The Wealth of My Mother's Wisdom: The Lessons That Made My Life Rich

by Terrence J

  My mom was the influence for my career. She always felt like people limit themselves because of their lack of experience. So she taught me to be not a product of my environment, but a product of my experiences. Meet new people, travel to new places, do new things, have new friends. She never let me limit myself: I went to school, I played sports my whole life, I had a scholarship for engineering, and I ended up becoming the president of Def Jam. You can’t write that story. If it weren’t for her I wouldn’t be where I am today.

  My mom was willing to sacrifice herself. Often, she wasn’t home: she worked two jobs every day, went to school, and took on a senior position at her job in order to fund the things she gave to my brother and me. When I was young, I called my grandmother and grandfather “Mom” and “Dad”—they were retired, and they were the ones caring for us every day while my parents were out there working to provide a better life for us. I didn’t give my parents the respect of calling them Mom and Dad: I called them by their first names.

  I remember my mom saying, “If you keep calling us Alberta and Jerome, we’re going to punish you.” And I got it quickly. I had to write “Mom and Dad” five hundred times every time I called them by their first names. I still have those papers!

  My mom was also a dreamer. One of the things she always said was, “I believe in myself, therefore I am what I believe myself to be.” That sat with me. What I realize now, every day, is that God gave us gifts and we have to use those gifts to make a difference in the world.

  2

  My Mother’s Words of Wisdom About Love & Acceptance

  It’s a boy.

  Tiffany was practically bouncing with excitement when we met up last night. She’d gone in for an ultrasound that morning and learned the gender of her baby. In five months time she’s going to have a son, a little boy of her own.

  I’d found Tiffany sitting on the sidelines of the gym at the Boys & Girls Club, busy sketching outfits in that design notebook she always carried in her bag. She was oblivious to the basketball game taking place just feet away. Being pregnant hadn’t eliminated her fashion sense—she was still dolled up, though underneath her leggings and tunic you could definitely see a real baby bump. She spent most of the time we were together with her hand placed on top of her stomach, as if she were trying to reach through and touch the baby boy who was growing inside her.

  “My little man,” she said, and smiled. “It’s like he’s already talking to me!”

  At home, though, things weren’t exactly playing out as she’d hoped. She seemed more worried, as if the reality of her situation was starting to hit home. Her super-religious grandmother was less than happy about the out-of-wedlock pregnancy, and although she hadn’t kicked Tiffany off the sleeper sofa, she wasn’t offering to help out, either. Tiffany was trying to save up for the baby, so she got a job after school as a waitress at a coffee shop. But being on her feet all evening was already getting hard; she was worried about how she’d manage when she was eight months pregnant. And although she fired off applications to four different colleges, she’d just found out how much tuition costs at some of her top choices, and nearly had a heart attack.

  And then there was Sean. She wasn’t sure what to think about him. First he told her that he was on board 100 percent, and that he was going to provide for them both—Tiffany and the baby. But as far as Tiffany could tell, he hadn’t applied for a single job. He was staying out late, drinking with his buddies and hitting up the clubs, while she worked late shifts at the restaurant. While she used to feel they were “totally connected” all the time, now she was worried when she saw him “liking” Instagram photos of other women, or following cute girls she didn’t know on Twitter.

  “He used to call me every day, and now he’s just sending me text messages filled with emoticons,” Tiffany said, frustrated. “I mean, it’s not like he’s doing anything wrong, not that I can point to—his Facebook status still says he’s in a relationship with me—but it pisses me off.”

  Man, I really felt for her. I’ve certainly been guilty of relying on IMs instead of real communication; these days, with all the social media that is available, it is pretty confusing knowing how to behave in a relationship, let alone while being pregnant. I truly hoped that Sean would man up soon—he’s a good kid, I think, just a little confused about what it means to be responsible, and at that age who isn’t?

  But to make Tiffany feel better right now, I decided to tell her about my mom and her own journey toward love.

