More than just believing

Recently I made a very difficult decision. I decided to take my faith out for a road trip. Before I think I was giving it a test drive here and there or a quick ride out in the cool of the evening. But it has been impressed upon my spirit that we don’t have as much time as we think we have. I have to make the things of God the number one priority in my life. A very important part of embarking fully on this mission is to complete my bachelor’s degree. That may not seem like a big deal except for the fact that I’m forty eight years old. Yes people older than me have done the same and I’m sure that there was struggle and sacrifice involved as well. I’ve been trying to fit my classes around my full time work schedule. Now that I am seventeen hours away from finishing, and feeling this urgency in my spirit I have gone part time. Part time in this economy as a single woman over forty living paycheck to paycheck. Yes I’m taking my faith for a cross country road trip. We say we have faith but we treat it like a spare tire. We only use it if we get a flat. I decided that I will move to the realm where faith is radical and ridiculous. I claim every promise of God by faith and KNOW that my God shall supply all of my need according to His riches in glory. Not according to the amount of my paycheck or how many hours I work a week. He said He would do it, and I believe Him. I’ve got work to do and it’s time to be about my Father’s business. He gave the vision and He will give the provision.

New Beginnings

They say seven is the number of new beginnings. Ok I’ll buy that. It was seven years ago that I got the courage to end a very painful chapter in my life. Change is never easy but mostly always worth it. So today, on Seven seven eleven, I embark on another change. For more reasons that I care to recount, I gave up on myself. I decided somewhere in the back of this fragmented brain of mine that my time could be better spent on things and pursuits that would benefit other people. Yes I have returned to school and am 3 semesters away from my degree in psychology, but that’s not for me. That’s so that I can help women, like me (broken by the pain of the past) find healing. Yes I am a licensed preacher but that too is for the Cause of Christ. Not something that I chose but that chose me and I am compelled to do. So I stopped caring about how I look and what I wear and what I put into my body. I’ve felt safe fading into the background. It’s easy to be on stage because people don’t see me they see a character I portray. And when I read my poetry people get a glimpse of my mind and forget what it’s encased in. I’ve hidden because it created distance between me and the rest of the world. If nobody gets close enough to hurt me then that’s been fine by me. Until today. Today, I’ve decided that it’s time to re-enter the world without hiding behind jokes and characters and well put together prose. One day at a time, little by little, I must return to living instead of merely existing. So look out world, here I come with all the spice and sass of a 48 year old formerly narcissistic currently psychodivalicious preacher poet Nanawoman. Wait’ll they get a load a me!

Identify yourself

It’s really sad, but I understand why some nonbelievers don’t want to go to church. They see how “church folk” treat each other and realize they are safer in the world. I say church folk because I’m referring to specific people not to be confused with Christians. Church folk are unrepentant unregenerate unscrupulous, power hungry, backstabbing religious people. I know that sounds harsh, but it’s time for us to stop tip toeing around the truth. These people who claim to represent the risen Christ are more interested in furthering their own agenda than winning souls. And what do you do if you are truly a believer with a heart for the things of God and the cause of Christ?
As hard as it is you stand your (HIS) ground and do the right thing. It’s up to believers to show Jesus to the world. We cannot allow those who have not entered into a genuine relationship with Him to represent us. It’s like allowing a mere acquaintance to introduce your Daddy to the world. Nobody knows a father like his own child.
The other thing that we have to do is love and forgive. Remember that we wrestle not against flesh and blood but principalities and powers. The person who is being used of the enemy needs someone to pray for them. When the enemy has moved on to another target, the person that was his puppet will need the forgiveness of those he/she used manipulated insulted, plotted against and attempted to destroy. We forgive because we have been forgiven. We forgive because we are forgiven as we forgive. If we have accepted the great commission then we have been given power and authority to act as ambassadors of Christ. We must walk in that authority and use the power to show the world true commitment to kingdom building.
Don’t let an imposter introduce your Daddy to the world.

