CELEBRATING MY MOMMY

I sure am missing her as I should be...after all, it is Mother's Day weekend.

A mother-daughter relationship can be very complicated. There may be times when you disagree, argue, get mad at each other, etc. But when push comes to shove, there is no human love like a mother's love...NONE. Not even daddy's love compares to a mommy's love. A mother's love is special.

As this mother's day approaches and I see all the hoopla about the Susan G. Komen "Race for the Cure", I am really missing her. For as long as this race took place in Philly, I would get up at 4am on Mother's Day (whining and complaining) to support my mother's team to raise money and walk for the cure. I hated getting up at 4am on mother's day, but I always did anyway. As I got older, I did what my mother told me most of the time...more than I did when I was younger. I realized later in life that more often than not, she was right about most things. And after all my whining and complaining every year, once we got down to the Parkway/Art Museum, we always had a ball.

After my mother passed, (even though she didn't die from breast cancer, I will never know what really killed her because they lied and told me that the autopsy was done, then, the day after we buried her, they tell me - with smugness - that there is no qutopsy because they told the hospital not to do one...so they just flat out lied to me and threw it up in my face -- a whole nother story...anyway) we asked friends and family to send donations to the foundation in her name, because everyone knew that was her pet project. At the time of her death, she was a 19 year survivor.

That following May, I get my mother's mail from the Susan G. Komen foundation, and they are asking her where she'd been; they hadn't heard from her and was looking for her support again that year. I called and told them that she had passed, and I wanted an accounting for all of the money she had raised for them over the past 15 years. They transferred me all over the world and finally told me that they do not keep an accounting of how much money teams or individuals raise. Hmmm.

So with raised eyebrows, I did a little investigating, only to find that 90% of the billions of dollars raised by the foundation go to administrative costs. ONLY about 3% of those billions of dollars actually go to research!!!!

So as you all get all hyped up about the "Race for the Cure" this Sunday, keep that in mind. Also keep in mind that black women STILL die from this disease at a rate of 75% more than white women. Keep in mind that we STILL don't have the resources needed for early detection and prevention in our communities.

Now, all that said, if my mom were here, I would be ecstatic to join her and my aunt at 4am this Sunday morning...