  I’VE NEVER MET MY biological father—in fact, I don’t know anything about him, beyond his name. I don’t know because I’ve never asked, even though my mom offered to tell me anything I wanted to know. But see, I’ve never wanted to know. And the reason I don’t want to know is because I already have a dad. My real dad, Jaime Gonzalez. He married my mom and adopted me when I was three years old, and I’ve never met a better man.

  Here’s the thing about Jaime. He’s a light-skinned, six-foot-one, 360-pound second-generation Puerto Rican New Yorker—a Nuyorican, as they like to say. He talks with a thick New Yawk accent. He’s witty and opinionated: He holds strong views about everything from religion to politics to work, and he doesn’t bite his tongue. We used to frequently butt heads.

  And my mom? She’s barely five feet one, a tiny beautiful slip of a thing, with rich chocolate skin and long black hair and a snappy wardrobe. She’s got a New York edge but also a big dollop of that southern hospitality, with just a hint of a southern drawl in her voice. She’s politically correct, and although she’s outgoing, she’s very careful with what she says. Sure, she’ll tell you off—in a polite way—but then she’ll say, “Have a nice day,” and you’ll still be cool the next day.

  They are a study in juxtaposition.

  So no, Jaime isn’t exactly the person that my mom imagined herself ending up with, back when she was in high school. Never in a million years did she think that she would date someone who wasn’t African American. It just wasn’t in her consciousness. But the story of how Jaime courted her is a real lesson in what love really can—and should—be.

  I was already two years old, and my mom still hadn’t started dating again. She was so torn up by her experience with my biological father that, frankly, she wasn’t very interested in giving love another go. Besides, her focus was me, 100 percent, and raising a toddler doesn’t, or shouldn’t, leave much time for meeting potential suitors.

  But one day, when she was working the front desk of a company called Atwood Richards in the World Trade Center, Jaime walked in the door. He’d come to fix the card access security system for the building, but what really stuck with him that day was my mother. As he tells it, she immediately impressed him—by both her beauty and her “good aura.”

  My mom was gun shy in the beginning, and they had some false starts: Jaime would ask her out, and she would agree to meet him at the front door after work, but then she would have second thoughts and sneak out the back instead. “I must have missed you in the lobby,” she’d tell him. What she was really thinking was: “If he’s a real man, he’ll pursue me.” And he did. He was crazy persistent—he just wouldn’t quit. Finally, he seduced her with sugar—he left a box of gourmet cookies on her desk. Those cookies were so good that she agreed to go out with him—but just to find out where he bought them. After work that day, he escorted her to David’s Cookies, down on Wall Street. (It’s still there to this day, and makes a mean chocolate chip cookie.)

  During that walk, Jamie asked my mom about her goals in life. My mom was totally floored by that question: No one had ever asked before. She thought about this for a long time and then finally told him three things. She wanted me to graduate from college, since she hadn’t. She wanted to own a dog—because pets are symbolic of home, stability, and all the important learned life skills and responsibilities. And she wanted to own a house. Outright. This was something her own mom had never been able to do.

  Jaime listened carefully and said, “I can do
those things for you.”

  That was the moment when my mom knew that he was the one for her, but she still put him through the ringer—for my sake. One of the first things she told him, during that walk to the bakery, was all about me. “I have a son,” she said, right off the bat—because she was a package deal now, and if he wasn’t mature enough to deal with that, she wanted to know it before she wasted any more time with him. But it didn’t deter him a bit. He just said, “Okay,” and kept on walking.

  Their first real date—like almost all of their early dates—was spent at our home. When he arrived at the door, he was carrying a box of Pampers diapers. I answered the door because my mom was in the bathroom getting ready. I looked at my future stepfather and said, “Mama’s in the toilet making doodoo.” (Disclaimer: She wasn’t!) I don’t think she’s ever forgiven me for that.