Feeling some type of way…

I’m feeling some type of way about this whole birther movement.  When was the last time a sitting president was raked over the coals about his citizenship?  Never that’s the last time.  I will be the first to agree that people have freedom of speech and a right to believe what they choose to believe but come on!  It’s time we call this whole thing what it really is.  RACISM.  President Obama is the only president to have taken office with a deficit the size of the government and he is still castigated about government spending.  Who spent the surplus that was left by the Clinton administration? President Obama’s confidence is continuously called arrogance by his detractors.  He is belittled for his use of a teleprompter.  Who memorized every speech they give?  And exactly where do “they” want to take America back from?  I’ve heard commentators and pundits refer to him as “Obama” disrespecting the pomp and circumstance and respect that the office of PRESIDENT is due.  And even after he showed his “long form” birth certificate there are still those who want to insinuate that it’s not authentic.  And let’s not talk about the whole Bin Laden issue.  So many campaigned on the assumption that the president’s lack of military experience would prevent him from being able to make difficult decisions when it comes to the military.  Well he proved that wrong and for some it’s still not enough.  President Barak Obama, is the president of the united states.  He was elected by the people.  He is doing the best he can with a government that was already a mess when he took office.  He loves and respects this country and the rights of it’s citizens to hate and disrespect him.  I’m proud of the President of the United States because he is doing a great job.  It doesn’t matter if he’s black or white, because quite frankly, he’s both.  Let’s get over the race thing already!

Healed but still tender

I am the queen of procrastination.  I knew since the beginning of the semester that I would have this 15 page paper to write.  I kinda knew what it was going to be about (or so I thought), and I felt that I would be able to Zip it out.  Writing is not something that’s difficult for me because I do it all the time.  This paper however, is kicking my butt.  Not necessarily because of the content, but because of the emotional upheaval that goes along with this content.  It seems that no matter how I think I’m over it still affects me.  In writing this paper which is titled Developing a Healthy Sexual self, I’ve had to look  too many of my very own issues in the face.  I stand on top of them, no doubt about that, but that doesn’t stop them from hitting that tender spot in my emotions.   Every time I try to write about those secret things in my mental attic I have a melt-down.  I’m not melting down this time because I’m taking a different approach.  It’s not as hard as it has been, but it still stings a little.  I’ve had to accept the fact that it will always be a tender spot.  Like the back of my right ankle where they had to cut to repair my Achilles tendon.  It doesn’t hurt anymore, but it’s still tender…perhaps that’s that best that it will ever get.

Workshop Works

I recently workshopped a very personal story in my non fiction class.  I was so nervous I couldn’t sleep the night before.  What would these people think of me once they knew my secret?  Would they look at me differently? think I was a weirdo?  I had no idea.  I submitted this story because it’s a small part of a larger work. Now please understand that I share my poetry willingly and my fiction with pleasure but this story, this deeply personal and emotionally traumatic story was difficult to share.  I had to do it though,  because I know that it’s my purpose to share what happened to me.  There are so many little girls who grew up with the same secret and may never have the courage to speak out and free themselves from the 6000 pound invisible elephant that is strapped to their backs.  It is for them that I tell my story.  It is for the voiceless faceless victims of childhood sexual abuse that I expose myself.  My family often gets angry at me for sharing but this is not about them.  Once,  I asked God why I had to go through the things I went through, the abuse as a small child, being the butt of jokes and the one teased in my (large) family of origin, being often ostracized by my peers, the date rape in college, the bad marriage.  I wanted to know why and He answered me.  Not with a clap of thunder or a flash of lightning, but with a still small voice that seemed to come from deep inside of me.  He told me that it happened because He could trust me to tell it.  So I have to tell it, through my poetry, in my sermons, in my stories.  Every chance I get I have to tell it because I can’t let what I went through be in vain.  I can honestly say that I’m stronger now, and every time I reveal a piece of my story another piece of darkness is eclipsed by light in my soul.  And I will continue to tell, not blaming, or in anger, no longer fearful, or ashamed, but to help liberate the scared, sad little girls that live inside so many grown women.  It wasn’t because of anything that you did.  You’re not bad, there’s nothing wrong with you.  You were a victim, but now you can live in Victory, by not letting what someone else did control you or dictate how you live your life.  I pray that any woman who know’s what I know, and stumbles across this blog, will remember that her worth is not determined by anything said or done, but by the Creator to Whom she is \ worth His Son’s Life Saving Blood. Walk in Peace and Victory My Sisters.

