Recollect Season 2 Episode 4 Mama Bear by Shirley Smith One Black Mother’s Fight for Her Child’s Life & Her Own. Shirley & Zelda talk About Writing the Story She Lived

Recollect: Black Women Decolonizing thru Story & Nature

Hey Y'all this episode features Shirley Smith as we talk though the journey of her memoir Mama Bear and our connection of healing in the collaboration process of co-writing the work. In the last episode Natasha Thomas and I talked about the stresses in a Black woman’s body that can impact her ability to healthily bring children into this life. This episode is a wonderful spin off.

The conversation was recorded in front of a live audience and a Zoom audience at Her Story Garden Studios Sunday, October 24, 2021. Forgiveness and multigenerational healing for Black Women through writing our stories are among the lively, soulful topics discussed here. In her memoir, Mama Bear, Shirley offers the 141-day ordeal of fighting for her own life and that of her second daughter, Dakota, who is among the world’s youngest preemies ever to survive. Shirley parallels this journey with the story of her early life. Born into a childhood struggle to survive her mother’s drug addiction, she takes care of herself and her brother. It is a story of loss, resilience, and the maternal instincts of a woman who enters the emergency room of a hospital at the end of her twenty-first week of pregnancy on New Year’s Day and brings her child home for the first time in May of the new year. The joys and pains of her life continue, but in the midst of it all, she holds to her belief in God, family, and her love of journaling as the beacons to guide her in moments when she feels lost from herself. Mama Bear is an emotional journey that humanizes the racial disparity of infant and maternal mortality as well as postpartum depression through the lens of one Black woman’s lived experience. For more information on Black Women's Writing Workshops that inspire healing, self-definition and liberation visit https://herstorygardenstudios.com/

Shirley Smith is the CEO of https://www.mykotabear.com, a nonprofit organization that brings awareness and support to neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) families. She travels and speaks on issues on Black female mortality and premature births to educate and encourage parents, and to offer guidance to women who have struggled with postpartum depression. She lives in New Jersey with her family.

--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/zelda-lockhart/support