It's All Love

by Marita Golden

  It was one of those generalized pathologies grown folks whispered in our ears about White kids. They talk back to their mommas and their parents don't whup them. Adults would get mad just thinking about those White kids, and we were made to understand that none of that would ever be a problem with us. As a child, it was not uncommon for me to be in a distant part of the house and be summoned by my daddy to fetch a glass of ice water, even if the kitchen was only a few feet from where he was sitting, or to change the television channel in the days before remotes. This had to be done quickly, quietly, and, most important, without the smallest semblance of “attitude,” or any physical tic that might possibly indicate frustration. That meant there was no looking funny, twisting your lips, or sucking your teeth, and we were not to “even think about” rolling our eyes.

  In the book Fatherhood, Bill Cosby writes that his wife, the elegant Camille Cosby, used to threaten to knock their kids “into next week” and he once told his son, “When I come home Thursday, I am going to kick your butt.” Today show personality Al Roker titled his book on fatherhood Don't Make Me Stop This Car, after an oft-repeated warning from his own bus driver dad. In his comedy movie Delirious, Eddie Murphy recalls his mother's seemingly bionic powers at landing a shoe upside his behind. And an unscientific survey of my own close friends and family reveals certain recurrent themes in the threats leveled against us growing up. Routinely, if an adult didn't appreciate something we were up to, we were made to understand that they could, at any moment: slap you silly, slap you into tomorrow, slap your eyes out of your head, smack you upside your head, snatch you bald-headed, smack your teeth down your throat, smack the shit out of you, knock some sense into you, knock your neck to your knees, beat that ass, whup your ass, wipe the floor with your ass, knock your ass out.

  Break your neck, smack the black off of you. Leave you for dead. Said the luminous actress Debbi Morgan to her young onscreen niece Jurnee Smollett in the 1997 movie Eve's Bayou: “I will hurt you.”

  I remember times when childhood was less sentimental and motherhood less saccharine. My cantankerous grandmother Momma Susie used to hold babies while an inch of ash gathered on the end of the cigarette she was smoking, hands free, as it dangled from the side of her mouth. And if, on occasion, some bit of ash fell onto the baby's arm, and the baby started to cry, she just dusted it off, changed positions, and said loudly, “Aw, that baby's all right.” And it was. A little smudged is all. There was not a soul in my family who ever read Dr. Spock or subscribed to the “Touch Points” theory by T. Berry Brazelton. Times were different, and even White kids, who our parents told us got everything they wanted and never got yelled at, were deemed less fragile and more subject to a natural order of inviolate adult rule. Accounts of White schoolmasters and parochial school nuns were dense with stories of harsh corporal punishment, and don't you remember when Char-min or Northern toilet paper commercials featured a White child loading tissue down his pants, to cushion the impending spanking that was coming to his behind?

  Some of those times resonate with me now, not because of the physical punishments (or cigarette ash) but despite them. From the time we were very young, we were made to understand that adults were in charge. That life had boundaries and consequences for crossing them. We learned that all eyes in the neighborhood were on us and any grown person, at any time, had the right to correct us, to chastise us, to smack our behinds and send us home crying to Momma, who would smack us again because Mrs. Phillips had to get after us. Not long ago, I was listening to National Public Radio's The Di one Rehm Show, and author Cindy Post Senning, the great-granddaughter of etiquette maven Emily Post, was talking about her book The Guide to Good Manners for Kids. When a listener wanted to know how she should handle a neighbor's or relative's recalcitrant child, Senning advised against correcting other people's kids. I thought to myself: Those women can't know how the world used to look from the South Side of Chicago or other Black places, where neighbors have always relied heavily on each other. While we didn't think anything good about all the folks who could fuss or get us into trouble, even when we were small we could sense that the opposite of love has always been indifference. And all due respect to Ms. Post Senning, but don't I wonder what some of our communities would look like now if everyone was still together, trying to get to the same places, fussing at everyone else's kids?

