The mother of the singers Beyoncé e Solange Knowles, Tina Knowlesremembers growing In a loving and noisy family of nine people. She was the youngest of seven brothers. Add to that the cousins, and they were a force to be recognized whenever they left home.
When very young, Knowles said he was taught not to attract the attention of others. “To be beautiful is to act beautiful,” said his mother. In other words, be quiet and get to know your place.
Fortunately for all of us, she didn’t hear. In a launch tour of her new memories book, “Matriarch” (“Matria”, reading selected by the Oprah Book Club, she talked to me in the offices of CNN in New York about what he learned in his own childhood and his choices when creating his daughters, Beyoncé e Solange Knowles.
On this Mother’s Day, here is what the businesswoman, fashion designer and mother of two of the most famous artists in the world wanted to share.
Do not limit your children
Teaching children to be seen and not heard was a common way to raise children at the time “Mama Tina” grew in Galveston, Texas, during segregation in the United States. Her mother, her teachers at the Catholic school, and all the adults around her made clear the role that she was expected to play.
For Knowles, this translated into trying to become small and insignificant – although she was born with a great personality, great feelings and many opinions. But Knowles simply couldn’t follow the rule of being quiet and quickly received a nickname: “Badass Tenie B”.
“This was not a loving term when I was little,” Knowles told me in a recent conversation. “They used to say, here comes that Badass Tenie B because I was hyperactive, I answered.” Now she says she recognizes that her stubbornness and hyperactive behavior have come from the care deficit disorder with hyperactivity, or TDAh. Which, she reflects, “it wasn’t something at the time.”
Knowles attended a school where the nuns sent. She said there were teachers who told her that she did not belong there, that she was unrecoverable and a bad seed. The words hit her deeply and hated her to go to school.
“They thought they were doing their best,” said Knowles, but acknowledges that it hurt her terribly.
She ran home to tell her mother and couldn’t understand why her mother never was by her side. She didn’t know that her mother was working hard for church to secure Knowles and her brothers an education. From your own experience at school and childhood community, Knowles said it is very important to really think about what you are telling children. Labels can affect them for a lifetime.
“I still fight this sometimes,” she said, “and I’m 71 years old. It’s deep in my head: don’t call you much attention. It’s okay if someone else takes the credit for what you did.”
These words still hurt, so she advises parents to do differently. “Defend your children. You have to protect your children,” said Knowles.
“Make sure the messages they are giving their children are those who say they can do whatever they want and that they belong anywhere they want to be.”
It is exactly the message she conveyed to her daughters.
Pay attention to how you are
“Your children are watching how you treat yourself,” Knowles told me, noting that her loving mother, Agnéz Beyincé, lived in fear for her children as she tried to ensure that they were not targets in the south segregated US.
But Knowles also watched his mother make exquisite clothes for all her children, and they were the best dressed children in town, though they were poor. (Knowles learned great lessons from his mother’s work as a seamstress and ended up creating most costumes for Destiny’s Child, the musical group with Kelly Rowland and Michelle Williams.)
“As poor as we were, we were always the most elegant children and we were very proud of fashion and how we dressed and … I think it helped us not to realize how poor we were,” said Knowles. “I passed this to my daughters… They have a lot of talent to combine things. They don’t sew like me sewing, but they know how to preach a button, make a bar and a fold and that kind of thing.”
Work to prevent rivalry between daughters
Knowles says he immediately learned that Beyoncé had found the passion of his life the first time he saw his daughter on stage. It was so obvious. But Knowles said her younger daughter could have done anything, and she really didn’t want Solange to get into the music business.
“I was terrified when Beyoncé turned about 10,” said Knowles, worried about losing his daughters to their art and that work would create a barrier among the sisters.
According to Knowles, the children in the music group of Beyoncé said to Solange every day: “‘Be quiet, solange’, because she was trying to choreographer (the group). You know she is mandona, and she wanted to be involved.”
“I started to notice that Beyoncé allowed them to talk to her like this,” she said. “I saw a wall forming between them, so I took them to therapy.”
Although her family and community thought therapy could be problematic or even dangerous, she found a “wonderful” children’s therapist. As a result, the two sisters “They are now as close as they can be. No barrier will come between them“.
Knowles encourages other parents to do the same if they see a harmful rivalry between siblings developing among their children.
Do preventive exams against breast cancer
Knowles was diagnosed with breast cancer last year, and she fought with the decision to mention this publicly or not. She decided to talk that other people would also take the exam, especially if they lost one or two (or more) consultations.
“You are busy doing everything for everyone,” she said, “and everything else becomes a priority about your health at some point in our lives, I think (for) women in particular, but men too.”
“I want to share this in the hope that women will take a minute and say … I will do (the exam),” he added.
