Note: I wrote this post last week, before she announced her pregnancy. #allcity.
One of the reason’s why I think we are incapable of letting Lauryn go, or understanding why she has chosen her family work over her artistic work is that we do not see parenting as work.
I have friends whose parents provided for their material means, they had food clothes and shelter, gadgets and toys, but moms and pops were always at work.
And they hate their parents for always being away.
I am not doing that, and I can see Lauryn Hill’s desire to give her children some sense of stability and protection.
People always say to me, girl, when you gonna have a baby- blahzey, blah? I look them dead in they face and say, listen, a child requires you to reorganize your entire life, and I believe that that child should be your priority, because as parents we bring them into the world. I also believe that women are hyper criticized for parenting choices, AND also given little support to be parents. So until those conditions change, I am cool. This is not to say that I don’t struggle with it. Because I do. AND, I am still cool.
How we think about Lauryn and what we feel that we expect from her is interesting.
I began thinking about this as I watched two videos of her. Once when she was twenty-five, the other from last year when she first started really touring again.
@:34 she says “I wanted them to have normalcy and privacy…I wanted a real life as well.”
@1:24 They are really not my accomplishments to be proud of.
@2:58 On missing her high school graduation.
@5:54 The music industry is a microcosm of the world.
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@10:49 Lauryn Hill makes me look up the word ethereal.
I noticed in watching these two videos that she says twice “I didn’t have any new experiences to write about.”
A lot of my blog posts are based on a mixture of experiences and things that I have read, so I can see her point.
I read a biography of Billie Holiday last fall, “If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery” and the author Farah Griffin explores why we know what we know about Billie Holiday. She also forces us to think why Black men Jazz artists can suffer from drug addictions and still be seen as a genius, but Billie Holiday’s addictions seem to always overshadow her genius, her knowledge production.
I am thinking about how we know what we know about Lauryn Hill.
How the demands for her to come back don’t take into consideration that parenting is work. That making music is work.
And that it was particularly challenging for her to be a petite Black girl with natural hair in a music industry premised on approximating blond, white beauty ideals.
The ability to accept Lauryn for who she is may be a barometer of freedom for Black women in this country.
Why the investment in Lauryn Hill?
If we acknowledged that parenting and being an artist was work, would we view Lauryn differently?
Can Black women breathe?
If we respected parenting and acknowledged its work and that first and foremost parents need to provide for their children then we might fall back off of Lauryn. She took time off to provide for her 5 (soon to be 6)children. That’s her first responsibilty. That who she owes her time to, not to us as the listening public. Raising children is work and with 5 she had her hands full.
Can Black women breath?
Please, please yes.
Love love love this. Parenting is work and as you so astutely point out, it isn’t supported or celebrated in the society that we live in. One of the thing that frustrates me as a woman is that I know that I have to make a decision that is perceived as either choosing myself (working while raising kids) or my kids (being a stay at home mom). I hope when the time comes I will be brave enough to make the right choice because I know my dominant memories of my parents are the quiet moments we spent together after my school day totally unrushed, and not how much they gave me materially. Thank you for shining the spotlight on this and presenting an alternate view on Lauren Hill, I love her.
You talk a lot about the work of women being devalued, so I’m not surprised how lightly motherhood is taken. Lauryn don’t owe us shyt. She does however owe her babies everything. I need folks to fall back and let that mother do mother’s work as she sees fit. I love her for it.
Just as I was typing my comment here, I got a tweet that said (in relation to me having and using a CrockPot): “You got a family. I got..bills.”
Really? And how are these unrelated? I suspect my divorced single mother of 2 bills are much more than his and if I were not able to pay them there would be much more devastating than the single childless man that said that to me.
Another example of the work and responsibility of parenting, particularly motherhood not being valued.
Loving this post. And loving the reference to Griffin’s text. Fame and love…hmm. Much to think about.
Nice post. Reminds me of a book I read by Patricia Hill Collins.
“Black Feminist Knowledge”
“Black Feminist THOUGHT” actually.
i appreciate this post and your entire mission with this blog. Lauryn has been on my mind for some time because of her message and her insight and the way her music has shaped my identity and thinking as a young African American woman. I miss her immediate presence in the music industry as a female MC because I don’t think anyone has anything on her, but we as her admirers and fans do quickly forget that she is a human being. It’s great that we can all connect to her but we don’t own her, never owned her, not even anything that she creates… but we should accept her choices and simply cherish her past contributions to our lives and be ready to receive whatever else she wants to share with the world without objectifying her or feeling like we have a “claim” to her life….