Tears In My Ears

There is a difference between being fake and smiling through your pain. I am great at pulling through tough times because that is what I had perfected over the years..even as a child. Even when I was child in first grade I knew I was different than all of the other kids in my class. When "Take Your Kid To Work Day" came around and all of the other kids were excused to visit their parents and I was stuck at school in a class with 2 or 3 kids who either had unemployed parents or their parent's job didn't permit them to participate in the annual even that was meant to motivate children in continuing their education. I was still different from them...they had mothers and all I had was a granny and a grand daddy. I remember I was in the 3rd grade and I was in the bathroom crying and Mrs. Hall happened to walk past the door and saw me upset (I'm crying even thinking about it) and she asked me what was wrong and I told her "I want a mommy like everybody else to go to work with"...she hugged me and prayed for me right in the bathroom. I was 8 years old and that was the first time I closed my eyes and realized I needed this "God" I was told about. She told me that lots of people think that kids don't have pain but they do and she said that God was going to take care of me and I would feel better soon and that I could come to her whenever I was sad and I did just that. Needless to say, she was of course my favorite teacher. I was mad and had been acting out because I was missing something I could never get no matter how good I was or how many A's I got on my tests. I was a good student, I was just bad as hell. I would have an A for the grade and the teacher would always score me as "poor" for the behavior....it was like that until middle school. I said all that to explain how deeply my sadness has infested my life. So my granny and I was VERY close and just talking about her I can smell her Candid perfume. She brought me out of that spell of acting like a fool by showing me love and kicking my ass at the same time. I was a strange and unique child..I know my mother would have liked me. I am still empty and sometimes feel like a motherless child. God can help u but all of my pain is not gone and all of my tears are not dried. I thank God for allowing my children to not have to endure the pain of not having a mother and a father in their lives. My mother died when she was 26 years old...I am 29 now so she was very young when she died. I used to be scared that I wasn't going to live past 26...I was paranoid. She was in an abusive relationship with my father Johnnie Blackwell. I hated the repetition of his "inhale and exhale" until the day that he died. Sometime I wished he was dead and it actually happened. Sad huh? The only reason why I went to his funeral was because my mama (my grandmother) made me go. I just associated him with pain, death, sorrow, tears, negativity and just something cancerous that needed to be deleted from my life and my memory.

I am strong enough now to admit that I miss having a father in my life. I felt for years that I had to avenge my mother's death by holding hate in my heart for "him". I am just now able to call him my "father"...it may seem minimal to you but that was like an 11th commandment for me not to recognize him as ANYTHING in my life. My father died when I was 15 years old and I remember how when I was over my Aunt Betty's house people were confused because I didn't cry and actually verbalized my feelings and told them "You can't love a stranger" which upset many of my relatives on that side of my family. I said other things to them which is probably the reason most of them hate or either don't like me to this day. I am truly sorry. Just as I am proud to be from the Moten family, I am just as proud to be a Blackwell. Now I am. I remember when he used to come to Mt. Sinai and just sit in the church and stare at me with that red suit on. I would freeze up and cry uncontrollably until my grandmother would have to take me home early. I was a kid...going off of what other people would tell me about him and I built a wall that obviously time and experience could only tear down but now it's too late. Everyone is gone. My husband and my children are my saving grace. Otherwise, I would feel like I am alone. I remember when I was about 13 and he came over my Aunt Betty's house while I was over there and he was sitting on the couch just looking at me and I was forced to sit at the kitchen table because I wanted to go in the garage until he left but that was the last time I saw him. Yeah...I had issues. I was told so many bad things about him. That he was a convict, a rapist and molested his own child (not me..one of my other sisters). But you never know what the truth is and if someone exaggerated a story to scare me even more. So now you understand why I freaked out whenever I saw him. But just as much as I have a yearning for my mother ...I wanted a father too.

My grandparents were my everything. I had a special relationship with both of them and one relationship never trumped the other one, I loved them both equally. But mama....she was my best friend. We did everything together. She would come get me from school in the middle of the day and lie and said I had an appointment and we would end up at Red Lobster...I would always get a strawberry daiquiri without alcohol in it trying to be grown...LOL. She died in 1999 ...we were supposed to take senior pictures together and she died so I never took them. We were supposed to do a lot of things after she got better. I found out AFTER she died that she had cancer...they kept a lot from me because I overreacted when it came to Dorothy Tinsley...she was my boo. You have to understand I was a spoiled, arrogant ass bastard who wanted everything my way. I had very little respect for adults because I felt like they had to earn my respect. Plus, I didn't might flipping over a table, I would whip yo ass. I turned into a person nobody recognized after mama died. I hated God for a while...a long while. But I came back to him later after I developed my own personal relationship with him.

Now...holidays are very hard and all I can do is close my eyes and all I see is food ALL over the kitchen, Uncle Carl and Aunt Jill coming into town with their girls for a couple days...Daddy on his amateur radio (WD8KBX) in the back room...mama's red velvet bed spread ...the yellow paint in the bathroom with that rainbow night light...and Daddy's Cadillac in the garage with Mama's Intrepid behind his car...the wood table in the kitchen...the wood bread box...the green pot she cooked damn near everything in...the mirror in front of the sink...all of daddy's racist stickers on his door...Lana's perfect black and white room...with my princess bedroom with my canopy bed....looking out my window..that daddy just got replaced with new windows....lights on the bushes.....the bowl on top of the bush that mama would catch fresh snow to make snow ice cream. Yeah that's what I remember....but now I just lay here starring at the ceiling and crying with tears in my ears. Pray for me.
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