  That didn’t scare him away, either. Instead, he began wooing my mother by befriending me. He would show up for dates with jugs of apple juice—my favorite—and pound cakes, and endless boxes of diapers. He spent hours reading me my favorite Sweet Pickles book, over and over: Goose Goofs Off. This floored my mom—“This is a real man,” she thought. Jaime and I had great chemistry from the start. The first time we met, I jumped on him and tried to wrestle with him. I would chant his name over and over—“Jaime Jaime Jaime.”

  Still, my mom made Jaime work for her love. She wanted to test him to make sure he was going to be a responsible, loving, caring person—not just for her sake, but also for mine. She wouldn’t even kiss him for months—you would have thought they were back in the Victorian age. Instead, they spent all their time with me, playing board games and checkers and cards in my grandmother’s backyard. When they weren’t together, he even wrote her love letters and sent her poetry.

  Within a year, they were engaged. They ended up getting married twice. The first time was for my benefit: My mom wanted to move in with Jaime, because his neighborhood had a better pediatrician and day care. But her family disapproved of them living together before marriage. So they hit up the courthouse and got married right away so they could put me in the Little Friends preschool. Four months later, they had a “proper” wedding. And they’ve been married ever since—twenty-seven years.

  The moral of this story, at least I think so, is that you never have to settle—there’s going to be someone out there for you, even if they aren’t what you think you’re looking for. As my mom knew, a real man will fight to be with a woman if he loves her; he’s even willing to struggle if that’s what it means. He won’t just be around for the easy times. If he wants you at your best, he will have to love you at your worst. That’s a lesson I absorbed from watching how Jaime adored and cared for my mother.

  Something my mom says is that if a person is not present, they aren’t supposed to be part of your destiny. My biological father wasn’t there, but Jaime was. And my mom chose him for both of us.

  As a young man, growing up with my stepdad, I did sometimes have questions about the biological father whom I’d never met. But as I grew and matured, I realized what a great stepdad I had in my life. I came to understand that living without the distraction of a “dad” who didn’t want to be around had allowed me to focus on someone who wanted to be a real father. It showed me that my mom had really made the right decision.

  My mom tells me that she once asked her mom, “In all your years on this earth, what is the most important thing you learned?” She expected her to say something profound or religious.

  Instead, my grandma replied, “Don’t be worried about any man who ain’t worried about you.” Clearly, it’s a lesson that all the women in my mom’s family have taken to heart.

  So as far as Tiffany and Sean went, I wasn’t going to offer specific relationship advice—God knows I’m not perfect at relationships, either. And of course it’s important for a kid to have his father in his life. But if a man wants to be around, he’ll be around. And if he doesn’t, it’s time to look for someone else.

  Tiffany didn’t look very happy to hear this. “Yeah, but look at me”—she gestured to her baby bump. “I’m huge.” I rolled my eyes at this, but she went on. “Anyway, it’s not like guys are gonna be beating down my door when I’m carrying a kid around all day. Maybe I should just focus on fixing what I’ve got.”

  That’s not necessarily true. In fact, my mom always said that being a single mom was an opportunity, not a disadvantage, when it came to dating. That might sound strange, but hear me out. Mom always said that if you already have a child, you get to actively choose the man who is going to be that kid’s father, and decide who is going to raise him. It’s not just the default job of the guy who happened to knock you up—especially if that guy isn’t showing much interest in being a dad. When you are dating with a kid, you get to see how the men you go out with behave around children, what they are really like when it comes to those kinds of adult decisions. And as my mom likes to say, that’s a really powerful position to be in. Anyone can father a kid, but a real man will be a father.

  Jamie is one of the best men I’ve ever met—he was willing and eager to take on two people, instead of just one. And that’s how you know it’s for real. If someone really loves a woman, they will love her child as well. It’s not just about attraction or sex; it’s about loving someone so much you want to bring their kid diapers and read Goose Goofs Off a hundred times. This shows that someone’s game to be there for the everyday grind—the fevers and the potty training and the visits to the emergency room at three A.M. That’s the kind of person all women should be with—not just single moms. But single moms get the opportunity to give a partner a test drive, so to speak, to see how they act under pressure, before committing to them.

