Rat Race: One Mile Up and to the Left

nazie4 Comments

In a little more than a week from today, we will be receiving a slip of paper in the mail that may change our lives in quite significant ways for many years to come.

When we first moved to California from New York City, our kids were still so young (1 and 2) that we hadn’t given a whole lot of thought to schooling. Right before we were leaving New York, though, I had the opportunity to observe how several of my friends—both the ones whose kids were going private and the ones who were going public—began maneuvering for the schools they were interested in. Now I have NEVER been good at “maneuvering.” My personality is such that I can speak to anyone and everyone unless I have an agenda or need something and then I can barely look them in the eye! It’s something of an oddity.  

And so I breathed a sigh of relief at the idea that we would be bypassing the competitive NYC school scene by moving to the “wide open” schools of Northern California.

Someone hand this woman a clue!

Since we had no idea where we would be living in the Bay Area, I decided to put in an application at the preschool where the child of one of our few friends here—a Stanford professor—attended school. I applied in May for a September start date, which I thought was more than reasonable. I also thought that once I arrived, I could look around and see if there were any other alternatives that would work better for us.

Once I got to Northern Cali, it became clear quickly that the school scene, though less overt, was no different from the one in New York. All the “good” schools—that is, the highly sought-after ones—were, well, highly sought after and so completely jam-packed to capacity. The remaining options reminded me of one of those stores where, at first glance, the clothes looks cute but then once you start trying things on, everything’s just a tiny little bit jacked—the sleeves are too long or the middle’s too baggy or the logo says Prado instead of Prada.

What about the school for which we had already submitted an application? Well, we had quite unwittingly applied to what was probably the hardest-to-get-into preschool in the entire state, a university lab-school where people put their kids on the waiting list the moment they are born. I’m sure you’re having a good laugh and indeed it was funny once we were told the full story. And we heard not a word from them until quite literally the day before school started when I got a phone call from the director of admissions who told me they had a spot for my daughter. (The off-topic moral of the story here: Don’t ever assume something can’t be happen because other people tell you it can’t happen.) I don’t know why we got in. I have my suspicions—though I don’t think it’s the obvious because the school is very diverse—but there you have it.

When it came time for Kindergarten, our natural and first choice was our local public school. It’s close by, lovely and there is a Spanish immersion program we were excited about. At some point during the school year, though, it became clear that as much as we loved the school and the parents, it was not going to meet the particular needs of our child.  And so we started looking for an alternative. We found it in the form of an innovative private school, just up the hill from us. It was love at first sight from the moment we stepped on campus—the kind of school that makes you want to go back to being a child so you could go there! And it just got better as we learned about their philosophy, programs and teaching.

Alas, as with all things in life there is a downside or two:  1) It is quite difficult to get into; and 2) It is wildly expensive.

Boy, am I having déjà vu of the Manhattan schooling rat race.

We threw caution to the wind—I do that well and drag my poor husband along—and applied. And with each step, we fell in love with the school and its philosophy of teaching more and more. We know our daughter’s chances of getting in are remote at best. And we also have no idea how we are going to pay if she does get in. Seriously. No idea.

But I keep repeating to myself:  If it’s meant to be, God and the universe will provide.

Record Bearers

Tanji11 Comments

Black women are often the family historians. I have learned this especially with the tradition of  taking, receiving and archiving photographs in black families. When I asked my husband this morning if he wanted me to track his genealogy as well, he replied, “I am not really one for history.” I never thought I was either. My penchant for “History” usually dates back to 1979, both the year of my birth and the birth of commercial hip-hop (though I am a “soul” child at heart). However, this morning I have been doing some digging, and . . . well, I may just fill out my census form after all.

On ancestry.com I found my great, great, great-grandmother, Pleasant McFatter. She was, as of the 1900 Census, a 62-year-old resident of Spring Hill Township, NC. She had 12 children, including my great, great-grandmother, Mary McFatter, who was herself a single-parent of 6. Pleasant was a washwoman and Mary a day-laborer (Though they had both been out of work for 2-3 of the last six months.) Neither woman could read nor write. The widowed Pleasant rented her home, where her daughter and four grandchildren resided, including Henry, my great-grandfather.

