My Version of "And Still I Rise" by Maya Angelou

Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
'Cause I walk like I've got oil wells
Pumping in my living room?

Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I'll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops,
Weakened by my soulful cries?

Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don't you take it awful hard
'Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines
Diggin' in my own backyard?

Out of the huts of history's shame
I rise

Up from a past that's rooted in pain
I rise

Dirty, impoverished, enslaved and poor
Not even allowed to walk through the front door.
Not good enough to sleep in your bed
Turned up your nose at this nappy head.

You can have nothing, was their solemn cry
I'll take even less, I dared to reply.
I want nothing that I do not earn,
I could not enjoy it, now watch me and learn.

Fast forward to now and look at me,
Didn't you know this is what you would see?
Had you no eyes, no brain or no heart?
Had you no imagination to predict this part?

I'm a dark ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.

Adapted from "And Still I Rise" by Maya Angelou. Copyright © 1978 by Maya Angelou.

Only Human

"Is that a tattoo I saw when your shirt raised up?" one of my new friends asked me during our softball game. When I answered no, she added, "Oh, I was thinking maybe you had a wild side we don't know about." I squinted briefly at her, shaking off the tiny questions that fluttered and glistened like soap bubbles all around my head..."What was she looking for?" I wondered. "Why would it matter if I have tattoos?" Only later did it occur to me that what she had probably been seeing were the scars from the fibroid myomectomy I had in 2005. I don't have a tattoo but there have been times I've considered getting one.

Her curiosity and search for my wild side is understandable. It's only human to look at someone we like and admire and to make comparisons. Recently I wrote a post called "Independence Day". I've said before that all of my posts write themselves and that one was no exception. It strained to get out of me like a child and I couldn't understand why it begged to be written so badly. After it was created I felt bad about what I had written about my friend so I took it down and buried it in my drafts folder. Then tonight it occurred to me why it needed to be written. For years somewhere deep down in the recesses of my mind I have been chiding myself for not being more competitive professionally like my friend. And then when I found out her life hadn't turned out so well after all and I wrote this post it came across like I was gloating, or worse yet, revelling in the failings of my friend. But I was doing neither. I was only being human.

Any success I have is God's,
my failures only, belong to me
There's no need to search for scars
I have plenty
though they may give you comfort to see
and I don't blame you if you do
after all you're human too

The Center of the Universe

Yesterday was my birthday and I awoke feeling like a princess. I felt like I should lie back on satin pillows all day while I did my laundry. My boss had accidentally sent out my birthday announcement a day early so the emails with birthday wishes had already started to come flooding in. You know that feeling of anticipation you get on the day before a holiday? That's how Wednesday felt, like Birthday-eve, so that by the time the actual day arrived it was built up to the point that it felt like a national holiday.

I have never had a birthday like this before. When I was a child no one ever made a big deal out of my birthday except to talk about it all day long. So although I knew the day itself was special it never occurred to me that I should feel special too. My ex-husband tried to make me understand. He was the youngest of three kids and an only son with two teenage sisters when he was born, so he'd always been treated like a prince. He'd had birthday parties his whole life and because his birthday was during the school year and his mother was a teacher the entire school was invited. He feels sorry for us poor kids with birthdays during the summer.

My first birthday after we started dating we went out to dinner with the married couple who had fixed us up and he gave me at least 6 or 7 presents. I remember a tennis racket, a gold necklace, and I'm ashamed to say I can no longer remember the rest of the presents. I was so touched. I didn't feel that my birthday was special but I did know that I was special to him. I don't think there was any doubt after that day that I was going to marry him.

After we were married he started having birthday parties for me to which he would invite all of his friends and make them all buy me presents. He would even tell them what presents to buy. It felt a little bit like when the teacher makes the other kids play with you at school. He would have invited my friends except I didn't really have any. It's not that I'm unfriendly. Quite the opposite. It's just that I was still pretty new in town and the one thing I've forgotten about having a boyfriend is that once you do you no longer hang out with anyone else. Come to think of it, not having a boyfriend in Omaha has been sort of a blessing because it's forced me to get to know lots of other people. (There I go looking at the bright side of things again).

Yesterday I celebrated my birthday at 7 Monkeys, a bar and grille on 156th and Maple in this room. I love this room because it feels like it was meant to be used in an episode of Sex and the City. I think people who know about this sort of stuff would call it art deco. It was my first attempt at getting my friends from different groups together. I have church friends, bar friends and work friends. I didn't invite everyone I know because of course some of my friends just aren't going to mix well with others. Honestly if some of my friends met some of my other friends they'd be so mad at me they'd never speak to me again. If you don't believe me click the link. So along with a tinge of guilt over all the people I didn't invite, there was a feeling of warmth and happiness that I could get everyone together under one roof without having to get married (or die) to do so. After we left 7 Monkeys we went to Mick's! where, I was surprised with a birthday cake lit up with candles. I don't do surprises well, especially when they make me feel like the center of attention and a room full of people are all looking at me. This is due to the childhood trauma of having been raised in a household of about ten aunts and uncles and getting whippings everytime someone called attention to me. There was no such thing as good attention. Attention equalled trouble as far as I was concerned from about age 3. That's why I was shocked to feel no strangeness, no trauma, no feeling of wanting to run and hide when said cake and candles were brought out. All I felt was love from everyone in the room.

In the months since I've written this, the sentiment "all I felt was love" has often been mistaken for "in Love" with Mick. I have to smile because that is soooo my sister. It means that my search for her through my blog-writing has worked and she's "here" in my heart, where I wanted her to be. I have added "from everyone in the room" because that's what I felt and those are my words, not hers. I apologize to anyone who misunderstood. No hard feelings. Even I didn't fully understand till now.