  The harsh discipline was often painful, but in most cases, all that “knocking your ass out” was hyperbole meant to make you think twice about acting up. I never knew anyone who lost facial parts as the result of a good whuppin'. Still, I understand much of that romantic lore is revisionist history and there is a darker, more disturbing side to excessive yelling and harsh physical punishments—to being mostly unnoticed at all. It has shown up in the lives of extended family members who grew up with too little kindness. It has also shown up in my own psyche, in struggles with my family and scars that never fully fade, even with the passage of time. My brother, who was always whipped more harshly and more often than my sister or me, is estranged from us now. It is unclear whether those whippings have anything to do with where he is today, which is nowhere lucid or sane—nowhere anybody who loves him can reach him—it's just clear those whippings must have hurt. And sometimes the cumulative effect of all our hurts makes us too heavy with pain to ever walk with dignity. My house was loud and sometimes unforgiving, and in many ways, that scarred me and made me promise things were going to be different when I had my own kids. I read all the What to Expect books and memorized the book / Love You This Much. We decorated a nursery from the pages of a catalog and I told myself I wasn't ever going to spank or yell. For years, that worked just fine, until one day my policy changed.

  When Sydney was fourteen months old, I returned to the Washington Post to work as a reporter for the first time and sent her to a home-based day care a few minutes away. The owner, Mrs. McCorkle, was young, but organized and self-possessed beyond her years. Frequently when I would pick Sydney up, if one of the children was misbehaving, Mrs. McCorkle would just start counting, and that child would cease and desist before she got to ten. Once Sydney misbehaved while playing with a neighbor's child in the cul-de-sac where we used to live. I started counting and Syd chilled out before I got to six. Wow! said my neighbor, Ranae. What happens when you get to ten? I don't know, I told her. I'll have to call Mrs. McCorkle and ask. I think Sydney was about three when I stopped counting to ten and started to spank.

  Since then the threat of spanking has always loomed disproportionately large in the back of my children's minds, but while whippings are infrequent, sometimes I yell more than I care to admit. Not long ago I cussed Sydney out on the way back from her ballet lesson. She made us late, she couldn't find her shoes, her body was stiff with attitude, and I spat vicious words until I was spent, and a little ashamed. Good thing there was nobody else in the car with me at the time or I'd have really felt out of control. When I picked her up, I was able to calmly say, “We need to help each other think of ways you can keep your stuff together and we can get out of the house in a more timely fashion,” and Sydney agreed. A former neighbor once told me about a girlfriend who called talking about how she was “going to hurt that little bitch.” My neighbor asked who she was talking about. Turns out, she was talking about her own six-year-old daughter. We could laugh because that was clearly venting gone over the top. (Kind of like in the old television series The Honeymooners, when Jackie Gleason used to tell his wife, “One of these days, Alice. Pow! Right in the kisser!” And that qualifies as classic television.) Because kids try you and cussing out the air or calling a friend to rant gives you time to calm down so sometimes you don't have to say things to your children that are hard to take back. Or frighten them by saying nothing at all.

  Try as I might, I don't have the same ironclad authority as the adults I grew up with, and in many ways I don't want to. My house has an appellate process; it has precocious kids who tell me, “Mom, I don't like it when you yell,” and, �
�You hurt my feelings.” And I get to say, “Well, I didn't like it when you came downstairs naked.” My house has more exchange, more compromise, more kisses, and yes, that often means a whole lot more funny looks and twisted lips, a lot more attitude than ever would have been tolerated when I was young. That's why, sometimes, I've got to get in little people's faces to let them know, “I will knock your eyeballs out of your head.” Or maybe I say, “Don't make me tap that sammy,” which means “Don't make me spank your butt.” I got that one from Vita, in my book club, and it works especially well for the little ones who might find the idea of having their eyeballs violated a little too nightmarish. Later we make up in sentimental e-mails after we've had time to calm down or we go in the living room and try to bring back the love by playing a duet on the piano. Sometimes we're too angry to do any of that, but we move on anyway because, really, that's all we can do.

