Hi Readers, on Wednesday, I was featured on The Body Narratives, talking about my discomfort with people inquiring if I’ll be pregnant again soon. Check out my piece and leave your thoughts!
From the moment I knew I was pregnant, motherhood became a juggling act for me. I balanced my wonder at the changes in my body with my fear that I would hate the jiggle in my tummy later. I alternately felt excited about holding my baby and terrified about exactly how she was going to come out of me. And then, once she was born, I again juggled the trauma of having an emergency Cesarean section birth and the joy of seeing my healthy infant.
Motherhood is not all sweetness and light; it is a mixture of empowerment and vulnerability that requires constant adjustment. For this reason, it rankles when people ask when I’ll be pregnant again. Oh, they mean well, they always do. They see my daughter cooing and toddling, and out pops the question, “So, when is the next one coming?” My response worsens the situation. I smile and laugh, quipping that I want my daughter out of diapers, or my husband out of graduate school. But I never tell them the truth.
If a picture’s worth 1,000 words, this is one heck of an essay.
I am in love. I’ve known it since I was a teenager, looking with young brown eyes at his chocolate skin and easy smile. He called me shorty, and it was all over. I lived for his hugs, his daps, and my heart strings were tied to the soles of his feet. That love started out as a crush then, but it matured with me. And even now, I can definitely say I still love him. I’ll always love him.
I’m in love with black men. Brothas, to be exact. Nothing warms me up more than being around them. My daddy taught me what a man was by what he did. My baby brother taught me how to love brothas just because he was the first male friend to love me unconditionally.
Theorists call my brothas an endangered species, but they are the most vibrant, alive human beings I know. If black men are endangered, they live like they don’t know it. Dapping and hugging and reinventing the language all over the place. Brothas ball, play instruments, dissect atoms and write life. Energy crackles in their locs and dips around the waves in their fades. I love watching them twist their feet into equations other men could never decipher. You ever seen them smile? Brothas are my sunshine and sunset and cipher. Black and bright.
Black men + books =bbbbbbeautiful
There is a particular shade of pride I feel when my brothas do well. Even ones I don’t know. They make things grow in me—roots. I feel like I could gain inches in height just to reach where they are. When they stretch beyond their beginnings, I want to meet them where they stand so tall. Brothas be my weakness and my strength.
Those who don’t know them feel threatened, but I never feel fear around brothas. They call me queen. They have made it their pleasure to scoop me into the palms of their calloused hands and protect me from the world. It’s ironic, too, because the world is against brothas. Plotting hand over fist over feet stomping to bury them. Brothas are black diamonds with blood at their centers—hard as rock, but Lord, if they don’t bleed. And sometimes we are guilty of painting them devilish, ignoring cries for help as they fight off their demons. Their pain matters to me.
Through it all, black men turn red drops into green. They invented the hustle, perfected it, then prepared it for mass market. They transform themselves from being on the market to controlling the market. My brothas may not always resort to legal means to survive, but at the end of the day, they’re alive; every cell on my skin sings for each day they steal a breath. Brothas are revolution, just by breathing.
Kane is able.
Brothas ain’t perfect. I’m not either. But two imperfect beings can love each other to perfection. That means my brothas aren’t n****s to me. Sometimes brothas won’t let me love them, but I hold on from far away, still in love. The frustration and anger seems trivial compared to how much we need each other. Brothas tap the wells of my heart and keep me giving, and I will always give them myself. Deeply.
Originally written in 2006, but still 100% true for me.
I’m excited to announce that the lovely folks at MyBlackTresses.com have given me some room to write at length about my other obsession: black hair! My first article is for the mamas of wiggly little beans who have a head full of gorgeous hair and zero patience for combs.
Whether your baby is a boy or a girl, it’s important to reinforce early on that they are beautiful the way they are. You set the tone for their personal outlook on their appearance. Be positive about hair time with your little one! Their attitude will mimic yours.
Stripper poles are both objects of phallic-centered fantasies and the fears of fathers everywhere. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
My eyes rounded as the woman in front of me gripped the pole and spread her legs toward Heaven. God works in mysterious ways; this was the only explanation I had for what I was witnessing. Kirk Franklin’s Gospel song about redemption, “Imagine Me,” played in the background, an odd choice for a pole dance.
