By Amina Blackwood Meeks, Contributor 
Blackwood Meeks
ACCORDING TO the Outlook Magazine of Sunday, May 2, 2004, there is an International Day of Laughter.
Once upon a time that was everyday in Jamaica. In those days, every Jamaican was skilled at eliminating the troubles of the heart with a set of pearly whites. Nowadays we are the Screwface Capital of the World. The only tings dat seem to sweet we is bad tings. We have mastered the art of how fe teck bad tings meck laugh.
On the very day that I discovered the International Day of Laughter I also discovered an internet site for the perfect Mother's Day Gifts. That was sheer idleness on my part for I do not e-shop. I like to pick up tings, turn dem upside down, find fault, bargain, before I teck out my money, count it and wonder how other people cause a piece of plastic to mutate into dollars and cents. In other words, I shop like a proud hard-working Jamaican whose likkle pay can never stretch.
SINGLE MOTHERS
Anyway, the first item on offer was for single mothers. The ad ran single mothers need fun too. Get her started dating again. This was followed, naturally, by the gift suggestion a three-month membership in a dating organisation. After that, free paper bun pan fun or she could pay her own way to extending it, assuming she did enjoy it. Ha ha haa, very funny.
Of equal hilarity was the centre page of the Flair Magazine of Monday April 26, 2004. Some eminent Jamaican purveyors of laughter, them of the male variety, had been canvassed as to what they might like about being female. Find the magazine and read it for yourself.
Among the responses figured such wonders as the gossip, shopping and finding a rich man to marry. What a life of ease and luxury. Very funny. We love our women, our mothers so bad, we don't miss an opportunity to make the most disrespectful comment in the name of fun.
Well, today is Mother's Day. We are supposed to find our mothers in bed, resting and relaxing from a whole year of gossiping, shopping and looking for men with money. As a reward for their labour they are supposed to be served breakfast in bed.
REQUEST A SPECIAL CHUNE
Check right now where your mother is. In the kitchen? Oh! She is not one of those then. And you are happy to be let off the hook. In any case she is not your mother, just the mother of your children. For that she might get an 'I Love You', after all it is Mother's Day.
Better yet, call up the radio stations and request a special chune for her. You don't even have to say by which deejay. Any one of them is bound to have a song declaring how much dem love dem madda better dan de nex deejay. De nex chune might very well be a song encouraging one woman, somebody's mother, fe bruk out into a matey war with another woman, somebody else's mother, or laugh after the next one bout how har clothes nuh ready, or shake har booty so that she can get some money to buy some clothes dat ready.
We love our mothers so bad, we really cannot decide who or what they are or how they should be treated.
DOMESTIC HELPERS
In the 1600s, England celebrated a day called "Mothering Sunday". During this time many of the poor women of England used to work as servants for the wealthy far away from their usual places of residence. Not unlike a kind of apartheid arrangement, it seems to me, or the situation which now obtains right here on this little rock with far too many domestic helpers.
On "Mothering Sunday", these servants would be encouraged to visit their mothers and take as a gift a special cake, called the mothering cake. One time you know, the wife of a certain ruler of France could not comprehend why the ruled wanted to revolt just because they had no bread when cake was so superior a treat. OH YES! LET THEM EAT CAKE!
Here in Jamaica, many mothers have very rare experience of the daily bread. Politicians have spent the better part of the 2004 Budget Debate telling us either how much harder we are all going to have to have to work for even less of that experience and some of them have been honest or prophetic enough to declare that nuh bread nuh dey.
If you have been peeing instead of sleeping you would have noticed why. They consumed it all in the lavish after-Budget parties, wolfish grins and all. We love our mothers so bad, we bax bread outa dem mout and celebrate.
When they appear on the brink of starvation we table papers with fancy titles like the Feminisation Of Poverty. Same time they tell us that men have been marginalized. What a prekkeh. Men on the margins of poverty.
AMBUSH AND HIJACK
From there now, as well as in the centre, we find that men love their women so bad that dem nuh deal with dem at all. Men travel in packs. It takes a whole pack of them to ambush and hijack one woman, spirit her away to some seedy dark corner, beat, rape and sometimes kill her.
Men love us so bad they need us to be afraid of them. Or they need us to comprehend how the power of this love drives them to spend so much of their free time with the bredren. What's left they use to big up de woman dem everytime from the distance of some stage.
One woman told me that up close and personal they don't even know how to address women. So accustomed to saying 'yes, me bredren', one of them had to be stopped in mid-sentence by her to be informed that Sistren was a word he might use.
Mister Jacket-and-Tie is in no better barrel. When was the last time you saw him in public with the wife of how many years and grown children? Or Mister Hip-And-Ready-To-Buy-The-Town? Oh yes, he loves her one third his age, beauty queen qualifications; park every wrinkle and gray hair along with what might be in her head in the Arawak Museum that nobody visits or even uses that name anymore. Sex on the bus for a box of chicken is but one manifestation of how bad this kind of love can be.
A DAY OF MOURNING
The second Sunday in May became a national day for honouring mothers in the USA after it was so declared by President Woodrow Wilson, in 1914. World War 1 claimed the lives of millions of sons, husbands, brothers, nephews, making Mother's Day a day of mourning for far too many women.
Ninety years later, we mourn the anniversary of the loss of one of the oldest civilisations in the world marked by the parading on American television networks of the humiliation and degrading torture of the Iraqi sons of the Iraqi mothers the President of the Greatest Democracy on Earth led a coalition of like minds to liberate.
At the same time the children of Haiti, the Mother of Independence and Black Liberation in this part of the world, continue to flee in search of assistance for the restoration of the dignity of their mother. Many Jamaican mothers will be fleeing with their children, in search of any safe haven, from any variety of criminals whose bidding they will not do and trying to make sense out of how it came to pass that their children need police protection to do nothing more threatening than try to get to school or be safe there.
Happy Mother's Day is still something we all have to work for if we want it to have meaning for all mothers, that is, our grandmothers, our mothers and the daughters who one day will be mothers.
