Priceless Inspirations Page 2

  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.

  Around that time, my father went to prison. A lot of my mother’s family was talking about him and my mother. I was getting older, old enough to listen in on the things adults whispered to each other. Then they stopped whispering and spoke plainly, to my face.

  My mother’s family didn’t think much good about her or my father, and they let me know they didn’t think much of me either.

  “You’re gonna be just like her, ain’t you?” My aunt rolled her eyes at me when she said it and looked disgusted. “Ain’t you?” How could I know the answer? I didn’t even know my mother, and I realized I had to find out about her.

  From Crack House to Crack House

  Mom lived too far from Aunt Edwina’s house for me to walk, so I had to get someone to take me over there when I wanted to go. I pestered my cousins and older relatives. They knew that Aunt Edwina wasn’t in the best of health and I guess they hoped that seeing me might help my mother, too. So they took me.

  I don’t remember what I expected to happen when she saw me. All I can tell you is that it wasn’t like a happy TV reunion where the mother and the daughter fall into each other’s arms crying.

  I don’t remember her being glad to see me. Maybe she was, but she didn’t seem to know how to show it. I don’t think she even hugged me or kissed me or anything. She didn’t play with me, but we talked a little. She didn’t ask me how I was doing in school, or what kinds of things I liked to do.

  She never took me anywhere to show me off, but sometimes we would go upstairs to visit “the candy lady”, a lady who sold little two cent candies to the children in the building. She never said “I love you” but she would tell me I was pretty and ask to brush my hair. She didn’t ask me to come back and live with her.

  It would be like, “Oh. Hi, Toya,” and then she’d go back to whatever she was doing. She was in her own world. Now that I’m older, I understand that she wanted her kids and that she loved us, but she couldn’t reach us from where she was.

  I don’t remember feeling disappointed, but I know her attitude had an effect on me. I’d gone to her looking for some kind of connection, but I didn’t feel it. I didn’t feel anything. My father was away, in jail, and not expected back for a year. I ended up sitting in her front room and watching television with my brothers and playing games.

  I started visiting her every couple of weeks or so. The more I visited, the more I noticed that there were always a lot of people coming and going at her house. It hurt me so bad to have to admit that the negative things her sisters said about her might be for real, but I couldn’t deny it, sitting there, watching shady people come in, stay a few minutes, then leave. At least I didn’t see her get high or anything like that. She didn’t do any of that in front of me on those visits.

  My brothers weren’t so lucky. My older brother, Walter, and my younger brother, Josh, had stayed with her when Uncle Frank came for me. They saw much more of the awfulness of her addiction than I ever did. They raised themselves. As for the houses, as time went by and she spiraled deeper and deeper into her addiction, the places they lived got shabbier and shabbier. Later, when I was in middle school and high school, I can remember passing by a home and hearing people say the place was a “crack house” with the same disgust I’d heard in my aunts’ voices. I was too ashamed to tell them that my mother and brothers lived there.

  By then, I didn’t want a home with her. I was embarrassed by her. I wanted to pretend like I didn’t know anything about her. Feeling shame about your people makes you feel even more alone, especially if, deep down inside, you wonder if it’s true that no matter how hard you try, you’ll end up just like them. Especially if everywhere you look, it seems like all your friends and their mothers have beautiful, perfect relationships, and your mother doesn’t seem to know that you’re alive.

  What a Mother-Daughter Relationship Was Supposed To Be

  Visiting my mother’s house was how I met Angie and her daughter. My mom sent me to her friend Angie who lived next door because she was afraid for me and didn’t want me to see what was going on at her house. Angie had a daughter around my age. My mother knew I would be happy there.

  I loved visiting Angie and playing with Ameka. They became another family to me and eventually, closer to me than my own family. Even now, I call Angie when I need advice or want to talk about the old days. Back then, when I told Aunt Edwina that I wanted to go see my mom, I was lying. I wanted to go to Angie’s and hang with Ameka. I wanted to watch how her mother treated her.

  I wouldn’t have said it then, but I think now I was a little jealous of them. Angie even told me a story about how I once stood in the hallway outside my mother’s apartment, watching them like I was hungry. Little did she know, I was, but not for food.

  Angie and Ameka didn’t have much, but they had each other. They were mother and daughter, and they shared warmth and love and even argued sometimes. They were a family. Even though my mother’s apartment was right next door, there wasn’t any warmth or love there. There weren’t even arguments. Think about it—you’ve got to care about someone if you’re gonna waste your breath arguing with them. At that point, my mother didn’t seem to care for anything except drugs.

