It's not just a title

The title of this blog is "MamanKaya." And while some may think I am simply to lazy to put in some spaces and an "and" Mamankaya actually means Mother of Kaya in Hausa. Hausa is the language of the people in the middle and northern regions of Africa as well as the general name of the people in that region. My husband speaks Hausa and is considered Hausa, although his ethnic group is a smaller tribe called Mwagavul which has it's own language with the same name. As soon as we named her, I was no longer Dominique but Mamankaya, actually MamanDihye since that's her Mwagavul name. I am ecstatic to be the mother of Kaya/Dihye, the mother of an African child (my father is from the Ivory Coast) and adopt the African cultures surrounding being a mother and apart of an African family. At the same time I don't want to throw away Dominique DjeDje, the individual, the business owner, the independent woman.

I was talking to my friend today and we were discussing the challenge of new moms today. Mom's of the 50s and 60s were in the true since stay at home moms. The Leave it to Beaver mom's who cooked, cleaned, raised kids, was constantly a suportive wife and mananged to not get a hair out of place through all of it. While the 70s to 90s mom was living during the women's revolution - seeking to break out of the house wife role and into the male dominiated role of a career woman. As the daughters and granddaugters of these women we see the drawbacks of both but also seek to take the benefits of both and at the same time live sanely in the 21st century. And slowly it's working with the longer maternity leaves and the emergence of WAHMs; we see an envoirnment where a woman could just possibly have it all, or is that possible? Well, I surely hope it is and am making every effort to make it possible for myself and Kaya. I will be sahinr my attempts in this of course regularly here.

On a slightly different note, my friend mentioned a book called "Migrations of the Heart: An Autobiography" about a black woman who married a Nigerian architect and ultimately moved to Nigeria for several reasons including the desire to escape the racism here. But she finds once arriving that she encounters many hurdles she did not expect and inevitably divorces and returns to the states. Now I may be inaccurate about some of the details of the book since I haven't read it yet, but if there is such a thing as parallel lives, she is living mine. As most of you know, I share almost all those things in common with her except she is much older and I haven't moved to Nigeria yet (but hope too very soon). So of course I will be purchasing this book today. Hearing that her hopes didn't turn out as planned makes me skeptical of what it is I am trying to do, and figuring that out is so improtant once you're a mother. So among many other things we will be exploring that aspect and I'll definitely be expressing my thoughts on it once I've read it.

So in titling this blog MamaKaya I'm documenting and honoring this new position in my life at the same time balance all the previous hats I wore and continue to wear. It's a journey and an daventure to say the least, and I'm here to tell it.