Evolution Not Resolution

Every year I make a conscious effort to improve myself. I feel as human beings capable of thought and reason, we should never be static. The world around us is ever changing, what excuse have we to remain the same.

How many New Year's resolutions have you made in years past? How many did you actually honor? Don't worry, it's our secret. Here's one I think you can keep. Make a resolution to never make another resolution. They're all the same anyway. Lose weight, eat right, work out, be nice (maybe that one's just me). You vow to stop smoking, take up a hobby, go to church more and you do it all with the best intentions. Because isn't that how we all want to start off our new year, with good intentions? I say to the ruins with that, love. Don't resolve, evolve. Why not just decide to make one thing about yourself, your life, your situation better than the year before. For me that has meant many things over the years. It's included everything from getting promoted to growing as a parent. I love looking back over my life and being able to see growth and change from one year to the next. The key to my evolution is that I set one goal that requires many steps. That way I stay focused on what I've set out to do. Each step is an accomplishment in and of itself. Small victories have the power to keep you buoyed and propel you forward. This year I've decided to include a new philosophy in my evolution, it's one of my favorites. If you want what you've never had, do what you've never done. So simple yet so scary. There's a reason why you've never done it before, it's terrifying to do something new. If you're OCD like me, it's near impossible to do what you've never done because there's comfort in what you always do. You want more but there's comfort in what you have. This year let the first weight you lose be comfort. Shed it like a wool coat in August. The coat I'm shedding this year is made of fear, mistrust, and a complaining spirit. Thank God for a renewed spirit, which I feel is essential to this year's goal. Last year was self-esteem and courage. I learned to ask for what I want and that when I felt less than, I had to keep myself encouraged. This year I'm taking what I want, speaking my heart, and learning not to constantly side eye people. Admittedly I used to be more open to new people. Taking numerous arrows to the heart, be it from friend, family, or partners, will cause even the most loving person to shut down. This year I hope to marry my giving side with my suspicious side and see what they produce. Since I've never done it before I expect something fabulous in return. I'm speaking my heart, come what may. I recently lost my cousin to a hateful, horrible monster. To add to my pain, I never actually said to her, I love you, Jackie. I have no doubt in my mind she knew, but still she should have heard me say it. Now she never will. On the flip side, I've not spoken up enough to say I love you or I'm loving you no more. I've not said what you're doing is hurting me and you need to stop. I don't like being hurt so naturally I don't like to hurt other people. This year is the year of new paths. So sorry in advance to those whose feelings will be hurt. In this war for my happiness and well-being, there's bound to be some collateral damage. Not people but feelings and sadly, relationships. It's time to live, love, and be happy (Paula Abdul). Don't encumber yourself any longer with anything contradictory to that.

Love and Other Illnesses

I sit here in solitude, a by-product of the wreckage caused by one bad choice after another. I am ruminating on distance, loss, and what might have been. I am in love.

