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”This book has been written to examine some of the ways love heals and helps a person to climb impossible heights and rise from immeasurable depths.��

Two months ago, I read Maya Angelou’s “Letter to My Daughter�� �� the first of Angelou’s books I read. This morning, I read “Mom & Me & Mom�� which was delightful, wonderful, sometimes sad, sometimes not, but throughout has that same lovely tone that I found in “Letter to My Daughter.�� I’d read poems of hers before, seen her speak, although not in person, but there’s something about her that just reaches inside your soul and tugs on it while reading, or listening, to her words. Someday, I will get an audio copy of this to listen to, I suspect just hearing her distinctive voice read these words would add another level of impact.

”Suppose I really am going to become somebody, imagine.��

Mothers and Daughters. In Maya’s case, she barely knew her mother, Vivian Baxter, before she was shipped off to live with her paternal grandmother, Annie Henderson, along with her brother Bailey. Bailey was five years old to Maya’s three. Babies, put on a train with notes attached to them.

”I was three and Bailey was five when we arrived in Stamps, Arkansas. We had identification tags on our arms and no adult supervision. ��

It would take a while for them to re-establish a place for her mother in Maya’s life, and primarily in her heart. For a long time, she called her Lady, which made me smile, a name my daughter calls me now and then. When she was first re-entering that space, with a new stepfather in the picture, their relationship was cautious, tentative, slowly growing over the years �� but growing.

“She had my back, supported me. This is the role of the mother, and in that visit I really saw clearly, and for the first time, why a mother is really important. Not just because she feeds and also loves and cuddles and even mollycoddles a child, but because in an interesting and maybe an eerie and unworldly way, she stands in the gap. She stands between the unknown and the known.��

There are some of the stories of her life that are included in her “Letter to My Daughter,�� but there is sometimes comfort in that, much like once-again hearing some of my father’s favourite flying stories when he had a new, and willing, audience. There’s joy in hearing wisdom repeated, tales that your heart takes and translates into your life, your language, your being. I loved reading about the progression of their relationship, Maya and her mother, Vivien, when all those doubts had faded away, when proof of love was no longer required or questioned, and most of all I loved seeing more of her heart and its wisdom.

”Her love and support encouraged me to dare to live my life with pizazz.��

Highly Recommended