That’s because Brenda Wade, a retired school administrator and Monroe native, is godmother to 22 children—and mother in every way that counts.
“I don’t have any birth children,” Wade says with a laugh, “but I’ve got plenty who call me Mama.”
Her voice carries both the warmth of affection and the weight of experience. Her nurturing heart, she says, is a gift passed down from her own mother, the late Margie Smart Jenkins, a beloved dietitian in the Monroe City Schools for over 30 years.
Jenkins was the kind of woman whose kitchen never closed.
“People would come to our house just to eat,” Brenda recalls. “Didn’t matter who you were—there was always food on the stove, love in the air, and somebody else’s child sitting at the table.”
The family home was not just a refuge for her own children but for the entire neighborhood.
“We had our own cousins, church kids, even friends of friends staying with us. I’d ask, ‘Mama, who is this now?’ And she’d just say, ‘They needed a place.’”
That generous spirit didn’t stop at food. Though she left school to raise her siblings, Jenkins returned in her late 40s and graduated high school the same year as Brenda. Then she went on to earn a two-year culinary degree from Louisiana Tech. “That’s just who she was,” Brenda says, “a fighter, a giver, a doer.”
And she didn’t just give in the kitchen.
She gave through the ballot box. A victim of the 1956 voter purge, Jenkins waited in line for days to register, and the lesson stuck.
“One thing she made clear—we were going to vote. No excuses,” Brenda says.
“Even now, every time I cast a ballot, I remember her standing in line, telling us the story again and again.”
Brenda has carried that legacy forward—serving in church, mentoring youth, and being the constant call for children in need of comfort or correction.
“I guess I inherited her stare too,” she jokes.
“Mama could look at you and you’d straighten right up.”
Her childhood was filled with Saturday chores, pressed clothes, and firm-but-fair discipline. “She didn’t play. But you always felt loved.” And love, in Brenda Wade’s world, is not measured in bloodlines—it’s measured in presence, care, and sacrifice.
That’s why so many call her “godmother,” “auntie,” or simply “Mama B.”
As she reflects this Mother’s Day, Brenda doesn’t lament what she didn’t have. She celebrates what she did. “The biggest gift my mama gave me was the gift of giving,” she says. “And I’ve been giving ever since.”
She smiles. “Love don’t always come from labor. Sometimes, it’s chosen. And every one of those 22 children; I chose them.”
And they, no doubt, choose her right back.