  Jaime was the game changer for my mom and me. He became the foundation of our lives. He brought us the stability that we needed in order to thrive. Those goals my mom had? He helped her achieve every single one, before she was thirty-five.

  Tiffany digested this quietly, picking at her fingernails—bright pink, manicured. The girl was still thinking about her appearance. Finally, she changed the subject. “Was it really that big a deal back then that your dad was Puerto Rican? I mean, half my friends are in interracial relationships.”

  It was definitely progressive back then for a black woman to be married to a fair-skinned Puerto Rican. (Puerto Ricans come in all colors, from white to caramel to jet black; Jaime is Spanish speaking but looks like a white Italian.) This was way before Jungle Fever. The world has changed a lot since the 1980s, but at the time, they were still an anomaly.

  At one point, my mom asked Jaime if he was worried about being in an interracial relationship. His answer was “I don’t see you as a black woman—I just see you as a beautiful woman. Your color is like body paint to me.” With that answer, he made her feel very special about being a chocolate-colored African American woman—at a time when there weren’t a lot of positive images of this. And she realized that if he was okay walking around the streets with a black woman on his arm, then she would be okay with a “white” man on hers.

  As she put it to me recently, “You never know what color a gift is going to be. And your father was a gift. You shouldn’t turn away a gift just because you aren’t sure about the color of the wrapping paper it arrived in. Anyway, in life, most people only see green: If you can’t pay your bills, they don’t care what color you are.”

  That’s not to say that they didn’t run up against prejudice. Mom’s family initially opposed the match, and one of Jaime’s best friends told him that he shouldn’t marry a black woman. They persevered anyway. When our family moved to North Carolina in the early nineties, this was a whole new world. We had a tough time trying to find a church. The churches in North Carolina were segregated: There were churches for white people, and black people, and not a lot of mixing. People that my parents encountered in that part of the world were sometimes petty and judgmental—people would come right up to my mom and rudely ask her why she wa
s married to a white man. It made my mom very uncomfortable.

  I have a lot of respect for my mom for being able to see that it’s the person inside that matters, not their ethnic background or the way they look. And her choice taught me never, ever to judge people for who they choose to be with. I am a straight man and I love my black women, but I have no problem with gay marriage; I have no problem with interracial relationships. Black, white—whatever floats your boat, love can transcend skin color and ethnic background and even gender.

  And not only did their marriage teach me never to judge other people’s relationship choices, it left me a lot more open about people in general. I grew up surrounded by people of all ethnicities—not just white and black, but Italian and Indian and Spanish. I was taught that the only thing that mattered was character. What’s important is who you are, what you do, what kind of person you want to be. Are you a family person? Do you care about your community? Do you take pride in your work? Do you take responsibility for your actions? That’s what’s important—not skin color. That’s a powerful thing to learn at a young age.

  This has also helped me a lot in my career. When I sit down for an interview with someone, I don’t see any skin color, and I don’t judge them in advance.

  Tiffany nodded. I could see I was getting somewhere.

  Sure. But even more important than lessons about skin color were the lessons that my parent’s relationship has taught me about respect. I learned from watching them together that men should treat women like ladies. I saw that played out every day at home. From the first day they met, Jaime behaved like a real gentleman—it takes a special kind of guy to court a woman for months without even a kiss. He would buy her flowers, write her love letters, and he was always caring, but more than anything, he helped her build a life. He sacrificed to take care of us. Dinners and candlelight are great, but he was the man who stepped up and bought diapers, he was the man who picked me up from day care and made sure I had braces and a bicycle to ride. He was there to help me become a man. Those things, in the grand scheme of things, are way more important than the romance that we find so important when we’re young.