Crooklyn: How I Met My Mother

I don't think I'm at all alone in feeling a deep connection with the Alfred Woodard's portrayal of Matriarch Carolyn Carmichael in Spike Lee's underrated, but finally recieving its due coming of age film "CROOKLYN". The performance is both brilliant, and luminous much like my own mothers smile. Woodard's open window into motherhood allows each of us to peer into the inner lives of our own mothers. Through her, the long suffering, the emotional and physical labor, the "everything to everybody" -ness of a woman, a mother and a wife is made as transparent as spring water in clean glass. Her tender but firm touch with her children reminds me so much of my own mother that with each viewing I am absolutely destroyed by her death as if it were my own. There is a scene where all the children are fighting and Woodard's Carmichael is about to lose it. It’s a scene so visually chaotic, so viscerally combustible, its audibly distraught and physically stressful to watch…

I had seen Crooklyn before, but I hadn't seen Crooklyn until this day almost a decade ago. I had heard my mother speak of her nervous breakdown, but I couldn't see it, and sometimes seeing it is vital, (this is the importance of different stories in filmmaking). My own mother raised 7 children, and I could now see her stressed put out beyond all belief, drawn and quartered by a husband, several children, and the life she wanted for herself while holding down various jobs, and being an rock upon which my father could lean on when the weight of the outside and very white world would crumple his shoulders. My thought was not only “wow I can’t believe she made it", but also no one human being should have to shoulder all of this. Later, I started to ask my mother sincere questions about her life before and during raising us, as well as her marriage to my father, and I found answers that disheartened me to my core. Beyond the divinity of childbirth, ( a branch of their existence so often confused as the root of it) women are rarely afforded their flowers, and rarer still given space to live outside of this wish fulfilled conceptualization of their existence. In Crooklyn Delroy Lindo is not unlikable, he is a decent father, he loves his children, plays with them lovingly, when he is connected with his wife he is sensitive and doting, and I dont see a toxic man, but I do see a free one. He demands respect in a house he occupies much more than he lives in, shallow and oblivious (in ways he would not be if the roles were reversed) to the ways in which his wife provides that freedom until her death. Unshackled by the hypothetical burdens of having to be a full time father (when let's face it he had the time) and a full time husband that has to take care of a half time wife, he can obsessively pursue his dream so that he can perform the one manner of wish fulfillment men take on for women which is that of the unbridled material consumer. He sees that dream so clearly, so intensively he cant see anything else, but that is a freedom he is afforded as a man. Freedom to explore how to do for, love for, find for ones self , with regards to no other. A woman can join the journey, but she is rarely an actual part of it, and rarer still a joint decider. A woman from early on in her life is being raised to be a caretaker, a performer for others. Listen, none of what I say is new, it’s been quantified, researched, and spoken to ad nauseam, by Judith Butler's and Nikki Giovanni's and even Oprah's. Look at the role Zelda takes in her own family as compared to her brothers, a legacy she is handed down from her mother, due to her father and brothers lack of ,and worse still freedom from. Are men never to have children? Should those old school home economics classses only have a litany of girls taking care of eggs and baby dolls and pet rocks?

Knowing what it is my mother sacrificed for me in order to give to me and my siblings autonomy, discipline, sage advice, and most importantly the love she gifted to us in her own unique brand of artistic sensibility and pragmatism, I am humbled, and realize a debt owed. Not a debt of life-giving but a debt of solidarity. One that calls upon me to be as knowledgeable, responsible, patient, and giving of my time with my future children as my mother was. With so little but a sinewy body and a ribbon made of faith that held in place a lid on our exposure to the cruelties of a world, she provided exquisite lives to her children. It says alot that despite many of the horrors of my childhood, the various traumas, it is difficult for me to recall them. Some of that is my own repression, some of that is that my mother covered them, and ate them, a sacrifice far too many mothers make with detriments I dont think we've mined the surface of. It is from my mother that I gather my artistry comes from, and it is a reflection of the flame she so happily encouraged and coaxed out of me. Enduring a tantrum of tantrums when my brothers and sisters bailed on my planned stage play for Darkman the sequel as directed and starring myself. It was her assuring me I was enough when I fell to third place in a school drawing contest, pressing me to follow a dream many others insisted was no more reachable than the icy rings of Saturn with a wire hanger. It was she clapping the loudest at my first performance on stage in "Charley's Aunt". It was through her faith in God I learned the power of that sometimes far too maligned contextual spirituality, and the power of it when used correctly. I love my mother for all she is to herself, and all she allowed me to be. All the vulnerability she gave to me, to cry over that girl that didn’t like me, but not to blame her. To hate fighting, but understand why its important to defend oneself, and to address me as myself, even when I was too uncomfortable in my own skin to utter who I was, and that is what Alfre Woodard brings me back to each time I watch Crooklyn. The immutable strength of that bond, but also of the innumerable harms and sacrifices women make, because rather than reflect, interrogate, and improve upon severely outdated and moded ideas of Motherhood, we slap-dashed a day of appreciation on the map of their humanity to mark the arrival of another year of indebted servitude rather than egalitarian child rearing and support. A "Keep up the good work" slap on the ass, followed by ignorance to what it is they do, while the promise of them doing it mostly alone remains in tact. Instead of the sentimental dog and pony show that it is, Mother's Day should be like a collective bargaining agreement appointment. A day for us to recognize what it is that women have done over the previous year, and how we can be better for the next. A time for adjustment and recalibration that allows us to start making ground on the considerable crevice that exists between the lives of mothers and mothers to be, and fathers of the same. Mothers day should be time of accountability and evolution especially as it pertains to child-rearing that calls upon men to be cognizant and accountable to their lacking, through the appreciation of the women who either birthed them, or are birthing for them, or for any being who takes on that role regardless of the act of birth. A day to actually get to know your mother outside of her motherness, and to expound upon your journey with your wife, or partner. Dont make mothers day the equivalent of the empty gestures associated with Black History Month. It should be a solstice celebration of mothers of all kinds, and by extension the women they are, not the “phenomenal cosmic power in an itty bitty living space” we’ve trapped them into. Happy Mother’ s Day to all the good mothers out there, and to the rest of us, be better, aim higher, take this day to look at them as role models for your own foray into child rearing not inhibited by sex or gender. For my own, I love her, and on that day I have one of my own. I will embrace them and remember to pay forward the debt that is owed. ❤