I have never, until today, known this history, or any history of my paternal side, back any further then my great-grandfather’s generation, and even his name was unknown to me. My great-grandmother Lou, who my father knew well, was Henry’s wife. Once she told my father that she fled from North Carolina to New York after having murdered my great-grandfather because he was abusive to her. I did find Henry McFatter’s death record and he died at the curiously young age of 29, though no record of the cause of death was noted.

Part “fact” and part “legend” these histories become the makeup of who we are, though they are often so distant and silenced in the present . . .

Tanji is a wife and mother of three. She has two boys and one girl. She lives in Philadelphia, her favorite chocolate city. She is an educator and her first “baby” is now a Howard University graduate and a Cocoa Mama.

Whose Children Are These?

ORJ6 Comments

I am conflicted when I read about the orphans taken out of Haiti in the days after the devastating earthquake there.  By now, we’ve all heard the story of the missionary group that improperly removed children from Haiti, despite repeated warnings to their leadership that they lacked the authority to do so.  Lest we conclude this was just the mistake of misguided, but well-intentioned ordinary people who didn’t know any better, the U.S. government has also been responsible for improperly conceived plans to take children out of Haiti.  Governor Rendell of Pennsylvania, with the support of the Obama administration, successfully organized an airlift of 54 Haitian children who were supposedly in the process of being adopted, despite being aware that not all of the children were orphans, or even in the adoption process.  It is not, however, only rescue missions and airlifts that give me pause.  In the days after the earthquake, a feel-good story surfaced of a widowed white woman who had all but completed the adoption process for twin babies in Haiti, a boy and girl.  With the help of the U.S. embassy and a non-profit group, she was able to hasten her adoptive childrens’ arrival in the U.S. after the quake.  When reading the article, I scanned the page for a picture, wanting, in particular, to see the little black girl.

Children need and deserve supportive homes where they will be loved and taken care of.  My child is in a home with two parents who adore her and are committed to her well-being, no matter the sacrifices that her well-being will require.  I am in no position to deny that to any other child, regardless of whether that child is of the same race as his or her adoptive parents.

There is something unsettling, however, about the speed with which these children were improperly (and, likely, illegally) taken out of their home country.  I see a troubling arrogance behind the intentions of the missionaries and the U.S. government: the assumption that anywhere but Haiti would be better for those children; the assumption that the life Americans could provide for the children would surely be better than any life Haitians could provide for them in Haiti.  The assumption, even, that whites looking to adopt these children would necessarily be capable of raising a black child in the United States.

Staring at the picture of the little girl, I first wondered, “has this mother mastered the most basic of parenting tasks for those fortunate enough to raise a black child—that of grooming a black child’s hair, in all it’s curly and kinky glory?”  More substantively, I questioned whether she had grappled with the harder questions, like how race will impact the twins’ educational experience.  Has she considered the assumptions that teachers may make about their intelligence and capability on account of their dark skin?  Is she, and the other white adoptive parents implicated in these news articles, prepared to confront the lack of celebrated role models for their adopted children; to counter societal preferences for blue eyes and straight blond hair that their brown children do not have?  In the hopes of raising a “colorblind” child, will these parents errantly avoid discussions about race and racism in their home, thus leaving these babies to draw conclusions based on their observations of a world that inevitably places black and brown people at the bottom of a social hierarchy?  Have these parents confronted their own beliefs about race, both conscious and unconscious?  Have they considered how their own understanding of race, or a lack thereof, will affect their ability to parent these children?  Considered, even, whether their own psyches harbor the very same assumptions that allow missionary groups and government officials to disregard the right of a sovereign black nation to control when and how their children might be removed from their country?  Do any of these white parents believe themselves to be superior parents for these black children because they are, well, white?  Note, I haven’t even begun to address what the adoptions mean for the loss of Haitian identity among these children.

My suggestion is not that being white should necessarily preclude white people from adopting black children.  No race has the monopoly on properly raising children, and black children do not “belong” to only black parents.  Indeed, to open your heart and home to a child you did not conceive is a beautiful thing.  But like any adoptive parent, you shouldn’t be deemed fit to adopt a child if you’re not prepared to address the unique circumstances of that child.  Growing up as a person of color can be challenging enough; to grow up without parents who can understand—or worse, refuse to acknowledge—that experience is doubly difficult.  It would be a mistake for a white parent to assume that because race is not a factor in their own life, that it won’t be a factor in the lives of their black adoptive children.

