Priceless Inspirations (2 page)

I know a lot of young girls and women feel like they don’t have anybody, and like they don’t belong anywhere. Maybe it’s because there’s a lot of drama in their home life and they’re constantly scared and worried about what might happen next. Or maybe they’re like I was and they don’t feel like they have the love of their parents. Maybe they’re bouncing from place to place, from pillar to post, never feeling wanted, and it makes them angry. Some girls grow up without a roof over their heads at all. They live in shelters, in foster homes, or even on the streets.

Do you feel me? Does this sound like you? It was me when I was coming up. It was me for a long, long time. When you don’t feel like you’ve got someone in your life who really loves you, everything is harder. I know firsthand. Everything was harder for me because I was always looking for love.

When you don’t feel like there’s anyone in your life who wants to take care of you, you grow up feeling alone. Again, I know this personally. I felt alone many times in my life and it made me so angry and so sad that I didn’t know what to do, other than lash out.

When you don’t feel like you have anyone in your life that will always be there for you, it gets real hard to believe in yourself. I didn’t believe in myself for the longest time. I felt like I didn’t have anything special or anything unique. I made all kinds of mistakes, looking for a place where I belonged and felt wanted.

Eventually, I found my way, but the process was hard. Sometimes I made it even harder than it should have been because I was always chasing the wrong things. Chasing my idea of what a “home” should be led me away from family members who loved me and into the arms of boys who didn’t. This ultimately led me into single motherhood. This also got me into fights, put me in some dangerous situations and made me a grown woman before I was out of high school.

I learned some priceless gems about life along the way that I hope will encourage you if you’re feeling unwanted and alone. I hope my story will keep you from making the same mistakes I did.

“She ain’t nothing but a crack whore.”

“She oughta be ashamed.”

“She ain’t never gonna get herself together.”

They knew I was listening. They
wanted
me to hear it. Sometimes they even tossed their comments in my direction, saying stuff like, “You probably gonna be just like her.”

I was about ten years old, and at this point in my life, I barely knew my mother. I only saw her when she came to visit me at my Uncle Frank’s house, maybe once a month or so, but I still didn’t like the way the family talked about her. What kid wants to hear their mom talked about like that? No kid wants to hear words like that about their mom, and I was no exception.

It made me angry to hear them running her down like that in front of me. It made me want to know for myself what kind of woman my mother was. I think I wanted to prove them wrong somehow. The truth was, though, at that point in my life, I didn’t know anything much about her other than what her own family said about her.

I didn’t even live in the same house with her, and by this time, I had begun to wonder why. As a young girl, I couldn’t remember a time when I had lived with my family at all. I’d always lived on the other side of town with my great uncle, Frank, and then when he died, with my great aunt, Edwina. My brothers were with our mother and father. Why wasn’t I? My cousins lived with their mothers and fathers. Why didn’t I? Didn’t they want me? Was there something wrong with me? I looked at the families of some of my friends and saw them living with their parents, or at least one of their parents. Why was I different?

Instead, there I was, living with Aunt Edwina in the house she had shared with my Uncle Frank until he’d died a few years before. There I was, growing up with cousins who were a lot older than me, when I had brothers around my age in the same city. There I was, sleeping in a room in my aunt’s house that had once been the dining room, but had been converted to a bedroom, while my mother lived in the 7
^th
Ward in the Marabou Apartments, without me.

“Crackhead.”

My aunt spit out the words and looked at me. She was my mother’s sister, but that didn’t stop her. She seemed to be enjoying it. I felt like she was going out of her way to call my mother out of her name in front of me. It was like she knew that by calling my mother names, she was calling me names, too.

Was it my fault that my mother had a drug problem? I didn’t know.

My aunt kept talking. Every now and then, her mother, my grandmother, would tell her to cut it out.

“Stop talking that way,” she’d say in a low voice, jerking her head in my direction.

“I don’t care!” My aunt’s voice got louder. “If she don’t know, she needs to know!”

Listening to my aunt talk, I felt all kinds of emotions. I felt confused about why I didn’t live with my mother and angry at her for the things her own family said about her. I felt curious about whether the rumors and gossip were true, and unsure about whether she loved me. Most of the time, I didn’t say these things out loud to anyone. Sometimes, though, my feelings bubbled over and spilled out. I lashed out and I fought back. Once, I even struck out at that mean old aunt with her hard words. I wrote about it in my journal:

I can’t believe her! What kinda aunt is she to talk that way about her own sister? As soon as I got into Grandma’s house, she started talking about my mama. She didn’t even want to let me in the house at first. Tried to stand at the door and block me. But it’s Grandma’s house and she couldn’t stop me. So then she started with her mouth: “Your mama was here with her crackhead self. Nerve of her, bringing that stuff here to my mama’s house. She need to quit running the street and come and get y’all asses.”

She went on and on, running down Mama in front of me and I got sick and tired of it. I just decided I was gonna make her shut her damn mouth and if she didn’t want to shut it, I was gonna shut it for her
.

“Stop calling my mama a ‘crackhead’!” I screamed in her face. “Stop it!”

“Little girl, you need to shut up or I’ll whip your ass.” She got this real serious look on her face and I knew she was gonna hit me in a minute, but I didn’t care. I don’t back down from a challenge from nobody and she’s old, too. I probably coulda made her swallow her teeth
.

