Outside of whining about poor treatment from my BBDD, my Mama and I never sat down and had a discussion about men. She didn’t teach me about how I was supposed to be treated, she just lived and I lived completely oblivious to the silent lessons, both positive and negative, that I was learning by watching her relationship.
I get my view of house keeping from my Mama. My Mama’s husband did all the cooking and cleaning while he worked two jobs to give us what we wanted. My Mama would come home from work, grab a Budweiser and watch the stories. To this day, he STILL works two jobs and she helps some with the housecleaning now but she says she won’t cook because she’s spoiled and he shouldn’t have let her get lazy when she was younger because she’s not doing it now.
Tonight my Mama called me and said, “You do have a Mama. I just wanted to remind you.” I laughed at her, realizing that I hadn’t called in a few days.
We talked about my cousin’s upcoming wedding and the DVD she was making for her. Then I told her I’d go through the DVD she sent me and write down suggestions to make the next one better. I picked up the DVD and looked at it, my aunt’s face staring back at me. My aunt is gone. The last time I was in Miami she called my phone and asked me to come see her but I didn’t because I was so busy running the streets with my boys.
I asked my Mama how she felt about her siblings dieing each year. I was kinda afraid to ask her because we never talk about her feelings. She said, “Well, each one of them was sick so I’d rather see them at peace than hurting. When you grow up rough like I did a lot of things don’t get to you. We all gotta go sometime. I’m getting old myself. I got gray hair in the front but I keep dying it so it won’t show.”
“Do you feel old?” I asked her.
“Sometimes I do. Dealing with my sugar levels and thank God I don’t have high blood pressure. But I bought that treadmill but I don’t even use it anymore because it makes my knees hurt.”
She asked how my friends are doing and I told her that Tamara’s wedding is a few months away but she was going through fear, not knowing if it was truly the right thing to do.
“Well, all I have to say is, She got time. If God don’t want her marriage to happen, she won’t make it down that aisle. God will take care of it.”
“That’s what she says too, but I don’t know. I think we can all make a decision without God having to bring disaster.”
“Tamara has her head right, if she’s trusting God to show her, He will.”
“I don’t want to have to deal with any of that,” I told her softly. “Sometimes I think that relationships are more headache than they’re worth. Maybe I should just stick to my fantasy boyfriends.”
“The problem with these women today is, they don’t know their cootchie from a hole in the wall,” she said and I laughed. “They think that they have to take care of a man to get him to stay. They think if they do everything for him he will love them but all they’re really doing is showing him that they love him more than they love themselves and no man will respect that. The man will know that he can do whatever he wants and she will still love him and stand by him, so he WILL do whatever he wants.”
“If a man acts a certain way when ya’ll first get together, that’s how he’s going to continue to be. If it hurts you and you let it slide, he will never change,” she said. “So it’s on YOU if you stay and continue to be hurt over it. You don’t like it, but you actually choose it if you still stay with him. You are choosing to deal with it.”
“My whole thing is,” she continued. “You can’t force a man to be who you want him to be. If he’s not ready, he’s not ready.”
“How will you know he’s ready?” I asked her.
“Because…He will make it happen. You won’t have to do anything, you won’t have to prove yourself and you will see that he is making all the effort to be with you. Look at your sister, she did that wedding all by herself. That man wasn’t even working. He saw she was paying for everything and he wouldn’t even go and get a small job to help her. Do you really think he was going to take care of her after she did all that? Hell no! He couldn’t even take care of himself. How is he going to add to her life? Now look at him.”
“You make me want to cry,” I told her.
“You should cry. You should cry tears of joy that you ain’t in no mess like that.”
“Why do you think I’m not in a relationship, Ma?” I was curious to hear her opinion.
“Cuz you don’t play that shit! You ain’t wit’ it! You know that the man is supposed to take care of the woman and I know you ain’t fallin for that ‘I’m in love so I’ll take up the slack’ mess. Meet a man who takes good care of his Mama and says good things about her and you will find a good man. If he honors his Mama and his family then he will honor you and your family if he chooses to make you his wife.”
“I agree,” I told her.
“If you never listen to what I have to say, please remember this–MAKE YOURSELF. Don’t wait for a man to make you. Become who you are going to become and then when you add a man to the mix you will be more confident in who you are and you’ll always know that if things go wrong you can make it on your own.”
“That’s how I feel now. I know I can make it on my own. I don’t feel like any man has ever contributed to my success, but I’d like to build some part of my life with him. Even though I expect him to be able to take care of me financially, he’s really gonna be hard pressed to experience the type of success that I am going to achieve no matter how great his business is going. So it’s not really about the money, it’s about knowing he’s down for me and he’s willing and positioned to support me in whatever way he can because he truly wants to see me reach my goals.”
When we hung up the phone my heart was hurting. I asked myself, “If he’s supposed to handle things financially and you don’t cook or clean then what would you bring to the table?”
I began to feel badly as I searched my heart.
Well..I’m Tee. I have the gift of encouragement and motivating those around me to success. I do it with my friends. I’m smart too. I have a healthy work ethic and I love to work hard and long…the same way that I love people. I’m loyal and every man needs a woman beside him who believes in his dream and wants to help him get there, just like I want him to support me.
I don’t know man. My friends and their relationships kinda make me glad that I’m not in one. But I guess it’s the same as my friendships. None of my friendships are easy to maintain. We fight, we get emotional and we sometimes say the wrong things, but in the end, we all know we aren’t going anywhere and we truly want the best for each other’s lives.
The older I get, the more I get to know who my Mama is. I used to think she was so…ughh…But now that I’m grown I see things so differently.
She’s a woman. Just like me.