Free Mother's Day Card Your Kids Can Give in Kreyòl

Mother's Day in the US is May 10 this year. If you grew up in a Haitian household, you know the cards from CVS do not quite fit. Manman never spoke to us in greeting card English. So we made a free printable card in Kreyòl and English. Print it, let your kids color it, and give it to mama next Sunday.

What's on the card

The card has a cover with "Bòn Fèt Manman!" in big pink letters, a heart and bouquet of flowers ready to color. Inside, there is a short letter to mom written in simple Kreyòl with the English translation underneath, plus a black-and-white bouquet your kid can color in.

The Kreyòl letter says:

Manman, mwen renmen ou anpil.
Ou se solèy mwen.
Lè mwen pè, ou la.
Lè mwen ri, ou ri avè m.
Mèsi pou tout sakrifis ou.
Mèsi paske ou aprann mwen Kreyòl.
Bòn Fèt, Manman.

Short, true, and the kind of thing a child can read aloud at the dinner table without rehearsing. Two of those lines, "Mèsi pou tout sakrifis ou" and "Mèsi paske ou aprann mwen Kreyòl," will land hard for any Haitian American mother. They acknowledge what is rarely spoken: the work she did to keep the language alive in your house.

How to make the moment land

A few small things turn this from a printable into a memory:

1. Read the Kreyòl with your kid before they sign it. Even if your Kreyòl is rusty, fumble through it together. The fumbling is the gift.
2. Have your kid sign their name in their own handwriting. Crooked is best.
3. Take a photo of mama opening it. Send it to gran manman in Haiti or Brooklyn or Miami. She will cry the good kind of tears.
4. If you can, record your kid reading the card aloud and text it to mama. The audio of a small child speaking Kreyòl is the most universal Haitian American gift there is.

Why we made this

Mother's Day cards in stores assume English is the bond between mom and kid. For Haitian American families, that is often not true. The deepest moments between manman and her child happened in Kreyòl: the lullabies, the warnings, the I-love-yous whispered when no one else was listening.

This card is small. It will not fix the heritage language gap by itself. But it will create one moment, on one Sunday in May, where a child speaks Kreyòl to their mother and means it. That is a start.