In this, my 6th year of motherhood, I am celebrating my power to radically design a life for my child that does not conform to anyone else’s standards or conventions. I am crafting a life that resists the call to pass on legacies of unexamined dysfunction and empty rituals embedded in played-out cultural traditions shaped and sullied by the whims of industry, technology, politics and religion. Shrugged off and unquestioned… because, well, it’s always been done that way.
Long before I imagined myself a parent, I stood in line at a roti shop on Washington Avenue in Brooklyn and chewed on the island wisdom I overheard from an elder:
Yuh doh raise chil’run. Yuh raise cattle and corn. Yuh teach chil’run an lead ’em…
I recall nothing else about that moment — what sparked his statement, who he was speaking to (if anyone at all…because in my experience with my…
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