Dinner with Werewolves or The Witching Hour of Tots

We all toy with the idea of pushing our limits and you may do this ordinary act every two weeks or one week, depending on how much protein, zinc, and calcium you take in. Cutting my nails is a delicate exercise of grooming and bedevilment. Cutting corners at strange angles has always been a difficult task for me. Why didn't I have long nail beds like my Sisters? Such short, drangled nails without much direction and inclination to dirt accumulation have passed over to my Bourgie Baby.

The precautions I know I must take when cutting her nails are obvious because lately, I've included a bit of skin on the sides. Cutting her nails is like mine: rugged kertainized slats that bend back into the skin with the pressure of the clippers. Blood and hurt feelings are hushed over as I quickly try to finish. Nothing a Dora the Explorer bandaid can't fix,but I'm sure her day school friends will hear terrible tales of how this bad Mommy caused "the blood"...that's what I gather from the hushed quiet looks I get from them when I pick her up at the end of the day.

Sometimes we cut too far. Maybe we scream too loud. Put them in timeout too long or not long enough. Other times we enjoy ourselves too much on social outings and we try to squeeze in 15 more minutes when we know our tot's witching hour approaches.

Recently, I've been having a more involved social calendar and I always tell folks I always come with kid. Like a woman testing a new lover's resilience by saying they come with baggage. Or an employer telling a desperate new hire that the job comes with a challenging work environment. You just don't know how much deep excrement you're in until a little gets on your face. It's always worse when it splatters just to the side of your mouth. Figuratively speaking, of course...

People assure me it's no problem but there I sit...the Mama with the only child at the table wanting to jump into the grown up conversation but obliging compliments drift into banal discussions on the cuteness of my kid. Lest we forget about the other distractions of IgottagopeepeeImthirstyGimmeSome at my far end corner. At some point, someone should feel sorry for me and find me a babysitter on location and bless me with a complimentary bottle of their best Chardonnay.

But I know my seemingly good times are waning into ascending, thundering clock strokes. Entrees haven't arrived and its 10 minutes till 8...OK, pee break in the middle of dinner...OK, I'm back...food is cold, alright, "What did you say? Oh yes, the island fox is native to the Catalina Islands." The bourgie baby's eyes are getting a bit moony but geez, this conversation on the Catalina Islands flora and fauna is just too much to turn away from. And then the wiggles and clinginess begin. A tot's strength and weariness grows as the moon arches through the night sky. I can only imagine having dinner with a werewolf on the night of the full moon, but pushing the limit of any child's bedtime to soak up some night life with obliging friends is a dangerous undertaking. A scratch from your moony tot could give you the fever.

Just tonight, I celebrated the graduation of a dear friend. After a stimulating tot-to-adult ratio conversation, crayons broken into pieces in the bread dipping saucer, TWO trips to the restroom, and over-turned sprite, I still managed to get legal advice for my mom, a creative writing exercise, and to dole my game-changing, conversation stirring question of how all of us represent part of my dear friend's psyche.  It was good night until my tot complained of hurting feet..it began with the extraction of her flip flops...then the sliding out of her booster seat...and then the devouring of her cheeseburger (Wow! Didn't think she'd eat that much...RED MEAT!).  I knew then that the werewolf needed to run free in her dreams. Eventually she wanted to sit in my lap.

Thankfully, God has blessed me with an awesome tot who knows, at times, to tell me when she's tired and ready to go to bed. She whispered it to me. Then after 5 more minutes of pushing my languishing time with adults, the Bourgie Babe stood next to the table pulling my arm and dress. "I'm ready to lay down...I want to put on my jammies, Mommy. Let's go."  I love my friend but I love my sanity better. I must do what I can to avoid the werewolf's wrath.

This post is dedicated to my newly attained babysitter. Just remember to have her in bed no later than 8:30pm.

Feeling "Some Kinda" Way or Can I borrow #Dwele's horn section?

Since becoming a mother, much of my world view has shifted a tad. Being a motherless woman through the 90s and early 2000s, my womanist acrimony ran rampant against the ills of the patriarchy; the relentless hegemony on my people; the endless persecution of the Diaspora time and time and time again. My former Black, militant, grad school reading marathon rostrum has given way to weariness at times from how far we have strayed. My bourgie babe is growing up in strange times...from silence to leopard print...from the lone token Black girl in the Babysitter's Club series to The Cheetah Girls.

