Sitting With The Sisters

I had a lovely conversation with a sister the other day and it was almost as if we had known each other our entire lives.

The topics melted into each other and before either of us knew it, over two hours had passed.

Neither of us was trying to impress the other, the very fact that we were both in this restaurant at this little corner table, comfortable in our own being, was more than enough.

We had only met a few times before through those intersecting ways that women's lives often do.

Before this engagement, I was interviewed by a member of my sorority whom I hadn't met. Her topic was about the ways we encounter and are empowered by Sisterhood. It is one of our founding principles, so I was eager to be a part of her national conversation.  

It was another one of those kindred spirit moments where even through the gaze of the computer, we felt the energy of the other and as women do, made declarations of seeing each other at the next conference or event.

About a year ago, me with a bit of my somewhat extroverted INFJ Empath self, went to the home of someone I hadn't met before. My husband was becoming good friends with the husband and as was their cultural custom, they were having a gathering for the November holidays. Not too long in the gathering, I was embraced by his friend's wife and her sisters. Since then, whenever we see each other at whatever event, we make a beeline to greet and we are not of the same race but share the Antilles, Caribbean as ancestral places. 

Or the book group with an older woman of another faith and race, a younger woman of yet another faith and race, and a woman of the country's majority faith and race. We connected over a hope for our community and love of literature.

Finally, while acclimating to my still-new-to-me environs of the Northeast and with Covid letting up enough for me to be out-and-about, I had another conversation with a woman who is from my ancestral homeland. We were only supposed to be meeting for appetizers for an hour or so and before we knew it, four hours had gone by, we had to order coffee (me) and tea (her). She has become a dear spiritual connection for me and whenever we see each other, it is as if we always knew the other.

I have been thinking long and hard about this place in my life.

Once-upon-a-time, I said that I didn't want anything to do with women.

It came from a place of pain, hurt, and neglect that I had experienced at the hands of my step-mother and step-sister while growing up. My maternal older sisters were already adults and on the other side of the country, so I never grew up with a mirror of myself in my home. 

What I had seen even with some other sororities when I went to college further pushed me away from being with people who were jealous of the other, comparing each other's purses or clothes. I was working a full-time job and going to college full-time so felt I didn't have much space in my life for catty behavior, definitely not over who was dating whom or whatever little tits-for-tats were replete in the dorms. I didn't stay on campus.

I kept my distance.

It was my now sorority sisters who helped shine a light on a possible other way and helped me on the path to heal my heart.

They showed what Sisterhood was and what sisterly love really meant.

When I left college and because I didn't join my sorority at that school, I still only had one or two women friends that I would call. I am more comfortable in the space of my own home. Then, marriage and children further distanced that chance to develop women relationships.

So it was a bit funny to me that when I was twenty-eight and answering the call on my life, that it was in my spirit that I didn't know when or how, but that I would be working with women.

I literally laughed out loud at that declaration.

Who? Me? Nah.

But it is funny how sometimes God, the Universe, will call you to the very thing that is part of your healing.

Over the past thirty years, I have developed some mothering and being-mothered relationships with some amazing women. 

I saw in them the hope and beauty I wanted for every woman, every girl.

Now, I am not the life-of-the-party and some of my friends do side-eye me when I say that I really truly am an Introvert, so I'm not the one they will call when they want to go to one of the parties or clubs in town. My Sorors know that in my head I want to be able to step and stroll, but I am just shy and uncertain enough that I will stand on the sidelines and cheer them on. But they also know the I am their biggest cheerleader and support, especially for the undergraduates that I have the pleasure of advising. They know that bit about me.

I am a deep thinker, one of my sister friends told me I was an intellectual and a scholar. 

Ringing in my ears was, who? me? I don't have my doctorate yet, but it has been my sisters who have said, well of course you are and of course you should. And have been encouragers.

Sitting with the sisters has been a journey of love and acceptance, space and some time to ponder, and for some who are deeply trusted, teaching and correcting moments.

Over the past month, I had the pleasure of watching women come into the fold, through two organizations of women. It was sheer joy and love to affirm for them all that we are indeed, sisters, and to showcase the beauty of what that means.

Today, I have some as young as nineteen and others as old and ninety. And each one brings a certain richness to my life that I hope I am able to replicate.