“Come whip me then,” I shouted. “Come whip me, if you can, I don’t care. You ain’t no kinda aunt anyway! Don’t you get it? She still my mother and I love her, so don’t be calling her out of her name in front of me!”

“I call her a crackhead because that’s what she is!”

I went at her, swinging for all I was worth. I wanted to hurt her—I wanted to hurt her so bad. I would have ripped every hair out of her head if I could have
.

My grandmother stepped into it and pulled me off of her. She told me how wrong I was and tried to make me apologize, but I wouldn’t. And I won’t. I won’t do it. I hate her. I hate her and I always will
.

Now, I understand that fighting my aunt was really, really disrespectful and I’m embarrassed that I did it. At the time, I had so many feelings of hurt, confusion and shame, and I kept them bottled up inside me. The only thing I could let out was the anger. It was the only emotion I felt safe with, and it grew and grew the older I got, the worse my mother got and the more I needed her.

By the time I swung on my aunt, I knew that a lot of what she was saying was true, but when I first started visiting my mother at her apartment in East New Orleans, I didn’t know for sure. At the time, I was only ten years old. It would be years later before I tried to press her for answers, and even now, I hold back. As a kid, I didn’t even know how to ask what I wanted to know. I knew I couldn’t walk up to her ask, “Are you a crackhead?”

Some of the earliest memories I have of trying to get to know my mother at that age was of sitting in her dark apartment, feeling bored.

Taken Away

The story they had told me up to that point in my life was that my Uncle Frank said, “I’m going to get that little baby. That baby girl is too pretty to stay up in there.”

Uncle Frank’s children were all nearly grown. His youngest was in high school, and his wife was a stay-at-home mother who loved the idea of raising another little girl.

He just went and got me. That was the reason I lived with Uncle Frank and his family, or so I thought for the longest time. It wasn’t until years and years later that I asked my parents about why I never lived with them, and why they let someone take me and never tried to get me back.

When I heard the answers, they nearly broke my heart. The truth was, at that time, my parents loved drugs more. They just did, and that was all there was to it. So when you say you feel like “nobody cares about you,” I can relate. When I was a baby, my parents basically gave me away.

Uncle Frank was an older man. He was my grandmother’s brother. I know lots of people are raised by their grandmothers. You might wonder why my grandmother’s brother came for me, and why my grandmother didn’t. I’ve often wondered, too. For some reason my grandmother and I just aren’t close. I’m not sure why. There’s probably a reason, some family problem or secret that I am not aware of. There was a time when I felt hurt by it. I couldn’t understand why all of my mother’s family seemed to hate me, why they had so many negative things to say about me, and why my pictures were never on the mantle at my grandmother’s house, but I don’t care anymore. It’s all right. Uncle Frank and his wife, my Aunt Edwina, were good to me. They gave me my first real home and they protected me.

I don’t remember my parents visiting me there, but much later on, they both told me that they did. They said they came and wanted to take me places with them, but I hid my shoes so I wouldn’t have to go. They said I cried.

I guess even then I knew that things weren’t “all good” with either one of them. Or maybe, to my toddler eyes, they were strangers. Aunt Edwina and Uncle Frank were the only “parents” I’d known, even if I didn’t call them “Mama” and “Daddy.” Besides, why would I want to leave? I was happy living with them.

Later, when I was older, I’d learn how heavily addicted my mother had become by that point. She was running the streets with the worst of characters trying to get drugs. I learned about the things she’d do, and let others do to her, just to get enough money to get high.

I learned these things later. As a very little girl, all I knew was I lived with Uncle Frank and Aunt Edwina and that everything was happy and good for me at their house. That is until Uncle Frank passed away when I was six.

I was there when it happened. He was lying on the couch and me and one of my cousins were playing with him. Playing with Uncle Frank was an almost every day thing at their house. Uncle Frank would come home from his job and sit on the couch and we’d be all over him, rubbing his head and wrestling and stuff. He never seemed to mind. Usually he’d be laughing and trying to tickle us and everyone would be acting silly and having fun. But on this day, after just a little playing, he rolled off the couch and hit the floor. At first we thought he was just playing around, even though he hit his head pretty hard when he fell. We jumped on him, rolling around on top of him, laughing and tickling.

But he wasn’t playing. He was having a stroke, and we didn’t know it.

When he stopped moving and his face sort of froze in this expression that wasn’t normal, we finally realized this wasn’t a game. One of my cousins called the ambulance. I’ll never forget when the paramedics came and strapped him onto their gurney and took him out of the house. I remember feeling very scared.

I never saw him alive again.

I don’t remember anything about his funeral, or anything much about the days after that, but I’ll never forget Uncle Frank. He taught me a lot about how a real man takes care of his family. He taught me what family life looks like. He taught me about love.

I spent years after he passed away trying to get that life back.

After Uncle Frank’s passing, I stayed with Aunt Edwina. By now, my four cousins, her children, had grown up and moved out, so it was just me and her most of the time. She was an older lady by now, old enough to be my grandmother, but she still had enough energy and love to care for me.

Uncle Frank’s death was hard on her. By the time I was nine or ten, I knew that Aunt Edwina drank too much in the years after Uncle Frank’s death. Sometimes when she was drinking, she was hard to be around. She wasn’t mean or abusive, but it was like she’d get lost in her own feelings and forget I was there. If home is really where the heart is, her home and her heart were broken after losing Uncle Frank. I was young, but I kinda understood. I tried to get out of her way and let her grieve. At the same time, I was becoming more curious about my own family.