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If there is one artist who has had a very successful and eventful year so far it’s Mary J. Blige. The “Queen of Hip-Hop Soul” shut down the 2022 Super Bowl Half-time show along with Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, 50 Cent, and Eminem, she also performed at NBA All-Star weekend and now she is being honored as one of Time's most influential people of 2022.
Mary has been influential in Hip Hop and R&B for decades and has also empowered many women through her music and by sharing her life story.
She emerged on the scene in 1992 with her debut album What’s the 411? and had everyone looking for a “Real Love.” But during that time, the Bronx native was battling demons such as drug addiction and past abuse she faced. Her music reflected her pain as she often sang with so much conviction that you can hear and feel the heartache in her voice that many women can relate to.
At 51-years-old, it seems that the “Family Affair” singer is finally getting her flowers as the world is acknowledging what we’ve always known. Mary is the G.O.A.T. During her interview with Time, Mary reflected on her life before her prestigious career.
“I grew up in an environment where women did not feel good about themselves and then I learned on my own the hard way,” she said. “We lived in the projects. They put you in this experiment and they want you to survive. And I suffered a lot of damage from the hands of men and thank God I survived.”
She often struggled with self-esteem and talked about how it affected her. “You gotta care about yourself in order to take care of yourself and it’s hard for a lot of women like it was hard for me at one time because I didn’t love myself,” she explained. “I didn’t care about myself. I didn’t want anything for myself. I wanted to die.”
But when Mary found music, she was able to express herself and be a conduit for other women who experienced the same things she did. “I had nowhere to put it so I had to find a place to speak,” she said. “It was through the music where people said ‘wow, she’s suffering from the same insecurity or she’s suffering from the same abusive relationship or whatever she’s going through in her life, me too.’”
The Academy award-nominated actress reflected on her younger self and shared what she would have told her knowing what she knows now. “Thirteen-year-old Mary wouldn’t be able to hear this Mary. So I can’t tell her anything,” she said. “Just go through the process. It’s gonna be alright. I know it hurts but it’s gonna be alright and that’s what this Mary is telling her.”
Mary J. Blige | TIME100
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These days it seems that we’re all trying to heal from childhood wounds, and though I’m a big advocate for cutting people off – family included – I’ve come to learn how challenging that actually is. But also, it’s not always necessary if you have a parent who is open and committed to doing the healing work along with you, a mother, for example, who is receptive to her truth. But this also means you are receptive to the reality that parents are humans who often take cake crumbs from their parents and so on. It’s not to say that you have to accept piss-poor treatment because they’re human, but if any of us are going to embark upon a healing journey, we must acknowledge even the difficult truths.
This one is particularly difficult because I think so much weight is placed on parents to solely take on that identity that we come to think of them as superhuman, which at times can be counterproductive to our own growth. Healing can take place in a multitude of ways. However, one of my favorite methods which I’ve come to use to address the trauma amongst the girls I reach in my nonprofit, Black Girl Book Collective, is bibliotherapy. Bibliotherapy allows us to use books and the characters within them to encourage healing through solution-focused work.
With that in mind, here are 6 books to honor your pain and healing simultaneously – books that you can read alongside your mother to better understand the way trauma works to ingrain itself generationally.
1. Mother Hunger: How Adult Daughters Can Understand and Heal from Lost Nurturance, Protection, and Guidance by Kelly McDaniel
Authored by trauma counselor Kelly McDaniel, this book observes the patterns created by childhood trauma and into adulthood. The sometimes destructive behavior we exude in our adulthood is rooted in the trauma we received in our childhood. “Depending on what we each did to earn our mother’s love—what we end up doing is duplicating that with friendships, in romantic partnerships, and sometimes at work,” McDaniel shared on The Goop Podcast. Through this book and a concept called Mother Hunger, McDaniel seeks to minimize the shame that comes with having mommy issues and help those heal from attachment injury.
2. Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng
At the top of the pandemic, this book turned Hulu original series was all the rage. It tells the story of two mothers brought together by their children while centering on each of the mother-daughter relationships and how the dynamics vary based on intersectional identities – from race to class. With secrets, obsession, and motherhood at its core, the riveting novel will have you reeling with upset and yet so compassionate for the characters you find to be the most villainous at times.
