Becoming Our Mothers

MotherLearned Founder Darlene alongside second eldest daughter Bianca Vivion

As girls become women, there’s this fear not often talked about that we will become our mothers. We don’t talk about it, because the conversation surrounding mother’s is one of deference and respect. As it should be, given my entire life was a result of my mother’s prayers and my faith founded upon her faith. In pain did she bear us and in pain did she raise us. We know that. Our fear is not that we become our mothers as mothers, because they are good mothers. Our fear is that we might one day become our mothers as women. We already see the contours of our faces taking theirs, and after a while we begin to ache in the places they ache. Then suddenly you’re in conversations with the men you’ve grown up around, and they’re talking to you like they talk to your mother & assuming about you what they’ve assumed of her. And though you’ve looked around and you’re far from her homeland, and you eat better than she ate, and read more books, you begin to wonder if all you’ve accomplished is simply deviation from her means. Will I endure her lovelessness? Will her nightmares become my own? Will I learn to defend the things that kill me? You wonder “Am I my mother?” And you feel not only this terror in your curiosity but shame in your private hope that the answer is “No.” On this Mother’s Day, I would like to rejoice in the “No.” I see now that all her sacrifice— the prayers and petitioning for better life were a means to this end. She lived as she did so I could say unequivocally, “No, I am not my mother.” In this life I will do a new thing, a bold thing, a better thing. Because of all that you are, I can be all that I am. No I cannot do it like you. Because no, I am not you. But so proudly can I say “Yes, I am my mother’s daughter.” So I will do it for you. And I couldn’t have done it without you. 

Happy Mother’s Day to my Mama. You are the reason why.

-Bianca Vivion, Daughter of MotherLearned Founder Darlene Brooks