"Red Table Talk" (new web series): Jada Pinkett Smith, her mom and daughter.
8:16 pm - 05/13/2012Here’s the full first installment of Jada Pinkett-Smith’s web series “Red Table Talk”, which premieres online this Sunday-Mother’s Day.
One of the topics Jada talks about, is the challenges of being a wife and a mother and trying to find that balance. While she’s assisting her kids with their dreams, assisting her husband with his dreams, and in the midst of that, trying to figure out what her dreams are. She discusses how she forgot how to take care of herself because she was so consumed with being a mom, and her kids were her world.
She discusses the messaging we receive from society, that to be a good mother you have to completely sacrifice everything.Jada points out that in the midst of seeking our validation and happiness, we look to others like our children and our men to do it for us. We lose our way and forget how to make ourselves happy. She stresses the importance of taking care of ourselves.
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Obviously, very few to zero people here will relate to the conversations related to dealing with fame, but the rest of the discussion -- especially with regard to parenting that fell short, resenting or forgiving serious parental shortcomings, how the world values (or rather, doesn't) the identity of a women outside of motherhood -- easily relatable. Thought it was a fitting treatment of Mother's Day and what it means to a lot of people, without the Hallmark-card-esque veneer. Was also striking to see three generations of black females discussing things removed from the usual doomed/dystopian way in which black and other WOC are discussed in the media.
If you aren't interested in being a wife to someone, or a mother, you're considered completely undefined as a woman so when people get that information from you they have this reaction like 'what the hell ARE YOU then?"
We're people. Why is that always a surprise?
Yes,we are people.
Today in my anthropology class all the guys were talking about how they want to get married because they want a wife to raise their children, cook, and clean for them when they are doing work. It's a perfectly legitimate lifestyle, of course, but I was greatly upset because I felt like they didn't want to marry a person at all, just a trophy wife. It upset me a lot, and that all the guys seemed to want this. /: