I do a variety of things while riding the train in the morning. I sleep, pray, snack, sit extended Shiva for Prince while listening to Adore on repeat and wonder why he didn’t leave a will. I read when I can maintain my concentration, which lately is not often. This morning was very different. This morning I had a discussion with my 11-year-old daughter who asked me about self-love in a decidedly roundabout way. I panicked. In that moment I thought back to every piece of generic advice I’d ever received about the importance of loving oneself. The same generic shit that I’d been feeding her for her entire life. But this morning, while spitting the perfunctory “know-your-worth”, “straighten-your-crown”, “you’re-a-queen” spiel, it dawned on me that this was a love that I had been moving farther and farther away from for the better part of the last decade, essentially her entire life. I suddenly felt ill-qualified to advise her on a self-love that I’d become increasingly unfamiliar with. Well damn! For years I dressed up the negative self-talk in funky gear and fancy friends, but now here I was on the 6 train feeling exposed before my own perceptive, Afro-Latino, abandoned-by-her-first-love (daddy) Black girl, who needed me to teach her about a love I didn’t quite understand anymore.
While both my parents were adamant about teaching me how to love myself in all my Afro-Cuban-girl glory, it is amazing how one person’s behavior towards you at the right time has the ability to topple a lifetime of esteem, painstakingly assembled like a house of cards. During the last decade, two relationships with men who professed to love me (who I recognize now were simply incapable of loving me completely due to their own steamer trunks of baggage) was the resident monkey on my back that recently made every emotion needlessly complicated, especially love. Don’t get me wrong, I have a tremendous capacity to love. I can love other people. But myself… that depends on the day.
Rationally, I know that the cheating and lying behaviors that were common threads in both my marriage and the relationship that followed, were not due to anything I did or did not do, but my rational mind isn’t the culprit here. My irrational mind is totally culpable and it tries endlessly to convince me that if I were just prettier, more accommodating and less… me, somebody could love me fully. Then I wake the fuck up and shake it off… depending on the day, of course.
So, back to my daughter who is, by the way, approaching the age when boys aren’t as “yucky” as they used to be (and with her being gangly, which apparently isn’t all that attractive to a pimply, hairy-palmed, adolescent boy... the nerve), is expressing uncertainty about anyone’s ability to love her when her first love broke her heart. After all, when your own parent chooses not to love you, in the mind of an 11-year-old, you’re pretty much doomed. Sweet, wooly-haired, baby Jesus… WTF am I supposed to do with this?!? Not to mention that she watched both of my last two relationships crash and burn. These facts, combined with her smarts and the intentional lack of information and details provided to her about my failed relationships, she formed her own opinions which are decidedly unflattering. Geez! Here I was thinking that I was providing a strong and unwavering role model for her by pretending that one failed marriage followed by one failed relationship didn’t rock the foundation on which my self-love had been firmly seated. What an intergalactic idiot I was to think that this sharp-witted, little chick wouldn’t see right through the thinly veiled “strong-black-woman” façade (cue Gloria Gaynor's I Will Survive) and jump straight to the place that I thought was mostly healed and land in a raw spot where I picked at the scab daily without even knowing. So, now what?
What now is I’m worried about her looking for someone to fill in the empty spaces, the lonely places that exist because she doesn’t completely believe that she is… enough. I’m worried that she needs someone to “complete” her or validate her. My ex-husband had me convinced that I was just never going to be enough for anyone. That place of inadequacy is an awful place for your head to reside. He reminded me often that I was divorced, had two young kids, was too tall, too skinny, that my hair was too curly, my eyes were just brown, I had an angry looking C-section scar, I was too opinionated, and too independent… I was just too. He forgot to mention that I was just too damn expansive for him to comprehend and therefore appreciate, but that was for me to figure out. Unfortunately, before I fully came to that realization, the door opened just a crack for the next relationship to float in on silver-lined wings… because he was so “different” from my ex-husband. It turns out that while he was certainly different, that didn’t prevent him from putting himself first, or not cherishing the love that I freely gave nor did it prevent me from tolerating a fair amount of nonsense because I was still recovering from a mild Celie complex.
We’ve all loved people that didn’t deserve a look from our direction. We bend and contort ourselves to an image that might hasten the attainment of that crystal stair that we’ve been previously denied. These are things that I never wanted for my daughter. So, when my ex convinced our baby girl, not by his words but by his deeds, that she was also… just too, I did the only thing I knew how to and turned on the generic self-love advice.
She. Saw. Through. Me. To. The. Raw. Spot.
I promised myself, and her, this morning on the 6 train that I’d find a way to fill in her gaps and spaces, as well as mine, and knock it off with the hokey, generic self-love advice. I know that we Black girls are born with lemons in our hands. We just choose different recipes to make our lemonade. I think I need to add honey…
Have a WayBeyondZ Day, my loves!
“I believe when life gives you lemons, you should make lemonade...and try to find someone whose life has given them vodka, and have a party.”
― Ron White
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