Even I, a black mother, struggle with properly contextualizing race in my daughter’s life.  And if I can struggle, then I’m left wondering about how these white adoptive parents are faring.  Who, I wonder, are the best parents for these black children?  To what type of family can a black child properly be said to belong?

Raising Non-Racist Kids

Dr. Mama Esq.12 Comments

I don’t know if I’ve extolled the virtues of this book enough via the internet, although I’ve certainly done so for my in-person folks. I mentioned, and my husband bought, NurtureShock solely for the chapter on race, because news articles had convinced me that these people thought like I did, and better yet, had great data to back it up. For example, something I’ve believed for a long time, is that you cannot teach anti-racism or even have successful integration if you can’t talk about race. Same for our children. Here’s this writer’s take on what NutureShock says we should not do, if we want to raise anti-racist children:

Step One: Don’t talk about race. Don’t point out skin color. Be “color blind.”

Step Two: Actually, that’s it. There is no Step Two.

Congratulations! Your children are well on their way to believing that <insert your ethnicity here> is better than everybody else.

Despite the evidence, it continues to amaze me that parents think that not talking about race and racism will somehow protect their children or make them colorblind. For white parents, NurtureShock’s authors do a great job of striking down that idea. Not talking to white children about race makes them especially susceptible to belief that being white is better than being any other color. Without active push-back from parents (and I would argue educators), white children do not learn to be colorblind, but rather learn what is reflected all around them – that white people are superior.

While the chapter does not go into much about what racial and ethnic minority parents should do to ensure that their children are not racist, I think much of the same advice goes for <put your race and ethnicity> parents too. In fact, I think not talking to your kids about race and racism is even more dangerous for kids of color than for whites.

Why? Well, if white children are coming to understand their superiority, and perhaps other latent messages about other folks, why would we not assume that kids of color are not as well? In other words, as white children learn to internalize the racial and ethnic hierarchy, so do kids of color. Whether you like it or not. Given this, as parents of color I think its even more important for us to talk to our children about race and racism, if just simply to counteract the negative messages about themselves that they receive on a daily basis. Children as young as 3 understand race.

Many parents of color that I talk to just feel that talking about race before their kids bring it up encourages them to “see race,” and this belief is something parents are heavily invested in, no matter how much research I tout. True, people of color come to learn the racial hierarchy at some point in their lives. Unlike whites, they most likely do not have the privilege to ignore it or act like its not there. But I would suggest that instilling positive, anti-racist messages from a young age help tremendously in being able to put the social hierarchy in perspective as they get older, and to better understand the world around them. Consider this:

But Harris-Britt explained that if you’re reading a picture book to a child, if you are pointing out the red of a balloon, or the yellow of a lion’s fur, you can also point out the brown of a person’s skin.

Ignoring the color of skin, yet dutifully pointing out the color of every inanimate object and animal, only sends a message to children that talking skin color is taboo.

I grew up in a house filled with books about race and racism; my mother read black literature; my father worked someplace where he was the only black person. I was never taught to hate anyone, but I also wasn’t necessarily taught to love my black self. I don’t remember explicitly talking about race, but do remember hearing adult conversations about racism, and watching Eyes on the Prize. I remember being in elementary school, a school that was in my neighborhood and therefore 99% black. There was one white boy, maybe when I was in 3rd or 4th grade. And the most I can remember about him is thinking, “Wow, his family must be really bad off if he has to go to school with us.” Some way, some how, I understood that whites were up here, and we were somehow down here. I don’t think its simply because of segregation in schools; I remember feeling the same way when I saw white families in the neighborhood, or the one old white lady on the block who couldn’t afford to move when all the black families came into that part of town. Consider this, about school desegregation:

Stephan found that in only 16 percent of the desegregated schools examined, the attitudes of whites toward African-Americans became more favorable. In 48 percent of the schools, white students’ attitudes toward blacks became worse. African-American attitudes were also mixed, but overall were significantly less dismal. African-Americans attitudes toward whites improved38 percent of the time, and turned in the negative direction 24 percent of the time.

I realized how race was tied to class because my parents didn’t have a car, and we had to get a hack back from the supermarket, like many of the black people I knew. Intuitively, I knew this:

When its students were polled if they’d like to live in a diverse neighborhood when they grow up, about 70 percent of the nonwhite high-school juniors said they wanted to. But only 37 percent of whites wanted to. Asked if they’d like to work in a racially diverse setting when they were an adult, only 40 percent of the whites said yes.

