It was a small idea, but it had room to grow without that heavy cloak of respectability constricting me. I wanted to be part of something like that. I wanted to be with family.
“I’ll go with you,” I told my mother. “To Omaha.”
She nodded. “Okay.”
The Dream Team, Gail Devers, all these Black Olympians, they were the ones who modeled what it could be like for me to take those first wobbly steps out of the house.
The trip remains hazy to me. When we got to Omaha, it was the first time that I was able to connect with my aunts, my dad’s sisters. The first time I wasn’t just a kid dragged along looking at people as if they only existed in those moments, the way a kid sees a teacher or a doctor. They were not supporting players, but the leads in their stories.
Our second day there, one of my aunts made a joke, I don’t remember what, but it must have been a dirty one because before I knew it I was laughing. And the surprise was so great, I laughed again.
Originally, I wanted to end this story in Omaha, in the hope that I could move this ghost of involuntary memory to some place safer. Let her go from my parents’ living room and leave her to sit in the August sun with her people.
It would be an apology of sorts. I felt bad that I had walked in on her when she was so vulnerable. She’d been there alone for nearly thirty years, and it felt awkward to intrude on her space, even though she was me. I’ve grown accustomed only to the two mes. The one before the rape and the one I had to create to survive. But I forgot this third girl, the one in between. The one who existed solely to get me from one life to another.
All she had was what the Olympics gave her, and I know now the message she took in and handed to me as a guide wasn’t quite right. I could be Black and excellent—yes. But I also thought that if I was just great enough, everyone would love me and root for me. What I didn’t learn until later was that I am free and deserving simply because I exist. I don’t have to do all these other things to be worthy of respect and safety. Greatness is not required. It took a long time to undo that belief, but I understand she needed any lifeline she could grasp to get off that couch.
It’s been almost three decades since I limped away from that living room, but that nineteen-year-old remained there with her story untold. I can’t close the door on her again, and go on about my life. The right thing to do is, as usual, the hard thing to do. I was foolish to think I could leave her sealed off to haunt my parents’ house in Pleasanton, or even to tidily move her to Omaha for safekeeping.
Finally, I have to accept that her ghost is here with me, and always will be. She is me.
3
Embrace Your Kryptonite
He sat across from me, regarding me for a long time. “You know . . .” he started.
Let’s get this out of the way: a couple of years ago I was in a consult with a shaman. Yelp actually has a list of the “10 Best Shamans in Hollywood,” but that is not how I found him. Laugh, but I got results. Like what he was about to tell me he could see in my aura.
“You look at vulnerability as your Kryptonite,” he said.
Correct, I thought, and nodded.
“And you need to think of it as your superpower,” he continued. “Vulnerability will unlock everything that has been denied you. If you can be emotionally open and transparent—with yourself and others—you will have everything you have ever dreamed of.”
Shoot, I thought. There went everything I ever dreamed of. But I nodded again like I believed every word.
He knew I was lying. Can’t shit a shaman. “No,” he said. “These qualities don’t make you weak. They make you strong.”
I bluffed, talking about it clinically, like I was someone else assessing my criminal profile in a thriller. “The subject has an intense fear of public humiliation and views any displays of vulnerability as an invitation to harm her. Look here, you can see where she cauterized the wounds herself. Subject is also aggressively allergic to needy people. It’s quite a miracle she can feel anything, really.”
The shaman was the first person to explain to me that to be vulnerable doesn’t mean you’re weak. And if you’ve let people into your life who have attacked your vulnerability, it’s not because you exposed some Achilles’ heel, it is absolutely a deficit in them. When you acknowledge that your vulnerability does not absolve anyone of personal accountability, you will heal from those traumas faster and more fully.
As I opened myself up, a shift naturally happened—one I had never anticipated. I gradually became more nurturing, drawing on a feminine energy I had always discounted. To me, womanliness meant giving without an expectation of reciprocity, just the hope of gratitude. I thought it was asking to be dominated or made a fool of. My mother has a nurturing nature, and my father cheated on her for years. I wouldn’t allow that weakness in my own marriage. In the past, when I impulsively showed some softer, maternal side to Dwyane, he would immediately respond with love. But I would quickly check myself and bat it away. Dismiss it with a joke before anyone, even my husband, thought I was going soft. Gradually, I stopped myself from resisting this nurturing side of myself. Dwyane and I formed a deeper connection, and there was a shift in the energy of how I moved in the world. Everyone noticed, from friends and coworkers to the kids.
Especially the kids. I always get a lot of credit for being a stepmother, right? It’s part of our Hollywood story: D got full custody of Zaire and Zaya, and then his nephew Dada, shortly after we started dating. The weekend dad became a full-time dad, and I made a commitment to be a present, consistent adult, never a mother figure. The real moms were in Chicago. I was careful in interviews to always refer to “the kids,” never, ever “my kids,” and when reporters would press me with “What do they call you?” I was ready with a pat, “Nickie. It’s what my family calls me. From my middle name, Monique.”
That’s really why I get a lot of said credit. I was very vocal and public about knowing “my place.” And I defined that “place” by what I was most certainly not: their mother.