  “I Wish,” sang Stevie Wonder, and I have wished I were a woman who never yells. Sometimes I wish I wasn't a writer, so I wouldn't spend so much time in my head or find it so painful when people tried to pull me out. But mostly, instead of wishing, I find it more immediately useful to know my triggers, to be honest with myself; to work on my patience, and to have people around who can help me vent or check me when I'm tripping. My parenting is a constant calibration of the old-school lessons in accountability and respect (my kids say “yes, ma'am” and “no, ma'am” on the phone ever since I heard a lovely little White girl's impeccable phone manners when I called North Carolina once for a story), tempered by a modern emphasis on feelings and self-esteem. Jacqueline Kennedy once said it doesn't matter what else you do if you don't raise your children well, and I believe that to be true. Beauty fades and the most storied career passes into memory. I talk to my mother nearly every day now, but for a long time our relationship was strained, and it took us years to find our way back to each other. But tomorrow is not promised and I can't count on having years with my kids, so I try to find my way back to them sooner. To say I'm sorry now, in real time, which is the only time we've got, and let them know Momma doesn't always get it right, while they are still little, in the hopes that that immediacy lessens some of the sting. I try not to let our hurts fester long and grow deep between us.

  It is something I've learned over long years and painful lessons. They are lessons that apply not only to kids but to husbands as well, because despite my best efforts, despite how different I said my house would be from the house I grew up in, my marriage is one more place where I've yelled more often than I care to admit. And it is one more place where my romantic fantasies don't always square with the wife that I have been. For a couple of years now, I've helped write an occasional column for Essence magazine called “Making Love Work.” It profiles couples who have weathered hard times and offers their tips on pulling a relationship back together. Friends and relatives often recognize my name in the pages, but Tanzi, a friend of my close friend Stephanie, who sees my husband and me out on occasion, says she skips the column whenever she sees my name. I have the perfect marriage, she tells Stephanie, and who the hell wants to read an article about relationship problems by a woman who has never been through anything? I can see where she might get that. Because as a couple, our public face is always smiling. Because my husband knows my songs and likes to lead me to the dance floor; and I like to walk up and wrap my arms around him from behind. Because we play off each other well and sprinkle color in each other's stories. So I can see where she might think my marriage is perfect.

  It's just she's wrong about that.

  Losing my rosebushes was what finally sent Ralph and me to seek professional help for our marriage—that and everything that happened along with the move to our new house. When my daughter Savannah was a newborn and Sydney was four years old, my friend Deneen brought me two tiny rosebushes, no more than bulbs and sticks, to plant in honor of each of them. A deep hearty red one for Sydney, and a beautiful light pink for Savannah. I tended those rosebushes and they grew like my daughters, who could each tell you which one was theirs. I'm sentimental and often try to keep living reminders to mark the times of our lives. When one of my best friends and sorority sister, Valerie Smith Reid, died of breast cancer when I was pregnant with Savannah, I took a cutting from a plant I sent her when her cancer went into remission and we all thought she would live. My Valerie plant sits in my kitchen, reminding me of my friend. I loved the joy and celebration that those rosebushes stood for, and I loved that I had a friend thoughtful enough to give them to me.

  When we sold our first house in 2002, I asked to take the rosebushes, said I wanted it put in our contract. My husband promised he would take care of it. That he would call the guy who still does our lawn before the move, but he didn't get around to it. I asked the day of the move, but things were so hectic it wasn't a priority. I asked him for weeks after the move, but by that time, he had gotten into a $200 carpeting dispute with the people who bought our house. They were relandscap-ing, so they just dug up my rosebushes and threw them in the trash.

  Those bushes were a part of my first house and my babies and my life as a young married woman. They were a gift of friendship, and why didn't he know how much they meant to me? Why did he leave them so bad-karma strangers could hurt me with their casual disregard? How was it that I was still so unable to make myself heard in this marriage, after so many years? Moving days are always stressful but I had a newborn, and my husband had left all the packing to me and the Senora. It was a busy time for him at work, but I asked him to take a day or two off so that we could make a plan, touch bases, figure out logistics. He wouldn't—but why did I just sit there and play the victim?

