes into just feeding your child, providing a healthy environment and decent clothes. But we have lost the magic, lost the spark, the care the tenderness. There is so much wonder in tenderness which society at large has lost but never so much as in the black community. Its so sad, because it takes immense personal strength to be tender. It takes no effort at all to be a dick. To let generational traumas go down another generation, but it takes immense strength to try and stop it with you.
Let’s bring the magic back into motherhood. Lets take time to wonder with our children. Lets teach them to be right rather than look right.
Lets teach them…
Grace and Courage.
Annetta Mother Smith.