Baby Blues (Part III): Expecting and the Unexpected

By Charisse N. Montgomery

At 33 weeks pregnant, my husband and I went to the ultrasound clinic for a routine follow-up ultrasound. Because I have fibroids, as about 60% of Black women do, the doctors kept a close eye on their growth throughout my pregnancy. This appointment, however, revealed more than fibroids. Having been through thorough ultrasounds for the past four months, I noticed a difference when the ultrasound tech continued to take photos of my baby’s spine and brain. Her silence and her concentration on these areas were a red flag that something might not be okay. Not really wanting to know the answer, I asked, “Should his spine be curved like that?”

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Baby Blues (Part II): Doing more than "the do"

By Charisse N. Montgomery

Starting a family seems to be a normal course of events for most people. We find someone we love, we settle down and get married, and then we want to extend our love by adding to our family. Sometimes, though, this process is not as easy as we would like it to be. Despite the media impressions of black women having eight kids by the age of 25, fertility doesn’t necessarily work this way for all of us. Because we have the idea that having children will be easy, it can be hard to deal with when it doesn’t play out that way, and it can be embarrassing and disheartening when others expect it to. For that reason, I’m sharing my own fertility story; when I looked for resources on how to deal with this issue, I found none that were written from the perspective of black women or that even showed the faces of black women dealing with infertility.

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Black Baby Genius: Cultivating the minds of our next generation

anissatBy Richard Montgomery

I recently attended a Black male empowerment conference, and one of the speakers was a 13-year-old African American sophomore majoring in Computer Science at Morehouse College. While a thirteen year-old genius is impressive, his mother’s reasoning behind how he became a child genius who could perform complex algebra equations by age five was more interesting. Put simply, she kept him engaged in whatever he seemed interested in. Stephen has an older sister, and the two of them played school for hours on end mostly because Stephen liked it.

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Give me a reason: Fostering our children's critical thinking

anissatBy Charisse N. Montgomery

Not long ago, I had a conversation with my niece that went the way many conversations go in black homes across the nation.

“Why do I have to do that, Auntie?” she asked.

“Because I said so,” I responded.

My niece, who is six years old with a great big personality replied, “Sometimes I don’t think that’s a reason at all.”

All I could do was laugh at her candor because, of course, she was correct. “Because I said so” is an easy response, but does it do our children more harm than we know?

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Baby Blues (Part I): Verbal Felonies

By Charisse N. Montgomery

While it might seem that fertility issues are uncommon in the black community, it happens, especially for those of us who waited to establish a career and get married to start our families. I have thought long and hard about sharing my journey, and I have decided that I will, if for no other reason than that I found very little in terms of support or literature about black women’s infertility issues when I needed it.

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