But maybe if I’d been specifically taught about slavery, its evils, Jim Crow and redlining, along with messages that of positive associations, I could have made better sense of what race really meant. Perhaps in being told the reality, maybe I would have been more indignant, more outraged rather than passive and acquiescent. Maybe with some active anti-racist parenting, for both white children and children of color, we can avoid this type of thinking for our children.

Billboards and Conspiracy Theories

ORJ20 Comments

The more news coverage the “Too Many Aborted” billboards in Atlanta get, the angrier I become.

It never ceases to amaze me how much time and money are spent trying to prevent women from obtaining abortions, rather than trying to support women when they have their babies.  If women could be sure that in this, the wealthiest country in the world, they would be guaranteed adequate housing, nutrition, medical care and education for their children, they might make different decisions when faced with an unplanned pregnancy.  The scant attention and resources paid by anti-abortion groups to these issues leaves me with no choice but to conclude that it is not about “respecting life;” it’s about controlling me.

But now the movement is targeting black women, and them’s fightin’ words.

When the Supreme Court hands down decisions that burden a woman’s right to make choices regarding her reproduction, that burden is disproportionately borne by poor black and brown women.  Wealthy white women have access to private health care should they need to terminate a pregnancy.  That luxury is not always afforded to the poor and working class, making those decisions anything but race-neutral.  When powerful whites try to control my reproduction, it starts feeling like a plantation up in here.

And now, anti-abortion whites are using racism against ME to further THEIR cause.  The billboards in Atlanta, as well as media projects like Maafa 21, suggest that abortion is all part of a grand conspiracy to eliminate black folks.  Legitimately distrustful of the government and medical establishment (due, in no small part, to racist and unethical governmental research projects like the Tuskegee Syphilis experiment), the black community is becoming increasingly receptive to the suggestion, despite the fact that the conspiracy theory–like most conspiracy theories–is based only on half-truths.

So, let me get this straight: white anti-abortion advocates get to capitalize on America’s very own racist past (and present) in their pursuit to control my black body?  The irony would make me laugh…if I wasn’t so pissed off.

Who is the “Fairest” of the Them All?

nazie5 Comments

Don’t want to beat a dead horse here. But last month’s issue of Vanity Fair with the nine lily-skinned–albeit lovely and talented–young women with the banner declaring them the acting talent for the next decade really pissed me off. And I’m just not over it. 

The whole decade?

The last time I was this bitter was back in 2000 when Vogue featured Gwyneth Paltrow with a headline that screamed something about her being the “It-girl for the Millennium.” I’m sure that Ms. Paltrow is a fine human being but wasn’t the last millennium the millennium of the blonde, blue-eyed beauties? Do they get this one too?

Just so that we are clear: I am committed to the principle of unity. I believe at my core that at the end of the day there is only one race and that is the human race. And everything in my life bears witness to this belief.

Here is what I don’t love: Unfairness. Injustice. And piles of crap handed to me like it’s chocolate cake.

Have you ever heard of the doll experiments conducted in Harlem by Drs. Kenneth and Mamie Clark back in the late 1930s? These series of experiments found that black children often preferred to play with white dolls over black ones. That when asked to fill in a human figure with the color of their own skin, they frequently chose a lighter shade than was accurate. And most devastatingly, that when asked, African American children gave the color “white” attributes such as good and pretty, and the color “black,” bad and ugly. These experiments caused an uproar back in the 30s and contributed to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education.   

Oh no, you say! That was eighty years ago! These are different times! This is the age of Obama, Winfrey and … I don’t know … lots of other folks. Well, sure, some things are different. There has no doubt been progress. But consider this: in 2006 a filmmaker recreated the doll study and documented it in a film entitled A Girl Like Me. In spite of everything that has changed, she found the same results that the Drs. Clark did in the 1930s and 40s.

I could have told you that watching my five year old and her friends these past few years, in spite of very explicit lessons that my friends and I have attempted to instill in our children of color. I myself have seen and heard things that have triggered a hysterical phone call or two to my girlfriends.