  I craved what Angie and Ameka had, and like a lot of young people who feel like they are missing something, seeing someone who had it just made me angrier. My anger made me lash out, and I took out my frustrations on the people closest to me. It made me rebellious and emotional.

  So many women and girls use anger to express everything that’s going on inside. They want to cry, but they don’t. They’re afraid that if they shed even one tear, people think they’re weak and try to punk them. I know that feeling well. I know about feeling all broken up inside, but not wanting to let anyone see it for fear that if I showed I could be hurt, someone would see it as an opportunity and step up to hurt me even worse. Anger lets you mask your pain. It allows you send the message—”Don’t mess with me.”

  I thought all the anger I had in me was something good. I thought lashing out and acting out and talking tough and asserting myself proved that I was grown. So I lashed out and acted out and talked tough and asserted myself, not with my mother or father or against the drugs or the whole circumstance, but with the people around me who were trying to help me, teach me or take care of me. Being angry brought me trouble, and it cost me the little bit of stability that I had.

  From Pillar to Post

  Aunt Edwina w
as getting too old to deal with an angry pre-teen. Her kids had all moved out and had families of their own. I don’t know how it was decided, but I suspect her kids got together and discussed it. They knew their mother was getting older and that some of my most difficult years, my teen years, were ahead of me.

  I moved out of Uncle Frank’s and Aunt Edwina’s house when I was 12. It was the only “home” I’d known since I was a baby, and now it was over. I didn’t know it, but this was the beginning of being bounced from relative to relative, sleeping in shared rooms, corners and couches, for the next six years.

  First, I lived with Uncle Frank and Aunt Edwina’s youngest daughter, Cheryl, her husband and their two kids. Then I lived with Frank and Edwina’s son, Nat, his wife and their two kids. Then I stayed with my Dad’s friend’s sister, Dionne. Then back to Nat and his family.

  I stayed with Angie and Ameka for a minute, and then it was on to my Uncle Frank’s son, Nat, and his wife, Kris. Then I spent a few months with my mother’s sister, Aunt Grace, and then it was back to Nat and Kris. My mother’s sister, Patty, took me for a while, and then it was back to Nat and Kris.

  Later, after I had my daughter, I lived with Dream’s mom for a bit, too. I even spent a month living with my mother, and once, a whole day with my father, before his then-wife threw me out.

  I felt like a burden to everyone I stayed with. I felt like I was in the way. Sometimes my “guardians” let me know just how much of a burden I was.

  “She’s got to go”, they’d say. Or they’d run me down for eating their food or borrowing a blanket out of the closet without permission. I felt unwelcome, not just some of the time, but most of the time.

  It wasn’t until years later, when I moved to Atlanta and bought my own house, that I finally felt like I belonged somewhere. I knew that finally, I had a “home” because it was the home I made for myself and my daughter.

  When I was a teenager, I didn’t have that safe place. It was this person’s house for a minute, then on to another one. Underneath all of the moving around was the anger I felt towards my parents and the hurt because neither one of them was around for me. If they had done better, I wouldn’t have been in this mess, or so I thought. If they had done better, I would have had a place where I belonged, or so I thought. If they had done better, I would have had a home.

  The Mistake I Made That You Shouldn’t

  “They didn’t want me.”

  That’s probably what I would have said about it, when I was moving from house to house and relative to relative. I would have turned it back on them and said that those people didn’t want me. But that was my younger self. The older, wiser Toya knows that at least some of the time, it was partly my own fault.

  I moved from one house to the next because I was furious that I had parents, but that they weren’t there for me. I moved from house to house because in most of those homes, my relatives had rules about chores, curfews, and homework, and I didn’t want any part of that. I moved from house to house because I wanted to be free, just like my brothers, Walter and Josh.

  My brothers were free. When I visited my mom’s house, I saw how they lived. They did what they wanted, when they wanted. My mother didn’t interfere with them. They were their own parents. As a pre-teen, and then later as a teenager, that freedom looked good to me compared to living with Nat and Kris and their family. Nat was like his father, my Uncle Frank. He was strict about the house rules. He wanted me to come straight home from school. He thought the age of 12 was too young for a boyfriend. He made me do my homework and he held me accountable for chores around the house.

  I hated it, and sometimes, I hated him.

  What I know now, and what you should know if you’re young and feeling like people don’t understand you and you just want to escape from all the rules and chores and drama, is that sometimes, people who really love you make you do things you don’t want to do. They tell you things you don’t want to hear. They make decisions that seem unfair.

  I couldn’t see this when I was in middle school, and you might not see it in your situation. Instead, I saw my brothers and my friends doing what they wanted. Uncle Nat seemed too strict. It felt like he was holding me back and holding me down.