I can't imagine it any other way and am thankful I gave myself the time to be open to the possibilities. Like the women who walked to the tomb after Jesus resurrection, the women in my life have varying gifts and abilities, each one speaking life and possibilities into the other. I can only imagine the conversation and strategy that was happening on that walk to the tomb.

"You go, sis!" "You got this!" "Yessssssssss!"

As I continue to age and watch the changes in my own life, I imagine the wisdom and knowledge I want to be sure my daughters and their friends have. They know they can talk to me about anything and that I will not judge or try to momsplain away their concerns or denigrate their ideas. That is the other gift of sistering across ages for me. My daughters are also becoming sister-friends.

I think about them and the future when I am looking out over the landscape of this country and the ways that certain men have been trying to legislate away a women's rights.

Or the ways they think they can disrespect women, especially Black women, without consequences.

In Louisiana, they found out that there are brothers who will stand up for us and that we are not alone.

Women have long been standing together.

The women have always been leading and have always been identifying when oppression rears its ugly head. 

It reminded me of the women I met cooking meals for the protests, or the ones providing mental health check-ins, or the ones gathering women together for a breakfast so we could strategize how we were going to stand together against the encroaching apartheid state.

Women accomplish a lot without the male gaze and without the artificial competition that often accompanies spaces in this country.

What if, just what if, sitting with the sisters was the way we solved issues like poverty and homelessness, educational deserts, and health care? 

There are many women's organizations where my advocacy intersects and what I have seen, in these rooms with wealthy women who do not look like me and those who do, is that there is a sincere desire to use their resources for the common good, that without the glare of patriarchy, they are able to dream into the what-ifs and see the possibilities for society.

Many wonderful dreams have been fulfilled and seen over the past twenty years and all of it came about when I dared to open my heart.

I no longer chuckle whenever The Spirit, in her still-small-voice guides me through Wisdom to be a part of this or that women's group, or take part in this-or-that women's fundraiser for young girls, or to lend my voice to a cause for girls' empowerment. It has taken years, but I can't imagine myself not doing those things.

My sisters are like reflections to me.

They show me the better parts of myself and the dreams of where I can improve.

Like my daughter, they encourage me.  

In the Netflix Special on "The Light We Carry, " Mrs. Michelle Obama talked about her kitchen table, her circle of intersecting lives of sister friends who help her stay connected and grounded to herself, she talked about how important it was to have those moments of assurance and vulnerability with someone who doesn't want anything from you but wants the best for you.

She talked about the quieting of oneself and that in the falsehoods of social media, it was important to have people that you can be real with, that was essentially her message to the younger generation, to be able to be sustained over the long-haul, not the smoke-and-mirrors of an IG post or influencer status.

It was something I hoped I taught my daughters and those I encountered.

To be able to be real and authentic with someone is a gift, a treasured opportunity. 

Being open to possibilities and like we used to say in Girl Scouts "Make new friends, but keep the Old" that nothing is lost in time or space if we expand our view and add more seats to the table.

As we age, it is even more important to remain socially engaged and have moments of connection across generations.

It is another reason I am delighted that my window to the world includes women of many walks of life.

I can't imagine it any other way.

Sitting with my sisters is like lingering over a latte staring out at the birds playing in and out of the trees in my backyard, it is comforting and reassuring.

My sisters are like home. 

He Who Finds A Wife

 

I am the wife of an important man.

He is a humble man who has done a lot in the span of his career.

There is hardly a place in this country where we have traveled without someone knowing him.

Well, ok, maybe The Dakotas and Wyoming, maybe Utah, but he is well known.

Known as a scholar, advocate, mentor, and leader.

I am lesser known, except in those spaces whereupon they meet me and only think, "oh, that's his wife." I've been called that so many times that my name was not used at all.

Not disrespectfully, but in a way that my only identity was as his wife.

Now, to be very clear, I am incredibly proud of my husband and so honored to stand beside him as he uses his gifts to transform education for so many young people. I remain in awe of this man who met me at the challenge of my faith and has been a steady hand in our life.

You already know my story because while they are my pearls, I have shared that we met when we were in our thirties, we were each pursuing our careers and education, In fact, we graduated just a week apart, he with his Ph.D. and me with my M.B.A. A few months after we graduated, we got bought a house, got married, and moved with my sons that were now his sons, to our new life.