But what was that place, really? When I was around, I didn’t know what my job at home entailed. Though each child is different, each needed some form of mothering. Not someone to replace their mothers, but nurturing energy in the home. I never knew how to maneuver that. If I stepped in, I worried I could be seen as a presence for their mothers to have to fear. This created an emotional barrier between me and the kids. Not quite a wall, but a fence. They knew I was close enough that I was not gonna let them hurt themselves doing something crazy. I would support their extracurriculars, be the one to go to speak to school administrators when I had to remind them about implicit bias and treating these Black children fairly and with respect. Yes, I would be there to help as I was called upon, but always stay far enough away that no one who’s peeking could ever accuse me of stepping over some invisible—and kind of impossible—boundary. “See this fence?” I could say, my hands where they could see them. “Nickie. Not the mom. I know my spot.”
When we all moved to California in the fall of 2019, that distance began to trouble me. With Dwyane retired, and me not traveling as much for work after Kaavia James’s birth, this was the first time we really lived together as a family unit. Issues are harder to ignore, and Zaya had something come up. We were in the living room, and I knew she had been hurting about something for days. I remembered being thirteen and keeping things to myself. Usually, I could flag something to Dwyane and dispatch him to look into it. But he was away on business.
For days, I found reasons just to be around, hoping Zaya would say something. I told myself that she knew I was there, and she could come to me if she had to. But why should she have to wait until “she had to”? Not in the sense of me being a last resort, but why should she have to find the ability to verbalize that she was vulnerable and in need of help when I was only just learning how to do that myself? Instead, I could just offer that help freely.
I took a breath, and blurted it out before fear stopped me. “My d
esire, my inclination,” I said softly, “is to run in. Hold you and hug you and let you know that it’s going to be okay.”
Zaya gave me a receptive look. I admitted to her that I had always put up a fence between us. That I had cared so much about the risk of some imagined stranger snapping that I was overstepping a boundary. Of course, Zaya knew the difference between me and her mother. I was giving away all my power to some unseen watcher in the woods.
She shook her head, and looked away. “I feel like I’ve had three childhoods,” she said. She explained that there was the one when she was mostly with her mom until she was three years old. Then the one with her nanny while her dad played in the NBA. “And then the one with you and Dad. Watching you guys with Kaav, I’m seeing what a childhood could have looked like.”
Those words broke my heart, and I let it break. I let myself acknowledge her pain, and feel my own in return.
“I’m not gonna wait any longer,” I said. “With your permission, I’m gonna storm through the fence. I’m gonna be the Nickie that you need. And while I’m not your mother, I can mother you well.”
This felt dangerous, and it felt necessary. We hugged the kind of soul hug I would have resisted before I started this vulnerability work on myself. And the work continues. Vulnerability is not only a journey, it’s the opposite of perfection. I still catch myself and sometimes hear the echoes of what my parents taught me as we are raising Kaavia James.
Like all good parents, I would like to avoid messing up my kid, so they don’t have to unlearn habits later. But they start so early, like sponges soaking up all the details. Right now, at a year and a half, Kaav is in a stage where she doesn’t want to wear pants. Fine, it’s summer and it’s not a battle I’m fighting at home. So, her legs are forever bare. She is also a runner, and the more a kid races around, the more they are likely to fall. The outside of our house has a concrete area, and you’d think that maybe when she is running top speed she would say to herself, in a thoughtful baby voice, “Oh, I was running really fast in this spot last time and I fell, so maybe I should . . .” Nope, full speed ahead.
Yesterday we were all outside by the pool, watching her run around with her little romper on. She was running with her back to us when she fell forward to the ground. Everyone froze. Parents will tell you, “When kids fall, don’t react. Because however you react to them falling is really them reacting to you.” I bought into that, lock, stock, and barrel.
“Get up,” I said. “You’re okay.” She did get up, and did not cry. But when she turned, we saw she had completely skinned her knees.
“Oh, God,” I said. We scooped her up to bandage her, but I thought about the more lasting damage. I had just told her what her feelings were. Even when she was legitimately harmed and had to have felt real pain, I negated her feelings. She told herself she was fine even though she was bleeding. Otherwise, somebody might think she was soft. I ignored her vulnerability.
Is this how it started with me? My father’s definition of endurance, which he drilled into me, was not acknowledging real pain. Tears were weakness, and nobody wanted to see that. “Toughen up. Toughen up.” That was how you were supposed to raise kids so they’d be equipped to handle every adversity life could throw at them. What kind of message was my one-and-a-half-year-old processing? “I know I’m bleeding, but they’re totally silent. And my mom told me to get up and nothing’s wrong. And if someone you love tells you how you feel, you should take their word for it.”
A tricky part of parenting is finding that balance between being a hoverer and being dismissive of real pain. At a certain point we all know our kids and know when they are reacting to our reactions and when they are in real pain. We should be reminding ourselves that expressing hurt or articulating whatever pain they may be feeling—emotional, spiritual, sexual—is not only okay but encouraged. You can teach resilience without “toughen up, kid.” That proverbial stiff upper lip can actually be nurtured through encouraging people to communicate, rather than instilling a fear of emotional connection and vulnerability. Articulating your feelings, whether they be about pain or joy. Clearly, the goal should be effective communication, not the shutdown of feelings.