But in a time where I shield my Noodle from Nicki Minaj's "Barbie-face" and give her the fashion sense to steer away from 2T underwear with "Baby Girl" on the ass or the inevitability of toddler Apple Bottom jeans, it makes me feel some kinda way. Some kinda way about how we love our people...What are our intentions when we live in a world where everyone is out to get, rise, come up, win, exploit, destroy, embellish, fake-it-till-you-make-it? Dwele said it best: "Oh...what's your kinda love? Your some kinda love? What's your beautiful?"

There's so much that can muddle a mother's love as one raises their child, much of which is railed into the media we consume. I have been deliberate in my attempts to give my tot airplanes and Hot Wheels with her baby dolls, relish in the fact that her favorite color is yellow (TAKE THAT PINK!), that she openly lauded her afro puffs and braids long before lil Black girls had to wait on Sesame Street to tell them to. But thanks anyway, WE DO LOVE OUR HAIR!

But, I'm still feeling some kinda way about what my bourgie babe and what life has in store for. She won't be able to share with others about her "rise from the hood" story that the media loves to exploit because its not her reality. By then, the memories of Nicki Minaj's "Roman's Revenge" will be as faint as her career because she will have thus reaped the very seeds of her success. I want my Noodle to have her own voice, but still know that her voice shares the same melody as her mom's. The truth she spits is a homage to what I gave life to. If you remember my past revelation of raising myself or what I'd like to call baby mama karma (could be a Ben & Jerry's flavor), teaching the younger generation about heritage is more than just opening a history book and telling them to read. My life is that open book, and from time to time, we have to go back to the reference section in order to contextualize our experiences. Its a matter of teaching respect, a nuanced dance between telling the truth and willing to be wrong at times. I see many of my students wanting respect without learning the virtue of humility and silence. Like Nicki Minaj, they think it might sound cute to make comparisons to themselves as a frightful dungeon dragon (RAWR! RAWR!), but do you realize you are enslaved? Did anybody else catch that? Yet, she lavishes in the attention she gets: "Look at my show footage/ how these girls be spazzin’/
So fuck I look like gettin’ back to a has-been?"

Unfortunately, Minaj's blanket use of Busta Rhymes iconic RAWR does not suggest much deep philosophical digging...or did she even note Bussa Buss' homage to Peter Tosh in the same song...? Eh,...just put this in your pipe and smoke it:

Busta Rhymes - "What's the Scenario" by Tribe Called Quest
Watch, as I combine all the juice from the mind
Heel up, wheel up, bring it back, come rewind
Powerful impact BOOM! from the cannon
Not braggin, try to read my mind just imagine
Vo-cab-u-lary's necessary
When diggin into my library

There's that BOOM again...Once the upcoming generation thinks that we're all a nation of has-beens, then they think we are disposable. Wonder what that scenario will look like when they can't learn from the mistakes of the past or the very history that gave birth to much of the movements and genres they merely dabble with and exploit...makes me feel some kinda way...that leering I felt when I watched Tyler Perry's For Colored Girls, or when I cringe at Beyond Black & White/No Wedding No Womb's critical refrain on Fantasia, or the fact that what we all need is a little more love, a hug or two, a more positive way to ask for attention, and maybe an intense womanist roundtable with crudités and hot tea to get to the solutions of dealing with this generational dissension.

By pointing fingers and essentially, and unconsciously, yelling that we have forgotten to love each other, maybe we just feel we've been left behind, forgotten, lost, isolated, silenced...bullied, forced, poked, and pulled into our own dungeons. Lord knows Fantasia is not part of the problem; she's just one of the many stories we all share and do nothing about it. It all makes me feel some kinda way. Like the fight has left us a bit. Some of us can't even get mad over something like cupcakes gone blackface. They're just toying with us now...a dragon with no fight in them. Some kinda love...


I sure do need Dwele's horn section now more than ever. Hopefully we won't see anymore of his McCafe commercials anymore...the brother needs to get back to the studio. "Some kinda love in the Cafe...?" I do think that's what he said...

Still one of the flyest McDonald's commercials I've seen...

Let's remember, when we start to feel some kinda way about the world our bourgie babes are growing up in, we should not hesitate to express a "kinda love his [or her] kinda love so hopefully our children's, children sons and daughters will hear these expressions of our kinda love."

#forcoloredgirls who raise their babies on mother-wit when Tyler Perry is not enuf

My Noodle surprises me everyday with things she knows that I didn't know she knew, ya know?

Like the hippopotamus she identified on her cup (shouldn't I have explained that already)

...Or similarities between dead and sleep:

Noodle: "That man dead, Mommy."
Me: "No, he's sleep...wait a minute...How do you know what 'dead' is?"