Funny thing about love, it will really hit you out of nowhere. A few months ago during a conversation with a friend, I was reminded that in spite of everything I should keep my heart open. I said yeah sure, my heart’s open. I admit to having been guarded for a while. I’d been in pain for so long how could I not be guarded. I understand when relationships don’t work, they just don’t work. Your fault, my fault, it’s not really relative. In the end, the issues were greater than the both of us so it didn’t work. You hurt, you recover, you go on to love again. But what happens when the person you loved and put everything into destroys you? You’ve been cheated on, deceived, abused, had your trust taken and twisted up and shot out of a cannon into the abyss of liars’ hell. The only way to get up in the morning and face the day without slapping the taste out of the next man to glance in your direction is to put a wall up around your heart. But the problem with that is when the wall goes up, you don’t just lock yourself in, you lock love out. The next time love comes looking for you you’re ready to neck roll and finger snap it away because you’re hurt and damned if you will let anyone else cause you the same pain or even anything closely resembling it. We never know how love is going to come. It could be the guy sitting across from you at church but you never see him because your other man, Hurt, is sitting by you. Maybe it was the man who smiled at you in the store but you looked at him like he was something you scraped off your shoe because good old Hurt told you that you didn’t need that man. All you needed was him because as long as you have Old Hurt you’ll never have New Hurt. Old Hurt is comfort and protection. Old Hurt doesn’t tell you that he’s blinding and deafening. You can’t see or hear love because Old Hurt has wrapped himself around you like a cheap wool blanket. Then one day you see a light. Old Hurt was slipping and left a crack. The more you see that light the more you want it. After a while you shed Old Hurt like last season’s Pradas and ever so slowly your heart starts to outgrow its fortress. You start to see and feel love all around you. Your favorite song on the radio, the shirt that hides your minor tummy imperfections, the shoes that make you feel like a diva, the friend that comforts you no matter what you’re going through or how many times you go through it. You’re loved and when you feel love you can give love. Admittedly I started finding love with the love of God. I never knew what it meant to truly let God love you until I felt like I had no love at all. *This doesn’t include my babies.* So when you let God into your heart, it has no choice but to open. When your heart opens, Old Hurt comes slinking back to remind you he’s still hanging around. The difference this time though, you don’t use Old Hurt as a means to protect you from New Hurt. This time you wrap your heart in Charmin so when New Hurt comes, it’s not nearly as difficult to deal with. New Hurt comes and goes, as it should, leaving not even a dent. Then one day you find someone has managed to slip past the layers and layers and layers of protection and found his way into your heart. The hell??? When did this happen and how did you get here?? It’s not the guy sitting across from you at church, it’s not Bottom of the Shoe Barry, it’s not even the nice guy from the library who loves books as much as you. No, it’s the one who’s held your hand as you went from one loser adventure to the next. He’s listened to you cuss and cry, watch you fall in and out of infatuation, been your knight on a white horse through it all. All of a sudden you’re excited when the phone rings and it’s him. You find yourself talking to him for hours and texting him all day. At first you say to yourself, of course I am, he’s my best friend. Then you say but wait, when did I start feeling jealous. Not that fake jealous but real honest to goodness jealousy because he’s on a date or has a girl over. What’s wrong with you?? Why is he all I think about and where did this yearning feeling come from? In a severe state of confusion and distress you call up Dr. Girlfriend and tell her your symptoms. Dr. Girlfriend my brain is swimming, my palms are sweaty, I feel warm and soft inside, my heart’s beating fast and slow at the same time, what’s wrong with me? Dr. Girlfriend shakes her head and makes the following declaration, you’re falling in love. That’ll be $50 and leave a check with my receptionist (daughter) on the way out. Well can I lay down until it passes? I can’t fall in love, not with this person. It’s impossible, it’s improbable, it could never work. As you go over every minute detail, you realize there’s no explanation, no defining moment. It just…happened. Dr. Girlfriend says it won’t pass because you don’t fall out of love. You fall out of intimacy, you fall out of trust, you fall out of respect, but you don’t fall out of love. She goes on to say you better inform him right away, as if he’s somehow in danger. Better to put it all out there and see where it can go. Oh the places we can go, the more you tell the more he’ll know. I don’t think so. Your buddy Old Hurt says you know exactly where this is going. Sad but true, we know how this story plays out. I don’t subscribe to the belief that it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. I’m more of a it’s better to love in silence and keep my best friend then to tell him and have no best friend at all. He’s the one man I can always be myself with and I can tell anything to without judgment. I’ve never had that before. Why risk losing it because I couldn’t keep my heart in check? Marvin Gaye said a one way love is just a fantasy and right now I can live with that. I can live with best friend in reality and whatever else in my head. Ah yes, the obvious question, how do you know he doesn’t feel the same or similar? Come on girls, we know these things. When someone is that close to us, we know. We know if someone has even a passing interest in us. I don’t believe that just because I’m feeling this way, it needs to be explored and expanded. I think that’s where we turn the key to Pandora’s box. The expectation that because one person is falling the other person should adjust (or be willing to) the present relationship. Not so. If we could take this flour, egg, and sugar and make something of it then great. But for now I’m just content to feel something. To know I’m capable of feeling this way again about another person just may be enough. And my heart couldn’t have chosen a better man.