My sister left this world in 2003 and she and I never understood each other. We approached life from completely opposite directions. For me the bar experience was my way of stepping out of my perfectly engineered life and getting a little messy, walking in her shoes and better understanding her choices, of finding the part of myself that I rejected because I didn't like the reflection that I saw in her - my gift of understanding to her and her gift of creativity and of open-mindedness (and open-heartedness to me). I think if she could have given me a birthday present this is exactly what it would have been.

The Nanny Diaries...

Well the vacation is over and I'm back home. It was an interesting weekend. My friend brought her 8 year-old daughter along because the child's father, my friend's ex, lives in Florida. My friend spent half the day in my hotel room working on the book and the other half in the room she was sharing with daddy and daughter.

Don't get me wrong, I think it's great for a divorced couple to be friends. I am friends with my ex. It works for Demi Moore and Bruce Willis. But my ex didn't steal my credit card on my last visit to see him. I don't pay the mortgage on a house for my ex to live in, a house we nearly lost in foreclosure because he was gambling our income away. The problem with being friends with an ex like that is there is always an elephant in the room that everyone is trying to ignore. And no one sees elephants better than kids.

At one point the child threw a HUGE temper tantrum because she wanted to go shopping with mommy and me. Eventually this tantrum landed in my room..... with me....alone. This seemed an odd time to leave her with me, I thought. I wondered if mommy and daddy were spending quality time together.

I hugged her and comforted her and told her that mommy loved her and we wouldn't be gone long. I remembered my training from sales school....get them to say three yes's and you've got them sold. Maybe it would work on kids too.
"Who bought you a sewing machine today?" I asked.
"Mommy did" she said.
"And who got to pick Mongo's for us to go eat the best lunch ever?" I asked.
"I did" she said.
"And who played with you in the ocean today?" I asked.
She had caught on....."Not Mommy!!!!" she wailed.
"Yes, Mommy did" I said. And I could see her resolve to stay mad melting away.

Eventually she calmed down and I went to take a shower and change. She sat in the room watching tv and when I came out she was entertaining herself by pouring the $4 bottles of hotel room water out the balcony window. Probably on somebody's head.

Moments later mommy showed up at my door, furious! What was taking me so long?? I was scathingly criticized for comforting her daughter during her tantrum. I was accused of letting an 8-year-old take advantage of me. Didn't I know when I was being played by a child?

Um....she's a child. She's 8. She has by default permission to "play me". It's my responsibility to figure out what it is she really needs and then meet that need so that she will no longer find it necessary to "play me" and she can learn to ask for what she needs in an honest, respectful and healthy way instead of manipulating. Call me old-fashioned.

"What did you say to her?" my friend asked.
How was I supposed to answer that? I tried to make you look good you b-word?
"I appealed to her sense of logic" I answered.
Impossible for my friend to understand because her sense of logic only appears for short bursts of time, 2 to 3 minutes max.

"Do you ever doubt yourself?" my friend had asked earlier in a totally unrelated conversation.
At this point I am seriously doubting my taste in friends.

Independence Day

This is the 4th of July weekend and I'm spending it at the beach with my friend. We are writing a book about her life and her career. She's an engineer and also has a business as a professional coach and she wants to use the book as part life lessons, part professional coaching instruction manual.

I love my friend. She and I have known each other since around 1992 when we worked as interns for the same company. I was the quiet, studious little engineer, the one who put her head down, obeyed orders, did what I was told and worked hard. She was the political juggernaut who behaved as if every assignment she was given was a fight for civil rights. I imagined it was exhausting to be her, but she had some good points. She was always questioning the establishment and policing our management to make sure she was getting the same treatment as the male engineer in our department who, let's be honest, was given more perks and seemed to do much less work.

She was the first person who pushed me to compete at work. Up until that point I had never seen work as a "competition". For the most part I still don't, but I know that just because I don't naturally function that way doesn't mean I can ignore the fact that most of the professional world does. She was right, if a little over zealous about her message. You have to stick up for yourself, look around, and make sure you compete and fight for what you deserve or no one will give it to you.

After I graduated and finished the internship we lost touch. When last we saw each other she, ever the ambitious one, was getting ready to take her GMAT exam and enter MBA school. I on the other hand was just interested in getting my feet wet, using my degree, and finding out just what an engineer was and how I would do it. I took a small, unglamorous job in a remote area of Alabama where there were no professionals and no one to date. I didn't hear from her for years and assumed she'd gotten her MBA and was continuing her fast track career to the top. A few years later I saw her picture in Ebony magazine and she was being featured as one of the most eligible single African American women in the country. "Good for her!" I thought, and I was proud of her because it seemed that she was well on her way to getting what she had always wanted and what seemed to me her birthright. She was beautiful and outgoing, popular with men, and hungry for career success. Meanwhile I was dating my college sweetheart long distance and content, though lonely, in my tiny little garage apartment in Alabama.

Cut to today. Her career has been derailed several times. She's been making bad decisions about men, especially men with whom she works. She's started her own business as a professional coach but is finding it hard to find clients. She's been married and divorced with a man who steals from her, has a gambling problem, and forfeited on their home mortgage. She is a single parent, struggling to maintain a lifestyle just beyond her reach and spoiling a daughter who doesn't know how fragile it all is. I am also divorced but with no children, no foreclosure, no gambling, no debt. My career has also been derailed a couple of times but the position I have now is a perfect fit.

So now here we are, on the beach, writing a book. I'm trying to listen without judging and without advising her or playing armchair therapist. It's always easier to see where other people have gotten stuck, much easier than it is to coach and unstick ourselves. What's shocking is the number of things our lives have had in common. It's as if God gave us the same material to work with and then sat back to watch what we'd do with it.

I wonder if she is getting the same value out of this experience. I doubt it, but I can always hope....