Reality check

Somebody recognized me in the mall once. 

 It was a long time ago when I was still married and my children were still in elementary or middle school.  I was coming out of the bathroom of Freedom Mall (affectionately known as Freedom Hallway) and these two smartly dressed twenty something females kept staring at me.  Now please understand that I’d gone to the mall to get away from home which was just down the street and around the corner.  I wasn’t very happy at home.  On the surface it would appear that I had everything to be happy about.  A nice two-story house on a corner lot in a bougie neighborhood, 3 smart and talented kids, a working husband and 2 more than adequate vehicles.  I had all the plastic a woman could spend and a job of my own that wasn’t too bad.  I wasn’t happy.  Inside I was broken, hurting lower than low.  My mother had recently died, my marriage was on the rocks and I just didn’t know what I was going to do with myself. 

When these young ladies continued to stare at me I looked down at my feet to see if perhaps I had toilet paper stuck to my shoe.  Or worse if I had toilet paper hanging out of the back of my pants.  I didn’t.  I kept walking with an awkward smile I as the young ladies  approached.  Perhaps they were from out-of-town and needed directions or something. “Aint you the Diva?”, they asked.  Well you coulda knocked me over with a feather.  Here I was walking around trying to escape my reality and these two young girls were looking at me like I was some kinda celebrity or something.  “We saw you at The Vault.  We always go to hear you read.”  Back then I did performance poetry at open mics.  I featured a couple of times. 

Diva was my stage name that kinda evolved from an email address that I had when I first ventured into the world of cyberspace.  I was a cake deccorator  at the time and I had aspirations of becoming a “true cake Diva”, and I was soon to be 36 so I adopted the email address Cakediva36.  It was on an AOL poetry board that I first revealed my poetry to the world(wideweb).  I got feedback that was positive for a change and interest.  My poetry gained some popularity in some circles and it gave me the confidence to do spoken word.  I’ll never forget the first time I stepped on stage.  It was at the now defunct Moon Room downtown Charlotte.  I was so nervous, I didn’t know what to wear.  I had also just cut my hair because I’d finally made the decision to loc.  I put on a little black dress with a shimmery gold oversized button down blouse, and open toed shoes.  Not too casual not too dressy.  I was a nervous wreck.  I sat in the back in the corner against the wall as the MC, Curtis McCornkle, gave the safety briefing.  Curtis was an interesting fellow.  Rust colored dreadlocks that mushroomed from his head covered by a brown cap that was unable to reach his skull, freckles that danced across his nose betraying his afrocentricity and revealing his white father.

After what seemed like an eternity he called me to the mic.  I had to squeeze by people because it was standing room only, and people were standing everywhere.  I walked to the mic, cleared my throat and said, “This is my first time, please be gentle with me,” which elicited laughter and applause.  And then it began.  I did two poems Woman? and Turn me out.  Woman was delivered with all the passion of a Lauryn Hill song and politicism of Angela Davis.  And then Turn me out, the sultry ballad of a woman in love offering herself to her man without reservations.  I dropped into my deep sultry, slow, deliberated delivery and at the last word, the room exploded with applause, and I…was…home.  For the first time in my life I found a place that I didn’t have to try to fit in because it fit in to me.

And so I left Freedom Mall feeling good about myself.  My gift was validated, somebody had recognized me in the mall.  I drove home and got out of the car greeted by my children who were playing in the yard.  Smiles and hugs all the time.  My son used to call me Pretty Mommy.  I went into the house and up the stairs to my bedroom, our bedroom.  There he was where I left him sitting in the chair in front of the TV, with his hand in is shorts like Al Bundy and the remote control on his thigh.