Using My Happy

The first time I heard that phrase was when a friend of mine posted it on Facebook. He was refusing to let some random stranger piss him off and cause him to have a bad day. He said he was going to "use his happy". Bear in mind, this man is a minister and has all the patience and compassion you would expect from a man of God. He is full of love for the Lord and love of the Lord. I can hardly think of a time when he can't immediately flip his switch and use his happy. After I read this I declared from then on I would try to use my happy. I didn't really think about what that meant in its entirety at the time. I had relegated its use to the times I had to interact with my neighbor, dealing with the senseless drones driving the streets of Oklahoma City, or people who don't believe in good customer service. I had not considered that maybe it needed to be applied in my everyday life. I don't remember exactly what led to my epiphany, I had already endured so much in my relationship. I can tell you it was a combination of things, one of which being a picture I'd seen of Eva and Tony Parker. Obviously at the time they were a young happy couple still behaving like newlyweds. What caught my attention was the way Eva looked at Tony. Every time I saw a picture of the two of them, she was always looking at him with so much love in her eyes it just jumped off the page and grabbed my heart. Then I would go interact with my "Tony Parker" and after a while I realized, I didn't feel that way. There was no love or admiration in my eyes. It was just dead. If the eyes are the windows to the soul then what does that say about what's in my heart? This is not me saying I don't love or that I feel nothing for him. But I'm certainly not in love and you know what, neither is he. Here we are years and kids later and our relationship is more fragile than when we first started 10 years ago. We were stronger for a while but that was before I started working again (that's another blog). Once I realized that love exists between us but not "in love" I decided I was long overdue for using my happy at home. I was living the life of the good housewife (without the wife part) but other than being satisfied that the house and my kids were taken care of, I had no true happy for myself. I lived to make sure everyone around me was happy. If that meant I had to sacrifice to the point it hurt or I lost sleep behind it, I would. I had a family, they have needs, it's all on my shoulders. But it shouldn't be. I'm not the only adult or parent in the house, why is it all on me? Because I'm the matriarch?? I'm too young for that. I've still got life in me. I'm not ready for the rocking chair and babies playing at my knee. Can't I be a mother and still be a woman? Shouldn't my happy constitute more than watching my favorite shows on the telly and readhing a good book once in a while? Of course it should, this is my life and I have to live it. I only have the one. So I started doing more things for myself and asking for what I wanted from my relationship. One would think a man who loves his woman would pat her on the back and say, I'm happy for you, it's about time you started living your life. But no, all I got was more problems. More problems, more arguments, more insecurities rising to the surface. He could use or smother his happiness at will but for me, if my life and love doesn't revolve around what's going on in 1432 then I'm either cheating or I've met someone and am about to cheat. Well before this man came into my life I was strong-willed and independent. I'm still independent but somewhere along the way I gave up my will to make him happy and feel safe. I think at the time I thought it was a temporary but necessary shift to ease his mind and introduce him to a quasi-normal life and a quasi-normal relationship. All it did was turn me into someone I didn't recognize. I'm stronger for it but I'm not happy. But don't cry for me Argentina, I've gone into the cave and when I come out I will be using my happy in epic proportions. My happy will be so explosive and mind blowing it will surely leave bodies in its wake. One in particular. And I can't be concerned with that anymore because that means compromising ME again. I'm no longer inclined to do that. It doesn't make me happy.

"So what if it hurts me. So what if I break down. So what if this world just throws me off the edge, my feet run out of ground. I gotta find my place, I wanna hear my sound. Don't care about all the pain in front of me. I just wanna be..happy" - Leona Lewis

Daddy Issues (Sevenof9)