Unbeknownst to us, our lives would change a lot.

I have always been fiercely independent, raised my children after my divorce without the aid of child support or a family member to fall back on. That was a quality he appreciated in me.

When we met, he saw me in a suit, when he first came to my apartment, you could eat off the floor. He was impressed

Each of us had, through the medium of our faith, gone before God and prayed for what we wanted. 

By the time we had each done that, we had each had our share of unrequited love, love lost, and love disappointed. We knew we deserved and wanted better.

It was funny, when he stepped off that elevator in that black turtle neck and jeans, coming to finalize his classes at the university where I was working, I instantly knew. So did he.

That spiritual connection.

The next four years were a whirlwind.

We dated, traveled, studied, grew in our career, and he and my sons connected in a way that only prayers could make happen. He became a dad, affectionally renamed by my oldest son as "BD". 

When you have a faith about your life, you trust the process, trust the journey. That is what we did.

I would never lie and say it has been easy, these twenty-five or whatever years that we have been together and traveled life's highways and byways, but I would never trade anything for my journey now.

He gets me.

I get him.

When we met and I traveled back to introduce him to someone who, had it been a different denomination, would have been my father in ministry, I was waxing poetic about him, how wonderful he was, yada yada. Pastor Freddy looked at me and said, "and daughter, remember, you are the prize."

It was something I didn't see in myself.

If you grew up like me, the PK, the one with the "not-very-nice-stepmother" and one who was just so different than everyone else, you would know that there are beautiful things within me that I didn't see, was oblivious  to because my step-mother made sure I did not see myself as all-that and my father always taught us to not think more highly of ourselves than we ought.

Over the years, I've come to see those things in me that are the good thing.

Growing up in the Black Baptist Church and then, as a young woman in faith, marriage was always held out as the holy grail, the highest attainment of a woman and without it, she was essentially worthless. 

That always bothered me, especially as one who early in my life, before I was thirty, had experienced the disappointment that came with a wrong-placed-ring. Back in the late 80s and early 90s, I was old before I was young and was considered damaged goods by some in the very church where I was trying to answer the call on my life.

It took a lot of healing and honestly, my husband was a part of that journey to complete acceptance of me and as he says, honoring myself and my pearls.

He is the son of a single mother who had been betrayed and disappointed in love, so he perhaps had a tender spot in his heart for someone who had been through life's sorrows. Whatever it was, he was a healing balm. He saw the hustle in me and when we were "talking" - that stage before dating - he asked me what I wanted to do and I said "honestly, at this point, I just want to be an at-home mom and raise my kids."

God and the Universe hears your whispered-out-loud-prayers and doesn't forget.

That was something I had never considered but was a bit tired of juggling career, school, and taking care of my sons by myself. I was up at before sunlight everyday and was burning the candle at both ends trying to make things happen. When he and I met, there was a bit of just being tired in me that I hadn't been brave enough to utter to anyone. I was so busy in a lot of ways proving to myself and others who didn't care that I was not worthless, not unlovable, and not a waste just because I knew the inside of a divorce court and spent my evenings playing Legos™ or race cars with little boys.

He saw the more because he, like I, had prayed for someone to see the more in us.

We shared our faith and our growth together into who we believed God had anointed us to be.

And he supported me. Everything I wanted to do. 

On our first few dates, he bought me a desk and a computer.

All the jewelry I own, outside some cosmetic pieces, he bought.

He delighted in arraying me in new clothes because I had my uniform of a couple suits, weekend wear of a pair of jeans and a couple t-shirts. There was a beauty in me he brought out. 

So I spent some time looking at myself in the mirror of time, reflecting through each gray hair in my twists and the dark circles I inherited from my 3x maternal grandmother. Looking at the woman I was seeing, I realized she was more than she thought.

Perhaps because the Creator who molded her said she was fearfully and wonderfully made.

Or that her late mother gave her a name that means of inestimable value and great worth.

Or that she knew she gave with a deep love and compassion that filled her heart.

Whatever it was, I looked at her in the mirror and loved her fiercely.

It is in that loving her, me, fiercely, that I said out loud after twenty-five years that yes, indeed, I am the prize, the good thing.

