A review by gabmc
Mom & Me & Mom by Maya Angelou

5.0

I listened to the audio book which was narrated by Maya Angelou. To hear this amazing author read her own words in her own way was amazing. Maya Angelou was an extraordinary woman - poet, playwright, professor, mother, daughter, civil rights activist ... just to name a few of her roles. In this book which I think was her last, she talks about her relationship with her mother. When Angelou was only three years old and her brother Bailey, five, they were sent by their mother to live with their paternal grandparents, in the book she says "you were a terrible mother of small children, but there has never been anyone greater than you as a mother of a young adult". At age 13, Angelou and Bailey returned to California to live with their mother, Vivian Baxter. At first she called her "Lady" because "you are beautiful and you don't look like a mother". When Vivian needed to talk to her children about something serious, she would say "Please sit down, I have something to say". In this way she educated her children about love, courage, strength and the difference between right and wrong. Maya Angelou says "My mother's gifts of courage to me were both large and small. I met loves and lost loves. I dared to travel to Africa to allow my son to finish high school in Cairo. I lived with a South African freedom fighter whom I met when he was at the United Nations petitioning for an end to apartheid." This was a remarkable book detailing the lives of the relationship between two remarkable women - it is something I will come back to again and again.