A Quote by Jamaica Kincaid
What distinguished my life from my brother's is that my mother didn't like me. When I became a woman, I seemed to repel her.
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My mother's father drank and her mother was an unhappy, neurotic woman, and I think she has lived all her life afraid of anyone who drinks for fear something like that might happen to her.
What motivated me? My mother. My mother was an immigrant woman, a peasant woman, struggled all her life, worked in the garment center.
When Eve was brought unto Adam, he became filled with the Holy Spirit, and gave her the most sanctified, the most glorious of appellations. He called, her Eva--that is to say, the Mother of All. He did not style her wife, but simply mother--mother of all living creatures. In this consists the glory and the most precious ornament of woman.
My grandmother spent her whole life working as a maid, a cook and a babysitter, barely scraping by, but still working hard to give my mother, her only child, a chance in life, so that my mother could give my brother and me an even better one.
He saw things in a way that others did not, so that a city I had lived in all my life seemed a different place, so that a woman became beautiful with the light on her face.
I do have one regret though. I wish Kathy Acker was still alive. I wish I could go swim with her again. My literary indebtedness to her is enormous. She's a more important mother to me than anyone can possibly imagine. In language I became a daughter worth a crap because of her. In language I redefined daughter, woman, I became a writer. Dora is an homage of sorts.
Not every woman thinks that their mother is a nice person. I feel like when you really examine a woman's relationship with her mother, any child and their mother, you can really get to know them, because it's such an important relationship in your life and if it's not positive, that's something you definitely carry with you.
When I was a child, next to my own mother, no woman that ever lived took as much interest in me, gave me as much motherly advice or seemed to love me more than did Sister Snow. I loved her with all my heart, and loved her hymn, 'O My Father.'
Every woman needs secrets,' her mother said with a smile then, her eyes meeting Sally's in the rearview mirror. 'Remember that when you're old like me, pumpkin, because the world has a way of making a woman's life everyone else's business--you have to dig out a little place that's only yours.
I wanted to be an independent woman, a woman who could pay for her bills, a woman who could run her own life - and I became that woman.
And that's the insult of it, how always it comes back to a woman being a "good" mother in the world's eyes or a "bad" mother, how everything in a woman's life is funneled through her body between her legs.
I lost my mother when I was 7 and they put her in a mental hospital. My brother and I watched her being taken away in a strait jacket. That's something you never forget. And my stepmother was like in the movie 'Precious.' I couldn't handle it. So I said to myself, 'I don't have a mother. I don't need one. I'm going to let music be my mother.'
A woman in the audience asked [Barack] Obama about her mother. Her mother was 101 years old and was in need of a certain kind of procedure. Her doctor didn't want to do it because of her age. However, another doctor did and told this woman there is a joy of life in this person. The woman asked President Obama how he would deal with this sort of thing, and Obama said we cannot consider the joy of life in this situation. He said I would advise her to take a pain killer. That is the essence of the President of the United States.
My mother's family is Christian: her father was a Baptist lay preacher, and her brother, in a leap of Anglican upward mobility, became a vicar in the Church of Wales. But my mother converted to Islam on marrying my father. She was not obliged to; Muslim men are free to marry ahl al-kitab, or people of the Book - among them, Jews and Christians.
The love between a mother and her daughter is special. A mother takes her daughter under her wing and teaches her how to be a woman. In order to do this, you have to ask yourself what it means to be a woman of today. How do you balance care for others with your own quest for meaning and joy in life and how do you pass on these lessons to your daughter?
I tried to avoid Mimi. Her presence seemed to call forth every rejection I'd ever experienced-the teachers who'd looked at me as though I held no promise, the boys who didn't like me back. Around her, I became fourteen again.
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