A Mama's Boy

An excerpt from the Chicago Sun-Times - 

I’m a mama’s boy, no apologies.  I was Mama’s joy. Manchild in the Promised Land.

By John W. Fountain

I’m a mama’s boy. This hasn’t always been easy to admit. But those late nights when I saw her sit, staring out the bedroom window, trying to hide the salty tears that fell like midnight rain for years and stained her pillow.

I could always plainly see her pain, though I was just a boy with no answers for the bitter pill called Life. Or for those ill men who are cancer. Or those men who failed her. I always felt her pain, her strain, her drain.

I’m a mama’s boy, though I bear my father’s name.

I was Mama’s joy. Manchild in the Promised Land. Eating from Mama’s tender brown hands as Mama sought to devise a plan to raise a Black boy to be a decent Black man.

A mother at 17, she went back to high school to graduate. I stare at her picture in cap and gown with admiration that only punctuates: I’m a mama’s boy.

Mama’s boy on those 60’s early sun-kissed mornings, when me and Mama danced. And she held my hand. And I held hers, as we twisted and mash-potatoed. Danced the Watusi and “the bird.”

“Love” was the word.

https://chicago.suntimes.com/columnists/2021/1/29/22257026/john-w-fountain-mothers-and-sons-chicago-west-side