There is a scripture in the Hebrew Bible that says, "He who finds a wife finds what is good and receives favor from the LORD. 
" Proverbs 18:22. NIV

 Imagine that. That a partner, companion, one suited for the other, could be so influential in their joint journey in life that this would be a reality. 

Proverbs 19:14 NIV says, "Houses and wealth are inherited from parents, but a prudent wife is from the LORD" 

My husband has been blessed to have an upward trajectory of his career, especially over these past twenty-five years that we have been together. I watched in utter amazement and delight as he moved from institution-to-institution and as receipts of his contributions piled up.

Admittedly, at one point, while cleaning up yet the seventh time our youngest daughter threw up because of her severe and debilitating illness as an infant, I was a bit envious, jealous. I was in my early forties and after looking appreciatively at my upwardly mobile career in brand and product marketing, I was now an at-home mom with school-aged-sons, and daughters who were under three and one was hospitalized more days than she had been alive. I questioned my reason for being. Was this it?

Fast forward almost twenty years from the seven-times-a-day laundry and floor-mopping episodes, and I am redefining myself and presence as my husband is preparing to step into another stellar position.

For a brief moment, I glanced at the naysayers who said I wasted my degrees or that I was "just the wife" as if I had no identity or letters behind or in front of my time. 

Then, I had to remind myself of the journey I wouldn't trade for anything and the life I helped build.

We lived on one income because when we got married and were making hand-over-fist-money, I insisted that we build a house in the part of town that was not overly inflated, that we live on one income, just-in-case. That just-in-case happened just three years after we were married when we both experienced a career stall.

I was pregnant with the last child.

So we banded together and the kids never missed a beat, never went hungry, and never knew until they were adults the juggling he did for a season that lasted a year.

That is the thing about being equally yoked and having a partner you envision for what you are trying to build. He knew there was a rock in me, even if that rock would sometimes shake and quake, she was steady. 

Denzel Washington's son was in an interview and the interviewer was waxing poetic about his father and the son said, "and Pauletta." He reminded them that his father was no where without the sacrifice of his mother.

Like Samuel L. Jackson's wife.

Like Barack Obama's wife.

Like Morris Chestnut's wife.

Like Martin Luther King', Jr.s wife.

The wives who stood with men with powerful visions and work in front of them.

"You can have it all, but not all at once," Dr. Cheryl Miller, my Archousia sister recently said in a fifty-year retrospective of her work when she commented about taking a step back from her career to raise their children. She who was a renowned artist and lecturer, she quietly kept painting and getting their children to college.

Like so many that I am in the sisterhood of supportive wives clubs.

Like my Mocha Mom sisters.

Like more than I can name who took care of the kids and the house, who volunteered to make their community a better place, who quietly wrote articles, books, painted pictures, took pictures, orchestrated cross country moves, and tended to college choices for their kids. 

The ones who have the privileges we have and the ones who don't. 

The moms who put themselves on the back burner until they could fulfill this one part of their assignment.

I'm an empty nester now and my husband reminded me the other day that I didn't have to worry about what I was going to eat or where I was going to sleep, that we didn't need me to work to pay a bill. That I was free to do the things I was called to do.

I smiled because it wasn't always like that in my life.

We are in the reaping season of our life.

The part where the hard work and sacrifice of one pair of jeans pays off that I can buy whatever jeans I want that fit this aging body if I want to.

Both of us have more years behind us than in front of us and at this stage are able to appreciate the steps along the way, are able to share nuggets of wisdom to the next generation, and lay a foundation for them to have a sure footing in life when we are gone.

Whenever I glance away and wonder if I was enough or did enough, I can look back through the arch of time and realize the only measurement is the joy in the faces of my family, of them having the confidence and assurance we wanted to instill in them.

I am content.

I am renewed.

I am writing anew this next chapter of my life and in appreciation of where it has been, pausing in awe.

At The Appointed Time

 I was sitting in the Performing Arts Center of CT State Community College at Housatonic, listening to a brilliant art scholar tell about her fifty year career that many are just now discovering because well, the appointed time.

She was always and already painting, as she told us, she had earned the requisite degrees, her title was Dr., she was a lecturer all over the world, and to so many, she seemed to come out of nowhere.