We don’t know exactly why children attribute negative characteristics to their beautiful brown and black skin. But many of us have our suspicions. And somewhere at the top of my personal list sits the images and messages they are bombarded with every day of their lives–very much like the one on the cover of Vanity Fair last month. Yes, Disney, you do get credit for Tiana and we do appreciate the bone you threw us but how about a true reflection of who we are and what we look like as a human family every single day and not just on special occasions? How about it, Hollywood? Are you in?

When I arrived in America on the cusp of my teens 30 years ago, I didn’t NOT feel beautiful. But I wised up very quickly. The message was loud and clear and explicit! Not only was I hearing: “You’re not pretty” (actually what I heard was: “You’re ugly” but … tomatoes, tom-ah-toes …), I also never saw anyone on TV, in the movies, in the magazines, anywhere, that looked like me (and who was considered beautiful). Remember, there was no bevy of ethnic beauties like Eva Mendes or Salma Hayek or Shohreh Aghdashloo back then. There was, however, Iman and Naomi and Tyra and a handful of Huxtable women. Oh and Diann Carroll.

Reflecting back, I realize that at some point I developed a coping mechanism: I started to interpret select images I saw in the media very literally as evidence of the possibility that I, too, may be beautiful. Here’s the short version of how it went:

I’m hearing some very negative messages about my beauty.

I’m not seeing anyone who looks like me who is considered beautiful.

I do see a few black women on TV and in the movies.

Black women have brown skin.

I have brown skin.

They’re brown like me.

These women are beautiful.

Maybe I’m beautiful too.

The bottom line is that our brown and black girls and boys need to see people who look like them achieving, inventing, excelling, curing, leading, creating, thinking, innovating, writing, being lauded, being recognized. They deserve it. They are entitled to it. (There, I said it! The word that makes so many people so uncomfortable. But I don’t understand why entitlement is treated like a natural-born right of some and as a favor for others.)

Our Caucasian children need to see people of color achieving, inventing, excelling, curing, leading, creating, thinking, innovating, writing, being lauded, being recognized.

You are doing every last one of our kids–no matter what race they are–a disservice. That includes you, Vanity Fair, and every one of your brethren across all media.

Stop barraging our children with the nonstop madness. Really! Because you might have gotten away with robbing us of our ability to feel beautiful–and comfortable–in our own skins but we have no intention of letting you do it to our sons and daughters too.

Is your vagina angry?

Tanji12 Comments

Last week I had the extreme pleasure of seeing a student performance of Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues. Approximately 40, brave undergraduate women participated. Far more of them were white, but there was also a handful of black women, including one of my advisees. She played the role of “The Angry Vagina.” It was a fantastic performance, she was convincingly angry, her vernacular was appropriately explicit, she checked hypothetical partners (and gynecologists) for all hypothetical atrocities. I couldn’t help feeling like she had been chosen for this role because she was black (we discussed this and she agreed), even though it also seemed like the role was inauthentically black (we both agreed as well). It didn’t seem like what any black woman I knew would say.

While I applaud Eve Ensler for her progressive theatrical piece, and I have willingly seen now a professional and student production (and left the latter happily with my “Team Rihanna” and vagina buttons), I wonder what black woman would say about sex, body image, rape and sexual assault, etc., if given the platform. I’m thinking about Tricia Rose’s phenomenal book, Longing To Tell. I am also fearing that black women are not really ready to talk openly about the issues raised in that book, that they feel protected by silence and anonymity. I see this explicitly in my current book project.

One of the interesting things about Vagina Monologues is that there is only one very recently written piece about childbirth. It was quite curiously an afterthought. I am certainly liberal enough to think that a woman’s body is not entirely reserved for  bearing kids, however would black women have omitted this altogether from our stories about our vaginas?

My vagina is feeling a little spent! 🙂 Three kids later, multiple partners in, one rape, and countless dreaded gynecological visits, I’m feeling like at the very least I should be other-bodily-part centered. Like, I would love to be more focused on my stomach, thighs, or my arms. Last night in a spirited conversation about weight loss with two other black women, one of my homegirls told me, “you know sex is supposed to help you shed calories!”  I said something like, “I’m married and I don’t have sex,” which thankfully is not true, but I wanted to say something like, “who cares about the vagina, and all activity therein, I want Serena Williams’ abs and arms not her . . . . vagina.” Damn, I don’t even have a working, blog-friendly, authentic vocabulary for it!?!

I do not think my vagina is so much angry as it is exhausted.

