Y So Serious?

Y So Serious ? Originally (2016)

Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky tacky
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes all the same,
There's a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

And the people in the houses
All went to the university
Where they were put in boxes
And they came out all the same
And there's doctors and lawyers
And business executives
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same

And they all play on the golf course
And drink their martinis dry
And they all have pretty children
And the children go to school,
And the children go to summer camp
then to the university
Where they are put in boxes
And they come out all the same.

And the boys go into business
And marry and raise a family
In boxes made of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same
There's a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

Malvina Reynolds (1962)

source: https://www.lyricsondemand.com/tvthemes/weedslyrics.html

As you can see I do have a sense of humor. I love comedies and have watched my share of them that have been so healing and empowering for me. Yet until maybe 6 years ago grief ripped my heart out because life stole from me every woman I had in my life who raised me by age 33. A lot of days I felt this way for so long even though I am a middle age woman over the age of 55. I was hurt by people I knew and now know fairly well now because they have their mothers. Their cousins. Aunts. Sisters and Grandmothers. More recently women who have little cliques and all these hos who like to group themselves up together in selfies on Facebook calling themselves the "sisterhood" got on my last damned nerves. Yeh. I think those hos are so funny. But I guess I was hating at the same time.

Maybe I was just being envious having lost so many of the women I loved since I was 12 years old. I lost all the women in my family through deaths. Although there are 2-3 who are still alive whom I really cannot stand sometimes. I call them "distanced" cousins I know them from growing up with my mother who was adopted by their aunt who never could have children. We used to be close. But now we don't keep in touch.

They stopped communicating with me just around the time I started letting go of my grief. I hoped the Thanksgiving feast I and my sons  were invited to by these "distanced" cousins feast was a sort of sharing an olive branch moment. But weeks and months later the cousin who did that teary "stay togetherness" speech before dinner stopped picking up her phone and started "ghosting" me. She stopped bothering to return my voicemails. Then one day I caught up with her by phone and could hear in her voice she didn't want to be bothered. So I just thought to myself, this was no olive branch affair. This bitch gave me poison ivy. And I am hurt by it because they were dead to me. Why she invited us to her home, be so phoney, only to express herself in such a way wasn't necessary. 

There was no one to take the place of my mama or my mom. I did eventually  get over the pain of losing them and her real relatives who were real relatives as far as I was concerned. What a bitch. She thought to just erase me and my children from a family from whom I was deeply imprinted. This bitch decided to just erase me just because my grandmother and my mother died. 

When my mother died, I left my hometown. I became absent because I wanted to stop living where all the people I knew would judge me. I wanted to get away from that small town and never return. So I did. I bought a house in a nice neighborhood. Just like the kind the intro of Weeds sung about. Little boxes all the same. I lived across the street from a golf course on a corner, next to the busiest street in my subdivision. And it was nice. I had my second son there. I could live out my otherness there. Because I was still alone and adrift from ever having the family I had before. I had nice neighbors. We were cordial and smiled at each other from our driveways. We chatted at the bus stop when our kids got picked up for school.

We smoked weed occasionally, had a drink and attended their family gatherings and barbecues now and then. But I broke down every year for 5 years straight. I punched out a glass window one year. I found and lost jobs I was really good at. I lost my house. My inheritance was gone. I even lost my children for a short time. I went to churches thinking I could belong to a family again or revisit a familiar role in church going to one after another.  

But I kept living out my otherness in those pews and in relationships I made too. I did eventually begin to meet some Black folks who came on the scene to help me stop feeling so confused and doomed. They helped me value myself as a mother and made me feel like I was a very good to me. Some decent educated Black folks who did not judge me, put me down or tell me I was never going to be anything. I needed people like this in my life for so long. I needed a long break from everyone because they are  so ignorant of the fact that we all need each other. 

Most people cannot even admit that we all need each other. I was never in denial about this. People tried to always convince me to get out on my own, move on, and tell me: “good luck with that.” Like that shit was funny.

That dumb shit hurt me. It made me angry. I always seemed to be angry, or look so serious to people. I still do appear to be this way sometimes when I have an enormous amount of stress. And it was very hard and stressful for me to maneuver in this world since I was 14 years old. My mom married a drunk. I lived in a home with a drunk and a thug from the time I was 14 to 19. I was forced out of my mother's home by him. I don't blame my mother for getting married. I just hate that she married him, died and left me. Because this dirty bastard would not be a father to me or two of his only sons I call my bros.

This bum put pressure on my mother to sign over the house my grandmother left to me. He also tried to bully the HR department from my mother's job to disperse allotments to him instead of me from my mother's death insurance. That asshole tried to bully me out of whatever my mother wanted me to have while she was alive and after she died. 