“Guess what?  Somebody recognized me in the mall.”  No response.  He didn’t even look in my direction.  I was used to it.  I just went into the bathroom, gathered my composure and came back out.  I sat on the edge of the bed near him.  He still ignored me.  I tried to make small talk.  Finally he said “What you been eating?  Your breath stinks.”

So much for thinking I was something special…

who looks like me…

there are no people who look lke me on the staff of the CRW department at the university I attend.  I wonder why that is…

I’ve taken 4 classes in the department (I’m a psych major with aspirations of a minor in CRW), and not only are there not instructors who look like me but it is very rare that we read the works of people who look like me.  In my intro to poetry class we did, but that’s almost stereotypical because of course we would be present in poetry, but not one Langston Hughes, or Zora Neale Hurston, no Paul Laurence Dunbar.  And in the fiction class not one mention of Richard Wright, or James Baldwin.  When they mention classics I need to see some of these names in the mix.  To me Langston Hughes and Paul Laurence Dunbar are the classics. 

So I asked myself why? I came up with thre possible senarios:

1.  They just don’t think that diversity on staff is important.

2.  They don’t feel that African American writers have anything of import to contribute.

3.  They don’t care one way or the other.

If number one is the case then that could mean that they don’t care if students who look like me (even occasionally) would feel mor comfortable reading works by writers who can relate to their daily existence.  Or maybe it’s that students who don’t look like me would not value the works of writers who look like me and share the same reality.  If that’s the case then the powers that be or that hands that hold the purse strings are so far removed from reality that they don’t realize that the popularity of hip hop and it’s ability to purchase bling and make it rain millions at a strip[ club has to do with the purchasing power of their teens and early twenties, at the music section of Americans retailers both on and offline (white kids buy).

If it’s number two and they believe that African American writers have nothing of import to contribute then I offer, Some of the previously mentioned writers and Maya Angelou, Dr. Martin Luther King and contemporary writers Terry McMillan, Eric Jerome Dickey, Omar Tyree, ad infinitum.  We are just like every other race or ethnicity as unique and different as snowflakes and the same as grains of sand.  We live, we hurt we laugh, we suffer.  Some of us are interesting in our lack of interest or interaction with the world.  Our secrets are just as interesting as our reasons for keeping them and our reasons for telling them.  Every story is not of poverty, every dream is not of freedom.  We have as many and diverse stories as there are people who look like me to tell them.  So why would a university with a writing program that is so prolific with its own magazine ignore people who look like me on its staff?  I think it’s because they are too busy feeling their oats, congratulation each other on the number of published writers they have on staff.  But one day…one day they are going to woo me, an Alumnus of this university to head up their African American Writers and writing program, and I will after much consideration, agree.  and then I will introduce them to MY classics, OUR classics.  And I will teach them the beauty of “I’m the Morning” by PLD and they will come to appreciate the diversity of the black writer who so effectively “wears the mask”.  And I will have Bishop Vashti McKenzie as the keynote speaker of writers week and she will talk about he book “Not Without A Struggle” which chronicles her rise to the position of first female Bishop in the Historic AME Church.  Saul Williams will perform his poetry in the big auditorium (sha Klack klack and all),  and Kimerla Lawson Roby will discuss the difficulty of an unknown African American female breaking into the fiction writing business. And they will rename the writing lab after me and a nationwide scholarship shall be created in my honor for non-traditional female students of color who want to pursue a degree in creative writing and then…then I will wake up and realize that nobody really cares what I think…except me.

A letter to Mama

This was an assignment in my creative non-fiction class. I didn’t realize that this was such an emotional issue for me until I started reading it and crying like a punk!

Hey Ma,

Since Grandma has been sick I’ve been thinking a lot about change. How much I’ve changed and how much I want to change. I guess I should back up a little bit. Since you died I’ve gotten divorced and moved back home. When I came home I was broken, emotionally bankrupt, devastated and just plain tired. I was so not prepared for raising and supporting the kids by myself. Never thought I’d have to resort to going to court to get child support but I did. I had a lot of struggles. They changed me. I’m stronger now, or maybe not stronger but strong in different places.