Her routine had begun with a (holy) body rolling chair dance, and now she was blessing the pole. Another flip, a well-timed thrust, and she straddled the air in a split. The audience applauded politely upon her dismount.
The studio was packed with people who came to support friends at their pole dancing recital, which doubled as a benefit for Haitian earthquake victims. The men in the audience fidgeted, unsure if Jesus was judging them for looking at booties while a choir sang. Praise Pole Dancing for the Lord, indeed.
I’m sure most people associate stripper poles with nothing sanctified, especially after seeing Rihanna’s visual ode to strip clubs, “Pour It Up.” Not much needs to be said about that; it twerks for itself.
I find strip clubs problematic for a number of reasons. Like many occupations rooted in sexuality, they inspire a Puritanical attitude from voyeurs who imagine themselves better than the women they spend money to ogle. Strippers become a sub-class of women to be despised yet lusted after, prized for their physical assets onstage but disposable offstage. People like to pretend they’re cool enough to not knock the hustle. However, stripping is still seen as a means to an end (i.e. the strip-your-way-through-college meme) and former dancers are “exposed,” as if their old jobs were illegal.
Take your mind out the gutter; the correct answer is RAKE! (Photo Credit: Entertainment Weekly)
The majority of strippers don’t engage in prostitution, but still are lumped into the colloquial category of whore. And as the old African-American proverb goes, “You can’t turn a hoe into a housewife,” right? Tell Amber Rose that.
Turning the nonsensical adage on its ear blurs the lines of respectability in womanhood and opens the door for women to strip free of confines in more ways than one. Hence, the reason why I am quite curious about a class in the Atlanta metro area called “Toast and Twerk.” Combining cardio with cocktails, the description details a fitness class you can bounce to. The studio also offers pole dancing classes, ostensibly for non-professionals.
The growing popularity of strip clubs spawned the preponderance of pole dance studios (at least 11 in the Atlanta metro area). Women not privy to the strip game are taking it upon themselves to learn a little something for an audience of one.
But many men who admittedly enjoy attending strip clubs prefer that their wives not learn any of the trade, even just for the bedroom. “It would be degrading for me to rain money on my wife’s head.” Clearly, some like their women categorized in neat Virgin or Whore boxes. Why else would it be okay to degrade these women and not others?
Pole dancing classes strip the activity of the paying voyeur dynamic and leave attendees with a feeling that most professionals appreciate about their craft: agency. It can be heady to command the attention of an entire room. Perhaps the pole dancer I saw was “spreading” the Gospel of empowerment in her own way.
Now if we can just get society to see strippers as women undeserving of scorn, then maybe housewives could serve dessert a little more creatively.
What do you think about pole dancing classes? Would you take them or encourage your significant other to?
My grandma died this morning. She was the best square dancing, salmon croquette making, 7UP cake baking, silver Afroed beauty I ever knew. She lived a life that taught me to create adventure rather than waiting to happen upon it.
Lennye was the flyest older woman I ever met, face beat to the gods on a Tuesday afternoon just ’cause. But she always made my naked face feel beautiful. She had these slender golden hands, soft but strong, that smelled faintly of flowers. She was a Mary Kay lady down to the petal pink polish on her manicured toes.
If I ever thought she would take any mess, she could shut you down with a honey-coated voice undergirded with steel. That was the Ala-d@#%*-bama in her, red clay forged under the heat of determination. She taught in Detroit schools for 30 years and raised my father alone as a World War II widow. Brassy Southern lady in a town driven by cold and metal frames; they didn’t stand a chance.
God made some flowers to wilt when the sun dims, and others to spread their petals skyward, daring the darkness to swallow them. Nothing faded my grandmother. Not the specter of war, not the solitude of single motherhood, and not the insidious shaking of Parkinson’s Disease. Through the veil of my tears, I see her as she ever was: a woman who loved as fiercely as she lived.
Go gently, Grandma Lennye, slumber in the arms of God. I love you.
dara t. mathis 