Tanji is a wife and mother of three. She has two boys and one girl. She lives in Philadelphia, her favorite chocolate city. She is an educator and her first “baby” is now a Howard University graduate and a Cocoa Mama.

It’s Dark In Here

ORJ8 Comments

I thought I had reached the light at the end of the tunnel.  After eight long months of waking every three hours (and sometimes every one hour or every 45 minutes), my daughter began sleeping ten to eleven hours.  Straight.  Every night.  As the barrage of sleepless nights came to an end, I emerged from my bunker and stopped moving through the world like a zombie.   My husband and I were reacquainted over dinners; I started exercising again; I even watched a little TV!  Most importantly, I started sleeping too.  But things fall apart: after three weeks of nighttime peace, my daughter stopped sleeping so soundly.  Eleven hours became eight, and getting her to sleep became the new challenge.

Having been to the promised land, this backslide is hard to accept.  Rationally, I know this problem is inconsequential, but rational thought does nothing to temper the havoc that sustained sleep deprivation can wreak in your life.  Sleep deprivation, however, is only part of the problem.  The larger problem is my reaction to the deprivation.  For eight months, I was somebody I didn’t like: sarcastic, short-tempered, exceedingly inflexible, quick to assign blame.  I would write that I was somebody I didn’t recognize, but the truth is that I did recognize the person I had become; sleep deprivation just amplified those negative aspects of my personality that I manage to keep under wraps with nine hours of sleep a night.  The advent of a sleeping baby allowed me to neatly wrap those character flaws back up, much to the relief of my husband.  As I now watch her newly established sleeping patterns slip away, I also watch my personality flaws reemerge.  Tensions are again rising in my home, in my relationships, and in my heart.

Parents can pass on character failures to their children, and I worry about what I am teaching her about handling stress.  If I don’t want her to lash out when chaos fills her life, I have to learn to keep my head when chaos comes to mine.  But this lesson is hard, and rational thought again fails me.  I know what it is I need to learn, but I’m not sure how to learn it.  How, in the middle of my frustration and exhaustion, can I find a light in the tunnel, and not merely at the end?

Who’s Loving You?

nazie5 Comments

Is your child in front of you? Take a really good look at him or her. Did he just make you laugh? Did she do something that made you furious? Did you feel a burst of joy when he said something loving?

What if in fifteen minutes, the phone rings. You get up. You walk over. You pick up the phone. It’s your doctor. You went in for a routine checkup late last week. She has the results. You were expecting them Friday, and today’s Tuesday. Four days late but you’re not worried and so you hadn’t called to follow up. You’ve always been healthy. You’re almost always the last person to catch whatever virus is going around—if you catch it at all.

The doctor cuts to the chase. She says three words in quick succession: “It is cancer.” You hear the words but you don’t understand. It’s almost like someone is speaking to you underwater.

Then the walls crash in on you. In one instant, the decades you saw stretching before you are reduced to months. If that.

And the first thing you think is: What about my babies? What is going to happen to my babies? What are they going to do without a mother?

You don’t think it could happen?

I didn’t either. But it did.

When I was diagnosed with breast cancer in my 30s—two and a half years ago—I thought I had been handed a death sentence. It was advanced. It was serious. It had spread. All three typical of women of color at diagnosis.

I was so confused. I had nursed both of my babies for over a year each. I was still nursing my youngest. I had no family history. I had no risk factors. How could this be?

I was in such a fog those first few weeks.

Almost immediately I started beating myself up. This could have been prevented—or hugely mitigated—if only I had looked out for myself as well as I did for every single other person around me. If one of my babies as much as cried funny, I would run her to the doctor. Why had I ignored all of my own warning signs?

I had been so incredibly tired and run down for a few years. I assumed it was because I was a new mother.

I had felt something lumpy in my breast. I assumed it was a clogged milk duct.

I had been angry, furious, raging for a long time. I assumed it was a post-partum something or other.

I seemed to have a chronic yeast infection.

I was catching colds and flu constantly—not like me at all.

By the time I finally got a mammogram, it had been over a year since I hadn’t felt right. The mammogram showed nothing. I had to insist on an ultrasound. The ultrasound picked up a mass. They biopsied it and there it was. All 9 centimeters of it.