You know that Darlene died, because she’s there with you. It’s strange losing a sibling. She, like you died young, 51. That’s why I’ve been thinking about change. I don’t wanna die young Mama. I don’t want somebody else to have to show pictures of me to Naima and tell her about her Nana, like I have to do with Tyanna about you and Trevor will have to do with Kayla about Darlene. So I’ve been trying to learn how to be healthier, to give up the habits that I didn’t even realize I picked up from you and Grandma. To live past the age of 56. I’ll be 48 this year, Mama, in just a few weeks. I want to live past 56. Grandma’s 86 but she doesn’t have the quality of life that she would’ve if she’d tried to change before it was too late. Now she can’t even get out of the bed by herself, but then she couldn’t even before she got sick.

She’s getting better now, I think I am too because I realized that making lasting change starts with the decision to do so. I can change. I will change. Maybe I won’t live past the age of 56, but at least I will have tried and maybe i can leave a better legacy for my granddaughter. She’s so cute, Mama, you would love her. She smiles all the time and laughs that cute little baby laugh with her tongue between her gums. She’s crawling already. She just turned six months old. I want to break the bad habits that have plagued us for 5 generations and see her children and maybe even her grand children.

I love you Mama, and I miss you so much.

D.

…sum of all my parts

I think I kinda like the idea of writing what I feel and knowing that since I haven’t tried to “publicize” my blog nobody will see it until I feel like letting somebody know it’s here. I don’t feel like letting anybody know it’s here right now. When I was a little kid growing up in a big family, if there was something that I got out of a bubblegum machine that I wanted to keep and not have other people handle it and possible break it I would hide it inside my pillowcase. In my adult life there have been a few things that I didn’t want to share so I put them in my mental pillow case. In my mental pillowcase only I had access to that secret thing. I could touch and keep it safe. Make sure it was unharmed. That’s what this is right now for me. A place where I can empty my mental mess without having to worry about somebody else’s opinion of my pain. The thing about pain is that it’s not comparable. I think it’s awfully unfair to say that someone who lost a child suffers less pain then someone who was raped. The worst thing that ever happened to me hurts me just as much as the worst thing that ever happened to you. Pain is subjective.

So tonight what’s inside my secret pillowcase is the fact that I still love my ex-husband. It really pisses me off that I do, and I can’t stand him, but there’s still a part of me that loves him. Not like my favorite pair of jeans type of love, or my delicious partly homemade guacamole kind of love. If it were that, then maybe I could get over it. It’s nothing so benign. It is that love of my life, I can’t seem to get over it, unable to let go of the past and move on with somebody else, compare everybody else to him even though he treated my like crap type of stupid love. He is on my mind today because it’s his birthday. I try to tell myself every year that I won’t acknowledge it but I always do. He never remembered mine even during the 18 years I was married to him. I would constantly remind him that it was coming up but he didn’t care. Birthday’s were never a big thing to him. Mine has always been to me. His was to me because he was to me. It really sucks. I keep saying that I want to be in a relationship but when someone comes along I push them away because I’m stuck on somebody who’s long since stopped caring about me. People think I left him because I didn’t love him. I left him because he didn’t love me. I’m not sure he ever did. People don’t say the types of things that he used to say to me to people that they love. It’s ridiculous. I still hear his voice inside my head, like a broken record. I told him everything. I let him see what was in my secret pillowcase and he used it all against me. How will I ever be able to trust another man? How will I ever be able to allow myself to be vulnerable? I can’t risk it. It’s been 7 years and it still hurts just as much as if it happen this morning. The betrayal. I alway used to say that I loved him so much that I wanted to see him happy. Even if it meant being happy without me. The kids say he’s a different person. They say he’s happy with his new wife. I guess I got what I wanted…sort of.