Essay On Terry Mcmillian's Waiting To Exhale And Mama

When I was 12 years old, my mother began her extended relationship with the literature of Terry McMillian. Particularly, her books Waiting to Exhale and Mama, which for my mother, captured a specific moment in her life so genuinely, that I often found her crying or writing out her own thoughts during her private reading sessions. Watching my mother’s engagement with these books and Terry McMillian’s depiction of black female baby boomers was exhilarating, but more importantly, an indirect invitation to repair our relationship that was becoming fractured. Coming of age as a black tween girl in the nineties was difficult. Especially since I was entering a new phase of my young life and challenging my mother aggressively throughout the process because I did not quite understand what I was experiencing. Further, my parents were separating due to my father’s impending drug addiction and his inability to stay faithful to my mother. With all this stewing in our home, my mother and I became disconnected as mother and child as well as black females and began attacking one another; until we met Terry.

Mainly because Terry was the girlfriend that not only related to her, but told her story in a way that only another black woman could. My mother found solace and a community of black women that she could share her privatized suffering with because they too were also suffering and Terry liberated them the same way she freed my mother. From this, my mother invited me to also read these books, which I believe was her invitation for me to better understand her experiences, which she could not articulate in her own words. Additionally, it was an opportunity to dialogue; for her to prepare me for my entrance into black womanhood and for me to see her as a woman separate from solely recognizing her as the woman that gave me