Dr. Cheryl Miller is a woman, like many of us whose ancestry is traced to the horrors of the TransAtlantic Trade, whose being is a mixture of time and place. She has Danish, Filipino, and Ghanian heritage as well as Portuguese and the nuance of the Dutch West Indies as heritage. With maternal ancestry in the U.S. Virgin Islands and an African American father who was a renowned Howard alum, she has a pedigree that was more common that understood in the Washington D.C. of her coming-of-age.

A college education was expected, she being a high school graduate in 1970. Once-upon-a-time, Washington D.C. was the place of the strivers and becomers of Black America. It is no accident that Prince Georges County was home to more Black professionals and millionaires. It was a possibility.

In her lecture, she shared with us her acceptance to art school, with the support of her father who essentially told her she had to go do something and who didn't fall into the assumed pressure of telling his daughter she must study medicine or law. She just had to be the best at what she did.

Through her encounters through the post-Civil Rights Era, she told us about the stages of Black curiosity that ensued after the 1977 broadcast of Roots and during the 1980-1990s heyday of corporate social responsibility and diversity programs. Listening to her, me being about a decade behind her in my coming-of-age, I was on the edge of my seat as her lecture was peppered with the images of her paintings that she said was her trying to figure it out.

To initially look at her, this senior beauty with a slightly quirky personality, would initially be to miss the genius, if one only looked at where you meet her now. In the after-lecture, her husband, another couple, and I were chatting about her brilliance when he said, "Yes to so many, she was just a Jack-and-Jill Mom because she took time off to raise the kids. They didn't know all this." I was in awe. I had only recently become acquainted with her through my husband's connection with her husband through the Boulé. We hadn't been in this state or the Northeast long so lots of people where new to us. I was mesmerized.

She talked about her observations, her travels, and how she is on a quest to reclaim the origins of so much art - including graphic and commercial, marketing and advertising - that held origins in West Africa. Speaking unapologetically and in the ways that a professor can sometimes drop nuggets of wisdom while the student least expects us, she kept us enthralled for the hour-and-a-half experience.

Her thesis, she mentioned, has become an industry standard and was "published before the Internet was a thing." It was reminding me of how so much is left unearthed because we have all somewhat become accustomed to what can be an easy search or what is "content" or "Instagrammable." 

Ultimately, her thoughts and lectures were about being true to one's self and one's calling. That one thing you were put here to do, even if it tarry or more apt, if people tarry in finding out about you, just keep doing it.

So I asked her the question about the arch of time and ones relevance, not in those words, but how society, this American society, tends to deem people irrelevant if they are past 30 or 40, when they have more than half their life in front of them, if God says the same. I asked her to answer to both the students in the room and the seasoned folks who were still on discovery paths.  In her gracious manner, she did and talked about not rushing through it, to learn the craft, to sit with it, and for her, how she sometimes takes long periods of rest to think and hear what the art wants from her. The world, she essentially said, is just now catching up.

For me personally, it was a confirming and reassuring moment. I, took, took time away from my fledgling career to raise the children, the last two were girls. I felt that they needed me and after my second daughter was diagnosed with a debilitating illness, it proved right. In the decades that ensued, I worked around their schedule, was always writing and mentoring, but did not have a linear trajectory of upward career mobility or rise. Dr. Miller said, "you can have it all, but not all at once," also in response to my question. She is on a new series now as an empty-nester. I, too, am a new empty-nester and on a period of discovery.

Go back to that one thing. What is the undone thing.

I've written a manuscript - thoughts, memoir, story - and am in edits to prepare it for release to the world. Right at a time when my children are beginning their journeys and my husband is taking the helm as Interim President of a major university.  The last almost twenty-five years of my life have been in a second, supportive role. 

And it has given me space and time to journey, think, and be confident of what I need in life.

We do not stop creating at 23 when most young people graduate from college or at 25 when most are at the apex of a career. We are not finished at 30, despite that 1980s era series "Thirty Something" that was Boomer Angst of juggling life, career, marriage, and family trying to be modern and relevant. We are not finished. That was also a message of her work. There are stories upon stories upon stories that make up a lifetime, that also seemed to be an undercurrent of her lecture. We aren't just one thing.

Life is a journey. 

Let is take you.

And at the appointed time, your moments will find you.

Discover Dr. Miller's Work

https://dmd.uconn.edu/major/diverse-perspectives/cheryl-miller/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheryl_D._Miller