3. Mothers Who Can't Love: A Healing Guide for Daughters by Donna Frazier Glynn and Susan Forward
Author of Toxic Parents, Susan Forward, Ph.D., expounds on damaging parent-child relationships once again but this time with a focus on the mother-daughter relationship. She provides self-help techniques to help women who have experienced pain as a result of unloving mothers cope. She also breaks down different types of unloving mothers: the mother who is overly enmeshed, the mother in constant competition, the mother who is a narcissist, and the mother in need of mothering, just to name a few. Mothers Who Can't Love is an insightful tool for healing and emotional support for women in need because of the way they weren't properly nurtured.
4. It’s Momplicated: Hope and Healing for Imperfect Daughters of Imperfect Mothers by Debbie Alsdorf and Joan Edwards Kay
This book doesn't simply focus on the trauma and complicated nature of mother-daughter relationships, it asks that you do the work through spiritual and therapeutic work. Of note, this book was written with Christian women in mind so I highly recommend it for those who rely on their faith in God, particularly. Whether you identify as religious, spiritual, agnostic, or none of the above, It's Momplicated is filled with gems that can be applied to just about anyone’s life if we can agree to “take the meat” and “leave the bones.”
5. The Conscious Parent: Transforming Ourselves, Empowering Our Children by Shefali Tsabary
While particularly good if you can read it before you yourself embark on your motherhood journey (if not, that’s also okay), this book brings so much understanding to the parent-child dynamic without directly looking at trauma. Instead, the book takes a look at the socialization that we take on as parents and how that turns into worry or fear for our children. But oftentimes, we place those fears on our children and while it may seem reasonable, The Conscious Parent shares the way ego, often connected to strong emotions like fear can stifle a child’s growth as well as the parent-child relationship.
6. The Dance of Connection by Harriet Lerner
Dr. Harriet Learner provides us with a great many scenarios in regards to healing ourselves and potentially our intimate relationships, the ones with our mothers included. She fills the book with casework, thus providing examples that help us to envision the way in which these solutions can be implemented. The Dance of Connection can be a transformative tool in your healing journey and your journey to your authentic self, teaching you how to use your voice and take up space without sacrificing the connections you value most.
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Celebrity News
‘It’s Called No’: Queen Latifah On Saying No To Jobs That Want Her To Lose Weight
26 May
Queen Latifah is saying no to unhealthy and dangerous lifestyles especially when it comes to her career. Since the beginning, the rapper/actress has always been a body-positive role model thanks to the range of characters she has played over the years that shows that size doesn’t matter. In an interview with PEOPLE, The Equalizer star opened up about taking on roles that don't compromise her health.
"Health is most important to me. It's not about losing weight or gaining weight,” she said. “When I want to lose weight, or gain weight, I know how to do it in a healthy way. So if I have to do something that is going to be completely unhealthy for me, then that's not the job for me. Someone else should have that job that's already there… It's called No."
Saying no isn’t always easy though. As women, we tend to please everyone and say yes to things when we should really be saying no. However, the 52-year-old mogul has a solution for that.
"I practice my no's. I go in the mirror and I say, no, no, no, no, like 20 times. And that's it," she said. "I need to be okay with me. If I'm okay then I feel like I can do anything. But if I'm not okay, I have to say something. Like, it's time to take a break, stop, cut."
Queen, whose real name is Dana Owens, is committed to maintaining a healthy lifestyle and prioritizes herself above anything else. "I think self-esteem is like maintaining a car. You can't just buy a car and think that you're never going to have to get an oil change, a tune-up, change the tires, you know, you have to do that," she said.
"And health is like that, you have to check in with yourself. You need a tune-up, you need an oil change, you got to check in with yourself. I have to do things that really work for Dana Owens."
Recently, the Oscar-nominated actress partnered with pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk for their “It’s Bigger Than Me” campaign to destigmatize obesity. As a part of the campaign, Queen will host a series of events to bring awareness and change the narrative about obesity.
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When I was ten, my Sunday school teacher put on a brief performance in class that included some of the boys standing in front of the classroom while she stood in front of them holding a heart shaped box of chocolate. One by one, she tells each boy to come and bite a piece of candy and then place the remainder back into the box. After the last boy, she gave the box of now mangled chocolate over to the other Sunday school teacher — who happened to be her real husband — who made a comically puzzled face. She told us that the lesson to be gleaned from this was that if you give your heart away to too many people, once you find “the one,” that your heart would be too damaged. The lesson wasn’t explicitly about sex but the implication was clearly present.