..Or that "Almost There" is her favorite song from Princess & The Frog...from all the others...and yet, everytime she sings, "And I'm allllmmooosssstttt tttthhheeeerrreee. BOOM, Mommy!" she has to note the falling of the pillars at the end of the song, perhaps Disney's comedic rib-shot at this grown ass colored girl really thinking she's going to buy this massive property and be the queen of her destiny. BOOM!

Perhaps my bourgie babe knows the deal. She's got her eye on the man and she's going to stick it to him ad hominem style. Or maybe its just a catchy tune. BOOM!

That BOOM had never been louder when a friend and I went to see For Colored Girls, Tyler Perry's surgically altered womb of a tale.

I wholly believe in the power of the female voice. Our words, our songs, our love, our network: think double-dutch as an artform for my colored girls. It embodies the ties that bind us. The songs that keep us in step. The constraints of our paradox.


What I wasn't prepared for was the brutal, tragic, and bitter portrayal of women who seemed less victorious and more embattled than their beginning with the exception of Loretta Devine's character. She knew her lover-in-residence had run off with "a simple bitch with a bad attitude" but that didn't keep her from creating that vessel for which the other women could pour up a cup of mother-wit. Mother wit: the substantive nature of women who instinctually nurture from that part of them that is the recuperation of their ancestors - humorous, brash, wise - everything Madea attempts to be. These are the women who know that good bras, panties, and girdles are the root of our foundation. Can't have all your stuff hanging out or you just might lose it.


I compelled myself to want to really like each colored girl and love them fiercely for what they represented to our struggle. Red, blue, green, purple, yellow, white...but each woman was flawed, blazingly distorted, through Perry's own lens, all carrying destroyed wombs, whether it was destroyed by HIV, untreated STDs, abortion, infidelity, post-traumatic stress disorder, rape, and religion. At every turn, I saw a woman destroyed, rumpled up like paper and thrown in the corner in tears, literally. When does she rise? Was it supposed to be at the moment when all the women encircle Kimberly Elise's character on the roof and her manic declaration of "I found god in myself and i loved her - i loved her fiercely!"

Or Thandie Newton's cocaine chic portrayal of a young woman who should have been adorned in glitter and butterflies...and yet, all is forgiven and lives to be the life of the party because Mama ain't gonna change, now go to college!

Or maybe its Janet Jackson's (what's a weaker synonym for "stirring") confrontation with her down-low, HIV positive husband and she has all these sorries greeting her at the front door. Did she rise up from the ashes of her marriage or was it when she was told that HIV drugs have come a loooonnnngggg way since the 80s and she has to hope to live. I guess now's a perfect time to be philanthropic and learn to be nice to people since you saw your abused co-worker's children thrown from the window.

Or was it seeing Anika Noni-Rose's triumphant return to her dance studio, dancing in the spirit of Sechita, willing away her shame by her latent rapist. The voice behind my bourgie babe's favorite song and movie. BOOM! a woman who kicked viciously thru the nite catchin stars tween her toes. What I was not prepared for was to see this brutal rape. I felt a communal leering about the threatre. Silence. I felt my hands clench the arms of the theatre chair, my anxiety welling up...this latent rapist was upon us. women relinquish all personal rights when in the presence of a man who apparently cd be considered a rapist. BOOM!

Tyler Perry attempted to turn this beautiful choreopoem into something it was not, a man's portrayal and homage to women's struggles. This film needed a laying on of hands...simply allowing a wonderful assemblage of Black women to star in these roles is not enough. Their needed to be a laying of the hands on the script. With the last words being yelled to me at the end did not ring true for me. It seemed hysterical, livid, deeply morose, a realization made before the recuperation. Keep this in mind:


(from After Mecca: Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement by Cheryl Clarke)

I have seen several theatrical performances of this play and remember the wonder of the PBS American Playhouse production (1982) I found in the public library I worked in as an undergraduate back in the 90s. Directed by Oz Scott, screenplay written by Ntozake Shange, starring Alfre Woodard, Lynn Whitfield, and Shange as herself, this portrayal set the precedent for me. So imagine my confusion when I witness the clumsiness of the dialogue, the lack of fluidity between the characters, their words, and connection, the viciousness and coldness of the male presence. It lacked the communal responsibility of a woman's story told by herself and her reflections.


Maybe I'm a sucker for a linear story, the accursed Tyler Perry plot line. I wanted to walk away feeling that a woman's struggle and ultimate empowerment and joy is real. We are not just broken bodies with bitter hearts. Colored girls have a lot to teach this world and despite the failures and fallacies of the laden male voice on womanist subjectivity, we cannot convince ourselves that Tyler Perry is the "new voice" for Black women. I'd rather take some mother-wit from a brown, braided double dutch girl.