Lift Me Up

Love, Do We Really Have to Work at It?

“Many men wanted to lay me down; very few wanted to lift me up”– Eartha Kitt

I believe these words are true for a lot of Black Women. I don’t know what the love stories truly consist of for women of other races, I’m not sure what relationship dynamics look like within other cultural norms. But from what I know to be true, Black Women suffer in love, suffer during the pursuit of it, and even die early as a result of doing all it takes to earn “love”.

Sexuality, colorism and many other factors involved may make this more or less accurate. I have identified as a lesbian for the last five years and a lot of black lesbians manage to allude this fated torture and find healing and peace in sapphic love connections;I haven’t. I’m also dark skinned and up until the great conversion of 2016 when being dark skinned became attractive to everyone (but not really) my skin tone was a negative for most interested parties. Until my first long term relationship with another dark skinned woman, I had always heard the words “ you’re the darkest girl I’ve ever been with but you’re so pretty.” I swallowed these words like a horizontal brick with a polite smile for years because the person saying it usually thought they were actually complimenting me.

Every older Black Woman that I know married, divorced, or never married, at some point was a victim to their partners’ hand, or to their infidelity. My own grandmother birthed nine children and was never married. The men that fathered her children would marry and divorce other women, and abuse them too. I don’t know what the difference was between my grandmother and those women because they all suffered the same fate at the hands of these men. One man, who was the father of my grandmothers youngest child told her he was going to Surinam for a few weeks to see family and would be back soon. He never came back. He left her in Guyana with nine young children. All of them didn’t belong to him, but after injecting himself into a fragile family and knowing all the physical and mental abuse she had endured at the hands of my mothers father, he left her without a word of why. I can’t imagine what that devastation did to her after years of violence. Feeling like someone might be safe, and then they disappear into a puff of smoke without a goodbye or any concern for how you’ll survive their absence. She never had another man in her life after that. My mother had her own share of pain while pursuing love, waiting decades for unavailable men that would never give her what she needed but always wanted to take what she had to offer. Is that my fate? I can’t stand to be unhappy for even a second these days so does that mean I opt out of love completely to avoid such fate?

There’s an uptick of people wanting to hurry up and get married. I know that makes sense because everything seems so uncertain and scary in this country right now and there’s a need to cling to what’s safe or someone that makes you feel safe. But are we placing importance on falling deeply into a love that holds us up or are we falling into tradition that has historically left us deteriorated and forgetting ourselves? There isn’t a single woman I know who hasn’t bent over backwards trying to love someone into loving her the way she needs, the way she deserves. And the prize, if she can last that long without completely eroding her sense of self and individuality, is a stale but safe version of happily ever after that she almost died for. I knew older women that developed illnesses and died after being depressed for decades because of the things they endured from the love they thought they had to work at. Is love something that we should have to earn? If that person isn’t ready to love you by your own terms right then and there but you stay because they have the potential to do so one day, should the cost of happiness be decades of asking why can’t they, why won’t they, what’s wrong with me or them that they can’t get it quite right? Am I asking for too much? Potential. What makes the difference between someone’s potential to love you how you want to be loved and their ability to? Potential might take years off of your life. After a while your potentially perfect mate makes a choice to keep remaining on that line between potentially able to and actually able to, because you’re willing to endure.

I’ve been someone’s “soulmate” more than once. I don’t think I’ve ever been treated as such. I’ve been “unlike anyone else they’ve ever met” more than once, and still found myself being handled with as much care as the shit that they scrape off the bottom of their shoe. If I’ve been all these things to these people why couldn’t they love me without a misstep? If I was so much where was the urgency to become everything I needed and deserve? Who handles something they find truly valuable with carelessness? Each time after I managed to drag myself out of something that I stuck around in for too long because of potential, the things I had gained from said connection was little to none. All that potential that I could no longer hold onto was replaced with the very real data that proved how much I had been let down and disappointed; I realized how little importance I actually held. I was about as special as a work mule. I wonder if I’ll ever be so special that I won’t have to endure first to be worthy of love the way I need it. Or even better,I hope someone chooses to love me because of my potential.

This is a poem that I always thought rang true for the women in my family.

Somebody Almost Walked Off Wid Alla My Stuff by Ntozake Shange

Somebody almost walked off wid alla my stuff.

Not my poems or a dance I gave up in the street,

but somebody almost walked off wid alla my stuff

like a kleptomaniac working hard and forgetting while stealing, this is mine.

This ain’t your stuff.

Now, why don’t you put me back and let me hang out in my own self?

Honest to God, somebody almost walked off wid alla my stuff

and didn’t care enough to send a note home saying

I was late for my solo conversation

or two sizes too small for my own tacky skirts.

What can anybody do with something of no value on

a open market? Did you get a dime for my things?

Hey! Man, where are you goin wid alla my stuff?

This is a woman’s trip, and I needs my stuff to ooh and aah about.

Daddy I gotta mainline number for my own airline.

Now woncha put me back and let me play this duet with this silver ring in my nose.

Somebody almost run off wid alla my stuff

and I didnt bring anythin but the kick and the sway of it.

The perfect ass for my man, and none of it is theirs

This is mine, Juanita’s- her own things-that’s my name

Now you give me my stuff back.

I see you hiding my laugh, and how I sit sometimes with my legs open to give my crotch

some sunlight.

There goes my love, my toes, my chewed up finger nails.

Nigga, with the the curls in your hair!

Mr. louisiana hot link, I wants my stuff back.