Father. Protector. Provider. Priest of his house. All the things a woman wants for her child. Now replace those words with Abusive, Kidnapper, Liar. That's my father. Also known as HIM. When I first met HIM, I was about 10. He came to pick me up at the airport in Dallas (a visit arranged after numerous terse phone calls), he knew me right away. At an age I knew what he was though not who. He walked over to me and I just accepted that he was my dad. I wish I could say this visit led to many more visits and a long-lasting relationship, but it didn't. It led to the first of many heartbreaks, trust issues, abandonment issues, and issues with having issues. He ended up being one of several men with whom I would fail to maintain a relationship. He continued to come in and out of my life until I finally put a stop to it in my late 30's. By this time our little dance had been perfected: one and two, and back and forth, and the drop me on my ass. But he loved me though, let him tell it. And because I believed him, I went through life erroneously believing other men, until I entered young adulthood. That's when the dynamics of our relationsuhip changed. Now I wanted proof. I would put any man who dared let those words fall from his lips through tests that would rival the most medieval gauntlet. Then when HIM came back into my life I would ease up. I have my "daddy" back and all is right with the world. Left, two, three...Then he was gone again. Marriage, divorce, remarriage, and he's back. Step, together. We get into a fight about my mom. Right, two, three...he's gone. Fast forward two more kids and another "long-term" relationship (with more offs and ons than a strip club) and he's back. This particular relationship is odd in its own right. He looks like HIM, acts like HIM, thinks like HIM. How did that happen? Was my need to have HIM love me so deep and intense that I sought him out? Have I dealt with, put up with, cried my way through just so HIM, in whatever form, would love me? Wow. I really am textbook. I've gone through the low self-esteem, looking for love in all the wrong faces, my daddy don't love me so I don't love myself, self-destructive behavior. I guess it was only a matter of time before I checked the Find HIM and Date HIM square. So the beginning of getting healthy was cutting the head off the beast. HIM had to go, along with the self-loathing needy little girl he created. Waiting for HIM to love me, I was never going to love myself. Once I showed HIM the door, I realized I had a dad who loved me. He's never said it to me but he shows me in so many ways. First and foremost by loving and respecting my mother. That really is the best gift he can give me. I didn't realize it at the time but my relationship with HIM had even tainted my relationship with this man for the 13 years he's been in it. My dad is the EXAMPLE. For me he's been the textbook dad. Indulgent, supportive, and every other thing I could ask for. If I want it, I'll get it (as long as it gets by my mom). I've become a total daddy's girl. Which is what I deserved to be all along. I get the best from my dad and now I that I know what the "best" is supposed to be I expect the best. If I don't get it, I'm telling my daddy.

DADDY ISSUES (Kristin)

My "Daddy Issue" is fear of abandonment and trust. I do not trust men to stay and have my back. I am a product of a teenage marriage. My father was in his early 20's when he married my mother, unbeknownst to my mom he already had four children prior to getting my mother pregnant. I have always felt that because my Grandfather pastored one of the largest black churchs in Little Rock, there was pressure on my father to do the "right thing" and clearly he was too young to deal with the responsibility of being married to "one of those Knox girls" and deal with a spoiled pregnant teen. So, he did what my grandfather told him to do if he were to find himself in a situation where he couldn't "keep her in a manner in which she was accustomed" he took her home to her parents. Unfortunately he left me too, and from the time I was 10 until I was 19 I spent most of my summers in Little Rock, chasing after him trying to get him to notice and want to have a relationship with me. Yeah, that never worked.

Fast forward some years later and here I am a strong, independent black woman. But, when it comes to men I have issues. As I stated previously I don't trust men. In relationships I spend all my time waiting for the other shoe to drop, what am I going to say or do that is going to make him leave. I wonder if I am pretty enough, is my body desirable enough, and can he ever accept me. So, what I do is I surpress ME and I become who I think they want. I hold my temper, I become considerate beyond reason of their feelings, I spoil them, and I excuse their mistreatment of me. In the end, when the relationships are over, I hate that I compromised myself all for some dick. Hating that feeling, I became emotionally unavailable to men, because I didn't want to be hurt when they left. I started thinking like a man and acting like one. In my mind men were only good for one thing. I had no time or desire to be involved with anyone. Let me interject this as well. I am an only child, I have a mild case of OCD, I have control issues (topic for another blog), and I can be a bitch! I speak the truth if it needs to be spoken I don't care if I hurt anyones feelings because if you know me you know I say or do things out of love not to hurt. But, with a man that I care about...I fold like a deck of card, just so he won't leave me. I will hold my tongue and allow bullshit and stupidity to reign supreme, all in an effort to be accepted and loved. Even now, married to my second husband I find myself hesitant to express my feelings, needs and desires. I hold my tongue about things that I shouldn't, and when we have disagreements I am more worried about his hurt feelings than my own. No marriage can survive like this. Hell, I can't survive like this! Because eventually one of two things will happen: one, he's going to leave me and be with someone who treats him like shit,because she doesn't let him get away with anything and she speaks her mind. Or two, I am going to get fed up with his shit and smother his ass, then my next relationship is going to be with my cellie Beulah who likes her socks folded not rolled, her hair corn rolled every other Friday, and only wants to cuddle on Sundays.

