Alaine’s mother, Myrna Laughton, was not initially excited to have been expecting a baby girl 42 years ago.
Opening up about her pregnancy and motherhood like never before when they sat down for an interview with The Gleaner following the success of their Mama and Me YouTube channel, Myrna on Sunday said she was disappointed, and had to be comforted by her husband – who had paid her a visit in New Jersey, northeastern U.S, from Jamaica.
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“I have five sisters, and all of them had boys first. So I was always guessing that when I have a baby, I am going to have a boy, following the trend. Well, when they tested my tummy and they heard the heartbeat, I don’t know if it was scientific, but they say girls’ hearts beat much much louder and stronger than boys, so they said it was a girl,” said Myrna.
“I said no, is a boy, and her father, Courtney, who was visiting at the time (because I was in America), had planned to leave the next day, and I was so disappointed that he stayed another day to kinda console me. Then afterwards, I said if it’s a girl, she must be the sweetest, nicest likkle thing that God ever make, and I just started falling in love with her from that time.”
The reggae singer and songwriter was taken aback by the revelation, responding in surprise: ‘Hol’ on! Weh yuh just say a while ago? You were vexed that I was a girl? You were disappointed?” before reportedly bursting into laughter with Myrna on ‘concluding that they must have a meeting to discuss the details further’, added The Gleaner.
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Myrna got candid about her upbringing revealing she was in the entertainment industry long before she had Alaine and knew the You Are Me songbird was talented at just three months old.
“From she was a baby when she was crying for anything and I started to sing she would just stop. I knew from she was three months and the song Land of my Birth was playing, and Alaine was on the bed and started moving to the riddim and moved down to the edge of the bed and I had to just grab her, that she got our talent. The entire family is like Alaine is. I, myself, [have] always been in the entertainment world. I used to do make-up, working on a lot of videos. I used to do the Jonkanoo Lounge cabaret. Sometimes I did it on the north coast. I did pantomime. I wrote one of the episodes on the Oliver At Large series. I did a play which was extremely successful, and so I have always been this creative as well,” narrated Myrna.
She explained how their vlogging journey was, in fact, a blessing; a chance for them to reconnect and share facets of their life, especially friendship in spite of fears the platform could draw negative attention to her on social media. “People only throw stones at a mango tree that ripe and have on mango,” she wisely posited. “That means if yuh not doing anything, nobody not going to notice yuh. Is when you doing things that people will see, and everybody not going to like it. Some will love it, some will hate it, and so what. No matter what you do, people will talk,” she added.
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A message Alaine powerfully echoed: “Mommy is so infectious, such a bright light, that she attracts people’s attention very easily by just being her vivacious self. So, I was like ‘Let’s do a YouTube channel because we could have so much fun’. But I did have reservations. I am very fiercely defensive and protective of her, and so before I even put her up on Instagram, I explained to her the kind of elements that one is exposed to on social media. She said ‘Cho, dat nah go bother me at all’, and I saw how much she really just wanted to do this for the fun of it, and so I said all right.”
