Moms, They Aren’t Your Little Men. They Are Your Sons
Note to Jim Jones, your mother tongue kissing you to teach you how to kiss girls is beyond weird and definitely in the incest range.
“She told me how to tongue kiss when I was younger….she showed me with her mouth…that’s my mother…remember my moms was 17…she’s a baby”
Jim Jones seemed to fall deeper and deeper with each response on his interview with Angela Yee on her podcast Lip Service. Did he hear himself? Does he know what he’s actually saying? Jones seemed to catch on to the awkwardness of his answer by reading the room and the faces of the fellow women in the room. Jones quickly talked about his mother giving birth to him at seventeen and how young parents sometimes treat their children as siblings or friends versus establishing the parental boundaries needed for a healthy parent-child relationship. Yee tries to save Jones by asking if the rap artist thought tongue kissing was disgusting to him the first time he experienced it. As a listener and podcaster myself I grasp what she’s trying to do; trying to give Jones the room to say it was awkward and weird and that his mother maybe wasn’t in the right. Instead, Jones replies with a smile that the first time he kissed a girl, not his mother, it was weird; implying that tongue kissing your mom at ten years old was completely normal.
I had to watch the replay clip several times on The Shaderoom’s Twitter page just to open my heart past my initial shock. But why am I shocked? As a Black community, we often joke about incestuous behavior amongst the royal families of Europe or in the backwoods of a Louisiana swamp between those of a certain caucasian race. But rarely are we ever willing to accept the very unhealthy dynamic that often exists between Black moms and their sons; especially single Black moms and their sons.
If you’re dating a Black guy and his mother is alive you’ll have at least a second of panic wondering if his mother will be the main woman of the house or you. Whether she lives there or not, or pays bills or not. Undermining your decisions and thoughts as a partner because that’s HER son and she gave birth to him which will always in her eyes give her more precedence than you. If the father is absent in the home it’s common to hear a Black mom refer to her son as her ‘little man’ or the ‘man of the house ‘. Giving him the freedom in that house that a man would have to earn. Allowing a son to keep tabs on his mother’s decisions for the house, record her comings and goings, and discuss ‘grown business’ like relationship woes.
Listen, I get it. I was raised in an off-and-on single mom home. I will never be able to fathom the pain she experienced creating children with another being yet made solely responsible for caring for these children. Even though I am femme and do not identify as a man, as the oldest I at times had to put on the pants. When my mother couldn’t afford things, I had to figure out how to pay bills. My mother couldn’t grill worth a damn so I began to be responsible for the BBQ if my uncles weren’t around. When there was a bug, I knew I had to kill it. When there was snow on the ground or mounds of leaves I knew I had to grab my boots and a shovel. I innately knew my mother needed help, and tried to fill that void.
But I was a child and not only should’ve stayed in a child’s place but given room to explore a child’s freedom. I was and still am not my mother’s partner but her obligation. If I did not identify as femme would I be just as vain as Black boys of my generation who appear to be spoiled when they can’t even make a simple cup of coffee or do one load of laundry after leaving their mother’s home? Or subtly threaten the men who stood at our door ready to take my mother out? Probably so.
Looking at Jim Jones it is now very clear why his longtime partner, Chrissy Lampkin has had problems finding her place in his life. In the reality show Jim & Chrissy Vow or Never, Chrissy asks Mama Jones to go to her own home. Chrissy stated on Love & Hip Hop season one that she hoped Mama Jones would allow her son to grow up. Grow up?! At the time Jim Jones was thirty-five! When Chrissy proposed to Jim Jones Mama Jones was so upset she stormed out and said she felt excluded, disrespected, and disappointed. Calling Chrissy a selfish bitch and eventually deciding to make a diss track. Is she behaving as a mother or as a scorned girlfriend? I can’t address her making out with her son, I can’t.
To the single Black moms out there, you are not missing out on anything by not having a man in the house that didn’t value you or the children you made together. That ‘father’ did all of y’all a favor by walking out. And you are bad all by your damn self raising these kids on your own. When your son leaves the house he is leaving to create an extension of the love you gave him, not leaving you alone. Inserting into a son’s relationship, his household, or allowing your pubescent son to be a decision-maker in yours is not love.
“We love our boys, and we raise our girls.” Michelle Obama told no lies.