That memory came back to me after a flier went viral last week, advertising an abstinence event titled The Close Your Legs Tour with the specific target demo of teen girls came across my Twitter timeline. The event was met with derision online. Writer, artist, and professor Ashon Crawley said: “We have to refuse shame. it is not yours to hold. legs open or not.” Writer and theologian Candice Marie Benbow said on her Twitter: “Any event where 12-17-year-old girls are being told to ‘keep their legs closed’ is a space where purity culture is being reinforced.”
“Purity culture,” as Benbow referenced, is a culture that teaches primarily girls and women that their value is to be found in their ability to stay chaste and “pure”–as in, non-sexual–for both God and their future husbands.
I grew up in an explicitly evangelical house and church, where I was taught virginity was the best gift a girl can hold on to until she got married. I fortunately never wore a purity ring or had a ceremony where I promised my father I wouldn’t have pre-marital sex. I certainly never even thought of having my hymen examined and the certificate handed over to my father on my wedding day as “proof” that I kept my promise. But the culture was always present. A few years after that chocolate-flavored indoctrination, I was introduced to the fabled car anecdote. “Boys don’t like girls who have been test-driven,” as it goes.
And I believed it for a long time. That to be loved and to be desired by men, it was only right for me to deny myself my own basic human desires, in the hopes of one day meeting a man that would fill all of my fantasies — romantically and sexually. Even if it meant denying my queerness, or even if it meant ignoring how being the only Black and fat girl in a predominantly white Christian space often had me watch all the white girls have their first boyfriends while I didn’t. Something they don’t tell you about purity culture – and that it took me years to learn and unlearn myself – is that there are bodies that are deemed inherently sinful and vulgar. That purity is about the desire to see girls and women shrink themselves, make themselves meek for men.
Purity culture isn’t unlike rape culture which tells young girls in so many ways that their worth can only be found through their bodies. Whether it be through promiscuity or chastity, young girls are instructed on what to do with their bodies before they’ve had time to figure themselves out, separate from a patriarchal lens. That their needs are secondary to that of the men and boys in their lives.
It took me a while —after leaving the church and unlearning the toxic ideals around purity culture rooted in anti-Blackness, fatphobia, heteropatriarchy, and queerphobia — to embrace my body, my sexuality, and my queerness as something that was not only not sinful or dirty, but actually in line with the vision God has over my life. Our bodies don't stop being our temples depending on who we do or who we don’t let in, and our worth isn’t dependent on the width of our legs at any given point.
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Jamie Foxx and his daughter Corinne Foxx are one of Hollywood’s best father-daughter duos. They’ve teamed up together on several projects including Foxx’s game show Beat Shazam where they both serve as executive producers and often frequent red carpets together. Corinne even followed in her father’s footsteps by taking his professional last name and venturing into acting starring in 47 Meters Down: Uncaged and Live in Front of a Studio Audience: All in the Family and Good Times as Thelma.
And while the 28-year-old has indeed learned a lot from her Academy award-winning father, he recently gushed over what he has learned from her. The business partners sat down with Access to discuss the upcoming season of Beat Shazam. “What Corinne teaches me is to see the other side of things,” he said. “Don’t knee-jerk–a lot of times something goes wrong and I’ll just say it’s over. She’s like dad, talk it through.”
“I’ve learned from her on how to be patient. There were times when I was getting things wrong but naturally the way she is saved me.”
Jamie is also proud of Corinne and how she’s been able to successfully navigate Hollywood. “She goes to college, graduates USC, she’s been around this all of her life and so to watch her become–I remember live in front of the studio audience when she’s doing Good Times,” he said. “And I was so afraid because you know that’s live and it’s Viola Davis and she murdered that thing. It’s a testament to who she is and who she’s going to be.”
With the accomplishments she has already reached, it’s almost weird to think that Corinne was once considering using a different last name than her father. But according to her it almost happened.
In a Dec. 2021 interview with TOGETHXR, Corinne explained that she didn’t want people to think that she was riding on Jamie’s coattails and wanted to separate herself.
"I did consider, honestly, changing my last name," she said. "But as I've gotten older I've, one, made peace with people are gonna think things about me that I have no control of, and two, I'm proud of my dad and I'm proud of who he is and I'm proud of the work he's done. I'm proud of just the person that he is."
"Holding onto his name and being proud of my last name is actually something I've had to grow into," she added.
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