It is well known that women of color—and particularly black women—don’t detect their breast cancer until much later. As a result by the time they’re diagnosed, the cancer is much more advanced and thus much more likely to be deadly.

A few months ago at the CNN Heroes event, I had the honor to meet a beautiful angel of a human being—an African American woman from Florida—who, following a breast cancer diagnosis, made it her mission in life to go knocking on doors every weekend to make sure that every single woman who would like a mammogram but can’t afford it, can have access to one. For the obvious reason, I’m a bit hostile toward mammograms (it didn’t pick up my nine centimeter tumor) but I could see how they are of value in certain situations. And there are certainly many other diagnostic tools out there that can detect whatever may be wrong with great accuracy.

The one thing modern medicine is pretty good at is detection and diagnosis.

I’m now two and a half years out. I passed a major milestone at two years post-diagnosis and will pass another one in another two-and-a-half years at the five-year mark. I remember when they had put me into an MRI machine to see whether the cancer had metastasized elsewhere, just praying and visualizing myself dancing at my daughter’s wedding. “Please God, let me raise my children. Please give me the honor of raising my babies,” is what I repeated over and over again in my head those days.

My kids got me through some of the darkest times that followed.

I love my kids. I intend to be around to raise my kids. For that reason, I now take really good care of myself as well.

And I am asking in all seriousness: Are you loving YOU?

The Talk

Benee11 Comments

Last Friday, my soon-to-be ex had “The Talk” with my 7 year old step-daughter. “The Talk” meaning the “Benee and I are not married anymore” talk.

Without me.

We had previously agreed that we would sit her down and tell her together, so that we could both express our love for her and for our family, and reassure her that it was nothing that she did. He’d picked her up from home (I’m usually the one who does that since I have the car) and met me in Manhattan. Our plan was to pick up the boy and spend a nice family evening together.  When I called him to see where they were, he said, “I need you to get out of the car and give J a big hug because I had “the talk” with her.”  Immediately, I was angry. How could he do that without me? He explained that she was asking questions and he felt he had to answer them. He said that she was crying and asking what happened, why was this happening. My heart was breaking as he spoke, but I got out of the car and as they approached, I grabbed her and gave her a big hug.

In those moments, I held her close and I felt broken. All of the pain of everything that led to this point of having “the talk” came rushing back and I was hurt, sad, angry, bitter, and depressed all at once. But, I knew that I had to put on a strong front, a happy face, and be supportive of her needs at the time. I admit I was hurt and disappointed that he talked to her without me, but then I understood that he felt the need to ease his daughter’s confusion and I allowed him that.

We had a good family evening. She’d been asking why sometimes she stayed with her daddy at grandpa’s house and why sometimes she stayed with me and her brother, without daddy. It was time to explain and I think we put it off for so long because we had not yet tied up our loose ends. We didn’t want to confuse her until we were absolutely positive things we done with us.

And they are.

So now, the next task is handling the more sensitive task of ensuring that the 3 year old boy comes to some understanding of the situation. At least, whatever his 3 year old mind can handle.  He seems to have a confused sense of “home” and that troubles me. This past weekend, he called me “Abuela” at least 5 times. “Abuela! Ummmm Mommy…” was how he started several sentences. That troubles me because I already have issues with the choice we made to have him stay with his father and grandparents during the week and me on weekends. I don’t want to disturb his amazing development as a little intelligent, funny, precocious boy. I’ve read the statistics about the effects of “broken homes” on young people and we’re doing what we can to counter the negative effects by wrapping him up with the love of extended family.

But I’m still his mommy. And I’m still her “other” mother, as she has always known me to be. I over think the future, especially since her father is already focused on the woman he wants to be his next wife. I overthink how maybe, eventually, I will become obsolete to her. Will she still think of me as her second mommy? Or will his new wife replace me and that precious position I’ve held for the last 4.5 years? Will she even remember these early years and all of the love and attention I gave her? Will she remember who taught her how to shop and coordinate her outfits, who did her hair on the weekends, who took her to get her nails done? Will I just be her brother’s mother after this new woman has replaced my position as her father’s wife?

It hurts, at times, when I think of the effect this has and will have on our children. They are so young, so innocent. This is such a huge period of adjustment and I feel we have a lot of careful work to do to make sure they don’t lose their sense of safety and stability. I admit, I’m nervous… I don’t know what to do, how to be….

And that scares the crap out of me.