“You’re fine” is a pretty short con. It will only last a few years, because if you tell a smart kid they’re fine and they know better, they won’t communicate their fears and hurts to you later, when it’s not about skinned knees. Because by then they will see through you saying, “You’re fine.” They will say, “You cannot be trusted.” Those teens then become grown-ups, who will then internalize the external—people’s reactions, behavior, decisions—and prioritize them. Those teens become me, sitting across from a shaman, if they’re lucky, learning something they should have been taught when they were Kaav’s age.
Once she was bandaged, Kaav got right back out there. No lesson learned, at least about running. I thought it was a pretty good sign that I wasn’t beating myself up about what I’d said to her. How wrong I’d gotten it. Let’s see if we can do better next time, I thought.
See? Growth.
4
On the Compassion of Strippers
It was 3 A.M. in Atlanta, so of course I was taking people to Magic City. When I was in town working, it was the place to go if you wanted to keep the party going after leaving the club. Strip clubs are always there for you in times of such need. In Miami, you had choices: Rollexx, King of Diamonds, Tootsie’s, or Pink Pussycat. But in Atlanta, it was always Magic City.
I might have been showing off that night. I was with Chaka Zulu, a successful music exec, and Hype Williams, the iconic video director. We’d just left Compound, and I knew Magic City would greet me with an “Our girl Gab is back!” on the mic.
Ah, but you see, that night I was also constipated. And had been for as long as I’d been in town shooting Daddy’s Little Girls. It is hard to feel like a bad bitch when you’re so backed up you feel nauseous.
On the way to Magic City with the windows down and the music up, we stopped at a gas station. I saw they had a convenience store, and had a eureka moment fired by drunk logic from brown liquor.
“Yo, I gotta go in and grab something,” I said. If I take it now, I thought, I should be good to go in the morning.
Yes, Ex-Lax. When I found the chewable chocolate kind right away under the too-bright fluorescent lights, it seemed the universe was giving my plan a thumbs-up. Just as I brought it to the register, Hype walked in behind me to get a water. I quick-grabbed a magazine to buy and throw over the little blue-and-white box of deliverance. Just some light reading material for the strip club, nothing to see here. The man who’d revolutionized music videos with Michael and Janet’s “Scream” and Missy’s “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)” was not going to catch me buying laxatives at a gas station. With yet another remarkable sleight of hand, I sneak-gobbled up a couple chocolate pieces on the way to the car. I prided myself on my forethought as we took off for Magic City downtown. My morning self would be so pleased with my nighttime brilliance.
In the study of film, Hitchcock’s “bomb under the table” theory of suspense boils down to the audience knowing that in fifteen minutes a bomb will explode beneath the characters. They then go on about their business, talking about trivial shit while the audience watching becomes increasingly frantic, on the edge of their seats, desperate to warn them.
Well, I was sitting on a time bomb, and I wish you’d been there to warn me.
But for the moment, I just wanted to continue the party. I knew Magic City would deliver a good time. It was one of my favorite strip clubs, and I had become something of an expert in the genre. They’d been there for me in good times and bad. A few years before, I was miserable in Montreal filming Abandon, a movie so bad I just now had to Google myself with “Katie Holmes” to remember the title. I was stuck there for three and a half months of shooting, and my part was so small that if you shot all my scenes in a row the time would have amounted to six days. I felt the producer, Lynda Obst, was mad at
me for not moving the date of my wedding after they changed their shooting schedule. It appeared she didn’t understand why I couldn’t reschedule a destination wedding for 350 people. This was my first wedding, one I didn’t really want to have, but, still . . . The irony is I’d actually taken the job to cover the costs of the wedding that I had to pay for completely on my own. As a concession, I gave her the time I had allotted for my honeymoon. But that was not enough of a sacrifice. I was kept there in Montreal on call to work at any moment, though I wouldn’t be needed for weeks at a time.
I spent days on end in my hotel across from McGill University, where most of the film was shot. Newly married and separated from everyone in my L.A. life, I fell into a depression. I disappear when I’m depressed, playing a sort of emotional hide-and-seek where I’m never found. But I’d impulsively answered the phone once, probably thinking it was room service, and my girlfriend Essence Atkins heard it in my voice. I think she called me at eight in the morning and was at my hotel by eight that night.
“You have to get out of this room,” she said, throwing open the curtains I’d kept closed tight for weeks. “Let’s go walk around. I know what’ll cheer you up.”
She took me to a male strip club. Back home in California, we had a group of girlfriends who were fans of the Right Track, an all-Black-and-brown strip club in South Central Los Angeles. We went so often, we got tired of schlepping down there, so we started hosting parties at our homes. We’d invite our favorite stripper, Quiet Storm, who was so sweet and never pervy. He’d always start with Aretha Franklin’s “Dr. Feelgood,” coming out in scrubs and a stethoscope to diagnose the problem. He made tons of money from us because whenever a girlfriend in our group was down, Quiet Storm was the medicine.
You Got Anything Stronger? Page 6