  By the time we began unpacking, on moving day, I began to realize a lot of things had gone wrong. There were the usual nicks on furniture and in the wooden frame to a tapestry from Guatemala, but it was my grandmother Mabel's broken china that wracked my body with sobs. Dishes that were probably eighty years old had fallen to pieces. They had been passed down from my mother, and after surviving so long, I had let them crumble on my watch. “You should have taken them in the car,” my husband told me. “I couldn't remember every damn thing,” I spat back. “You should have helped me plan. These dishes meant the world to me,” I cried. “Everything means the world to you,” he countered, his voice alien and ugly with sarcasm and scorn. After many, many battles, it was in those few months after the move that I finally felt empty and defeated. And my husband was as cold and withdrawn as I've ever seen him.

  When I was a young bride, no one told me that marriage had seasons. That the marriage you have at year one is not the same marriage at year six or eight or eleven. That some days would feel like St. Tropez and some days would feel like the Gulag. Like my childhood friend Alicia once said, I thought we'd giggle all day and make love all night. No one ever tells you that sometimes you hold on to the institution because it means far more to you than the man. No one said that to me, or perhaps they tried to, and I just wasn't in a place where I could hear them.

  Sometimes it seems like I've been married since I was seventeen. Only a few weeks after my college boyfriend and I broke up, I met my husband on Valentine's Day in 1989 at Howard University Hospital where he was a pharmaceutical representative and I was getting a physical. I was twenty-one years old. We started talking and he mentioned he had a little brother. Said he loved kids, and right then it flashed through my mind: “I'm going to marry this guy and we're going to have kids.” And so we did. But for a while at first, there were a few other relationships he was loath to let go of. This left me jealous and angry Still, like my momma before me, I was young, and I had to have that boy. I used to call my husband “The King” when he'd come visit me at work. Used to get a kick out of talking him up to everyone we met. He was smart, he had played college football, he was a Que, and I always did have a thing for the fraternal men of Omega. He left his W-2 on the table when we were dating and I fell in love with his salary and benefits. Before the wedding, somebody I wo
rked with told my friend Stephanie, “Lonnae's not ready to get married.” And he was right. But that's something else no one could have told me at the time. I was all packaged like the magazine and television shows instructed, and I just wanted to be taken off the shelf. I had an engagement party, three showers, and a bachelorette party. I had a big wedding and a big ring on my finger. Our picture was in Jet magazine. After all of that, I thought marriage would be magically delicious.

  We married and Sydney came quickly. Then I became a Washington Post reporter. I was meeting people and hanging out after work, and suddenly I wasn't the little twenty-one-year-old who liked to make brief appearances onstage before scurrying behind the curtains, where it was safe. I had a promising career and people who told me I was good at what I did. I was coming out from behind my shadow. I was growing, but my marriage was stagnant. My husband grew resentful of this new wife and her bigger world. He said I wasn't the woman he married. And I grew resentful, because he was right, I wasn't.

  (Black Thought)

  Yeah, so what you sayin I can trust you?

  (Female Voice)

  Is you crazy, you my king for real

  (Both)

  But sometimes relationships get ill

  (Female Voice)

  No doubt

  (The Roots, featuring Erykah Badu, “You Got Me”)

  I can't detail all the arguments we had. How many times I'd walked out in my mind and how ready my body was to follow along. I couldn't talk to my husband. That had been one of our recurrent themes, but I don't know if it was because he wasn't listening or because from my daddy's house to my husband's, I had never had much of a voice. I wrote things down so I could know what I thought. I couldn't talk to my husband, so I left a message for one of his best friends asking if we could talk, and I poured all my sadness into my journal, which I carried with me always. Except the day I left it in my bedroom, which is where my husband found it. I didn't want to come home from work that night. I wanted to run away, right then and there, but it's a familiar story to a lot of women. My child was with him, and I couldn't walk away from her or take her from her daddy.