have you heard the hoopla? it's my birthday! and that's pretty amazing. being able to speak with 25 years behind me gives me a comfortable throne with plenty of room to grow. everybody wants to know what i'm doing and i'm actually babysitting my niece and nephew who are 4 year old twins. that's the coolest gift i've gotten lately. in fact, she just asked me how old i am and i just replied "OLD!" and for all she knows, i am. she's been looking up at me for her entire life. in her mind, she is young and i am old. but more so than her perception of me, today i recognize what she represents.
yesterday, i was babbling to one of my friends that i felt like i had nothing to show for these 25 years except for a Coach bag (i ain't got no class...in my Camron voice), some stretch marks and more loans than lessons. but i'm looking at these children in amazement and especially missing my own (who's on vacation - apparently when you're young, your vacation is all expense paid).
so i started thinking, the only way i can appreciate what i've been given is to understand and admit who i am.
growing up, i struggled with things i couldn't understand until i was much older. learned that some family ain't family at all and started building love from the ground up and not from the blood in my veins. i had to understand that titles were for everyone but me, identifying measures to explain a list of expectations and responsibilities. mothers were supposed to be your style icon and best friend, fathers were supposed to interrogate your first boyfriend, brothers were supposed to fight him and sisters were supposed to stay up late with you talking about him. but i never knew a mother, a father, a brother or a sister that embodied any of those things. i saw grown women jealous of little girls. mothers vying for the attention of a man unwilling to share the spotlight with his daughter. i can only imagine how hard it is to love a man who loves someone else, never mind the someone else being the person you gave him from your own womb. i know a man who lost both of his parents before he turned thirteen and hasn't loved since, not because he doesn't want to but more so because he doesn't know how. i used to ask God to change the way i looked so people would stop staring at me instead of my sister. my black eyes, these big brown eyes and that milky complexion that had my mother looking more like my nanny. it wasn't that i hated what i saw in the mirror, i hated what everyone else saw. looking at me like a sideshow monkey wondering when did 'black' girls start making babies that didn't look as 'black' as them. i wanted to blend in with 'black' girls, my 'black' sisters until i realized that there was nothing 'black' about us. we were in america as foreigners but america was foreign to us. we were west indians, displaced africans with spanish grandparents, white uncles and indian aunts. it was hard to look 'black' when your 'blackness' depended on your geography and because we had been moved around so much, we could never achieve the solidarity of american black because we were pieces of different nations tied together. so i gave up on looking 'black.' i stopped feeling like i owed this country an explanation for a culture they were so vehemently denied and i started feeling comfortable in my skin. it wasn't that i didn't identify myself as 'black' but rather, i was not limited to being 'black.' nonetheless, growing up on the equator between the ghetto and paradise leaves many a girl questioning her self worth and her value. and i did, plenty of times. i would meet great guys and tell myself that he couldn't want me because i'm just a girl from the south bronx and even further than that, i'm just a girl from a third world country. girls from those places never grew up to be cinderella so i eventually psyched myself out to believe that prince charming would never be able to find me and if by the off chance that he did, four white mice would never be four white horses for him to ride off into the sunset on.
then i found myself suffocating through school. i dove into my school books because i was lucky enough to have that opportunity, not because i loved school. i was disinterested much of the time but i still managed to get A's without a lot of effort. i can't even tell you how many times my mother was called in because my work was too advanced, my responses were too intelligent and my final product was much too wise for my youth. instead of feeling flattered, i was always offended. i tried to figure out what it was about me that spelled out 'dumb' for other people. and then i realized that being attractive to other people meant that being intelligent was unlikely. so i stopped talking about school altogether. if you happened to find out i was smart, then so be it, but i would never talk about doing homework, studying or the fact that i got a 96% on the new york state english regents which was so unbelievable that i was forced to take it twice and the second time, i scored higher with a 97%.
moved on to college and found myself in arms of men i just didn't understand. figured it was easier to go through the motions than try to convince everyone that when i said i didn't give a f.ck that i meant it. eventually i realized that sex was not something to be done but part of someone to love but that was after a baby. and let me just tell you, that deciding to sacrifice your own youth for a spirit the size of a bean doesn't make you mother theresa, it just makes you a hoe apparently. but i digress, i brought my child forth into this world not as a consequence of my actions but as a miracle. she was that 2% that made all the difference and even when i felt stoned for it, there should be no rock bigger than the one you stand on. needless to say, whether it was taking my baby to class with me or letting her go so i could finish school, i accomplished what i set out to do and what people said i couldn't - by any means necessary. was it easy? no but it was necessary.
but while she was gone, growing and learning, i was doing the same thing. i was learning how to love the new me i had become. i was learning the relevance of sex and how it impacted my life specifically. it wasn't until i became a woman that i realized no two women are the same. someone else's formula for happiness might be my recipe for disaster so i stopped wanting the unhealthy things, i started chipping away at the things and the people that didn't make me happy and i learned not to apologize for it. eventually i walked across the stage realizing that i had done a lot of growing up in philadelphia. i did a lot of loving, a lot of hating and realized how to find a balance.
so if i die tomorrow at 25 and 3 days old, they can say that i took my time, that i wrote from my soul and i learned how to feel whole by collecting my broken pieces.
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