In the meantime everyone who knew about the trouble my mother, her younger children and I became my greatest haters when I moved out of the neighborhood and bought my first car from A dealership. This new life was A life she never really prepared me for. Her death and this gift she gave helped me begin to venture away, go away and be someone who was not afraid to be or start over. I began an adventure that turned into several nightmares, hundreds of disappointments, and many failures I made since I was 27 years old. I have been evicted nearly 30 times. I have lost furniture, my convertible, birth certificates, my youth, my sanity, and memories I kept in photo albums to people who enjoyed throwing my shit in the garbage, just because I could not do anything about it. 

Those were the kinds of Blacks who were similar to my first hater: my stepfather. Even friends were happy to throw my friendship away each time I felt myself getting better, or felt like I wanted to share. I had to do the reverse.  Hold back and walk away from people who did not care about who I was or how I felt. They only cared about what I had. And if I had too much they would push me out into the cold...twice as quick when I had a little something so they could jack me for it. That whole crabs in a barrel mentality. So my words have been silenced often and disconnected from who I truly am many times. By brown people. People nearest to me. People Who didn't give a shit about me. That shit wasn't funny either.

After many years of this, I thought I lost my voice because I lost my family, hoping I would have another one day. Hoping I would be part of a larger circle someday. And It never happened outside of the burbs.

I always hoped to find the warmth of the home I thought I should have, in that nucleus that started breaking apart 40 years ago. For over 40 years, my heart has been pierced. And this pain, people I think might not understand, didn't go away until 8 years ago. That is what makes me sensitive. I am less tolerant of rude, janky-assed people who cannot understand why I do let go of things. But I can laugh about their dumb shit and move on much quicker than I used to. 

I can patiently move on from things I choose to let go of because I have diminished my grief. I wasn't fulfilled in my life because janky-assed people didn't support me. And they expect me not to be unhappy, sad and broken. I had to live with my grief until it went away or give me a break. I missed my family every day. Especially when I had to keep starting over. But thank goodness for starting my educational path.

I made several achievements nobody but my two children and I only care about. Yeh. Nobody gives a shit about my sons having art in an exhibit at the United Nations in New York. No one cares about my talent for research and interviewing that garnered my being nominated into a league of scholars of applied social research. I even wore a different tassel at my college graduation to show off my special talent.

But soon again I felt lost. I thought I would find jobs, other jobs, dream jobs. I hoped that I would gain enough experiences to give me the confidence to start a new business. After all--I had a business. It was supposed to be a family business. But my sons never took an interest in having a family business. Then, with the internet boon, and a move to another state, as well as the death of my mother, my businesses became nonexistent. Today my first business would have been 10 years old. And I never made a dime since moving.

I resented my sons for not helping. Helping with the work of running this business I hoped would be successful by now. But my family responsibilities, although not as intense, still weighed me down. I had not been employed in over 3 years. I hadn't worked a full time job in more than a decade. I have been poor since 1999. That’s 17 years. My first son was 12. And my second son was only five. Technically, they have been homeless, off-and-on for nearly half their lives. And I have been this way for nearly half of mine by now. That shit is nothing to laugh at either. It's depressing. It is disappointing. And it's damaging to people who never really knew what it was to be poor for at least half of their lives. Namely my oldest son and me. But it was our reality, like it or not.

So what did I do? I still was the best mother I could be. I found it harder and harder to keep my word, but I got my kids up, cooked breakfast and got them to school. I was the only parent at the bus stops in these dirty assed cities I lived in since I left my abusive marriage and hauled ass to Newark, NJ. I figured things out, handled crises quickly and dealt with all kinds of people’s opinions and shady judgments one-by-one. 

I told everyone who had something ugly to say to me to fuck themselves until I became brave enough to get off of Section 8 and move to this dusty-assed working class town in NJ near Pennsylvania, where mostly poor whites lived: Phillipsburg. I thought my luck would get better. At least I gave it a try.

And for the first time in many years: I was happy to be alone and see or deal with very few Blacks besides my one neighbor and my sons. It was quiet and I could hear my thoughts. No my financial situation did not get better, nor did my health. By the time we settled into this town--I got two part time jobs. But then I was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma. I would be hospitalized, taking chemo cocktails at the hospital and radiation treatments for the next 10 weeks. Then we got evicted. Again.

None of this was anything to laugh about. But I guess god and the devil thought it was funny. Even though I didn't think this shit was funny I found the fact that I still wanted this shitty little life I had funny. And it is. It is strange that I still even want to live after all this bitter, fucked up, piece of shit nigger shit I have been through, I can still laugh. I can still find something to laugh about. I can find some off the wall shit about myself to laugh about. That's what makes me such an incredible woman. So thanks for listening to my story so far...

Luv to U & Me😘

Ms. BBB