So my resolution for 2011, I am going to be me. All of me, if you don't like me...peace the hell out! I am a bitch, I have OCD, and control issues. I like things a certain way, I like to have a plan of action, a "to do" list, and a schedule. However, I understand everyone is not like me I am willing to be flexible but not malleable. I refuse to be a door mat. Love me for me or go pound sand!

DADDY ISSUES (The Black Pearl)

I'm the single mother of five daughters - yep, FIVE. All girls - ages 15, 13, 9, 8, and 3. One major concern I've had for my girls is what kind of men would they choose to allow in their lives once they were of the age to start dating. I really worried about my oldest daughter because she had always been a "Daddy's Girl" and before she went to live with her father in Italy recently - her relationship with her father was heart-breaking, to say the least. He would rarely call or write and when he did call, he would fill her head and heart with promises that were never manifested. I was left to pick up the pieces of her broken heart and to try to explain the best that I could that love was not about saying but doing. It's not what a person tells you - but what they show you that counts. True love produces action. Even God Himself proved His love for us by sending His Only Son, Jesus Christ, to die for us. That's love. But how could I explain this to her? I was Mom, a woman...a daughter wanting her father, just as she was. After countless arguments with her father on how he should be there for her and how he was hurting her and how he would be acountable for his treatment of her, I finally "got it" when he told me that no matter how he treated her - she would always forgive him because he was "DAD". And I had to admit that he was right. After holding my daughter and trying to console her after another disappointment from dear old dad, the minute he would call - her tears would be replaced by smiles and it was all as if it never were. So I determined right then and there that their relationship was what it was - THEIR relationship. And I would no longer argue with my ex-husband but would rather support my daughter in her decision to continue her relationship with her father and I would encourage her and be her shoulder and ear when things didn't quite turn out how she hoped. I knew my role and although at times it took all I had not to want to rip him a new one for how he was setting his daughter up for failure in her future relationships - I held my peace and let her grow. But it got me to thinking about my own "daddy issues" and how they affected the relationships I found myself in over the years.

I never knew my biological father and according to my mother, he never knew of me. I was first told that he had died while I was still very young. When I got older, my mother decided to tell me that he was not dead and asked how I felt about it. I told her that I wished he were dead because now I had so many questions: Did I have brothers and sisters? Would he have wanted me? How different would my life had been had he been a part of it? I felt this emptiness from not knowing who the other half of my biological and genetic make-up was. I felt incomplete.

The man I call Dad now is and has been a father to me in every sense of the word. He raised my brother and I as if we were his own and never made a difference between us. He wasn't very involved with us but he was there. I grew up in a home of domestic violence but it wasn't my dad hitting my mother but rather I witnessed my mother hitting my dad, stabbing at him with a knife, calling him vicious names and degrading him as a man and as a person. I hated it. I didn't realize until I started writing this blog that this was the reason why most of the men I found myself attracted to were what society would call the "undesireables", the underdogs. I was to be there champion and let them know that they were loveable despite what others said of them. In other words, in my adult life - I was now attempting to stand up for my father in a way I couldn't when I was a little girl. I would find myself playing the martyr in most of my relationships and sacrificing my needs and wants for this man who just needed someone to believe in him, love him, protect him.

Wow.

I also found myself attracted to aggressive, dominate, controlling men. I come from a family of very strong women - true "Sapphires" in every sense of the word. Watching how my mother degraded my father for so many years - I was determined to have a man who was a man and who would keep me in my place should I try to step out of it. I wanted a man who could "tame" me. What I got instead were men who would do everything possible to break me and in some cases, they came very close to succeeding...but that's another blog. Men who came into my life who were kind - I saw as weak. When I threw a temper tantrum and they allowed me to get away with it - I quickly became bored and started looking for someone with a stronger hand. Someone who would demand that I respect the man in them. It's only as I've matured that I've realized that my father wasn't weak - he displayed a strength that very few men can claim to possess. He saw past my mother's anger to her pain and he loved her IN SPITE OF. Not once did I see my father lift a hand to my mother. Not once. And now I realize how much it took for him to deal with that and to remain with her and with us. It's now what I look for - someone who is willing to look past my anger, my insecurities, my trust issues, my 'daddy issues' and to love me in spite of me.