  I saw friends who lived with their families and had parents who wanted them. Their parents let them do whatever they wanted to. Since I didn’t live with my parents, and since sometimes I felt unwanted by the people I stayed with and other times like burden to them, I felt like I shouldn’t have to listen to the things those people wanted me to.

  “You ain’t my mama.”

  Like that. You know what I mean?

  I don’t know if I ever said that, but that’s how I felt. I felt like I didn’t have to listen to anybody. I was so angry, I couldn’t listen to anybody.

  Like the old saying goes “a hard head makes for a soft ass.” My younger self didn’t believe that one either, and had to learn the hard way, and I did. Searching for a home and a family in relationships with boys led me to sex before I was completely ready. I ended up pregnant at the age of 14, and things haven’t been the same for me since. Being young and not having a family or a home is hard, but being young and pregnant without a family or a home is even harder.

  Maybe your home life isn’t what you wish it was. Maybe you look around you and it seems like everyone else has it good, has a perfect family, and has love and warmth and safety, while you’ve got nothing.

  You feel alone. Maybe, like me, you feel angry.

  Maybe, like me, you’re throwing that anger everywhere, except at the person or people you’re really angry at.

  Maybe, like me, what you really need is a place to let your heart show, like I did in the pages of my journal. It was the only place I dared express just how hurt I was.

  Maybe, like me, you need to know that you can’t find “home” in buildings or other people. The first step to making a real home is making peace with yourself.

  Toya’s Priceless Gem: Home isn’t a building or even other people. Home is the love in your own heart and nowhere else. It doesn’t matter what drama is going on around you. Keep the faith and someday soon, you can create for yourself a home that matches the love and peace you hold in your heart.

  BOYS TO MEN

  Girls and young women who see my show write to me all the time, asking me to answer questions about their relationships. They’ve seen some of the stuff I’ve been through with guys and dating on the show, and they want my advice about their own situations. They ask me all kinds of questions about how to meet a guy who’s about something, how to tell if a guy really cares about you, when to have sex and when to break up.

  The answers to all of those questions are all pretty much the same. It’s all in the people you associate with, who you hang with and what they show you about themselves. You have to learn to pay attention to what guys say and what they actually do. That’s been the most important thing for me in choosing who to be with and who to stay away from. You have to choose guys who want you for more than your body, who have got something going on in their lives and who care enough about you to support the things you want to do.

  How did I learn these lessons?

  The same way I learned most things--the hard way. I learned from choosing the wrong guys, like the players and the pretty boys, and realizing they weren’t what I needed at all.

  As a person who did it all wrong, I can tell you what not to do and offer you these priceless gems from my experience.

  His name was Mitch and he was one of the cutest boys in school.

  He was in this group called The Fire Flame that danced and competed in talent shows all over the city. Lots of girls had seen him perform and lots of girls liked him. I took it up a level. As far as I was concerned, he was my boyfriend.

  It was 1996 and I was 12.

  I was living with my Uncle Nat, my Aunt Kris and their two kids. Uncle Nat thought 12e was way too young for a boyfriend. He was determined to keep me from getting into troubl
e and he was determined that I would follow the same rules that he’d set for his own children.

  He picked me up every single day from school. Someone had run into the back of his car, and it hadn’t been fixed yet. The back was all crumpled and he had to tie the trunk down with a piece of rope to keep it from flying open as the car moved. It was embarrassing. He would park right out front in that raggedy car and wait for me, so that everyone at my middle school could see him. I hated that; it made me feel like a baby. Every school day he did it-parked there and waited. Sometimes he waited a long time, because I didn’t want to ride home with him. I wanted to walk home with Mitch, who lived near the school in a neighborhood called “The Goose.” I’d slip away from the school, meet up with Mitch and we’d walk a bit, usually only as far as a little bench at the bus stop near an apartment complex called Frenchman’s Wharf.

  We’d sit on the bench together, hugging on each other and talking, until Uncle Nat would pull up on us and make me get into the car. I’d get in trouble every time, but nothing he did stopped me. The next day, I’d sneak out of school and Mitch and I would be at the bus stop again.

  He was the first boy I ever kissed, and, of course, Uncle Nat pulled up on me and Mitch just as we were hugging up to kiss some more.

  I didn’t hear the car. We weren’t far from a really busy street and there was all kind of noise anyway. Of course, I was all into the moment of feeling Mitch’s soft lips on mine. The kissing might have gone on for a while, if it hadn’t been for Uncle Nat pulling up right in front of the bus stop in his busted old car.