It took a minute for it to settle in.

If I have known Tamiko since the ninth grade that means I’ve known her for … let’s see I was about fifteen in the ninth grade, plus ten is 25 plus ten, minus one … DAMN – I’ve know Yvette for nineteen years!!  When in the hell did I start having friends for that long?  The only other people that I can recall having friends for that were much older than I was … right?

So I blew it off and went on about my weekend.  Yvette and her friend Michelle and I went out to breakfast and ran some errands one day and while in the car I happened to pop Yvette’s cassette player.  Aw, hell nah! - not Guy.  Not Guy!  “Groove Me” and “We Can Spend the Night” use to blast in my Walkman nonstop back in the day.   I mean this tape brought back memories – 13, summers in Mississippi, biking shorts. 

And as we commenced to rocking to the Guy tape, I had an ephiphany of sorts.  We were listening to a cassette  – a cassette.  My car doesn’t even have a cassette player in it.  And the cassette was so old that it was the white one with the black lettering.   And for a moment I felt as if I was outside of the car watching all of us singing to the top of our lungs, watching me doing the Reebok and the Cabbage Patch and then, it hit me … I am officially old. 

I mean seriously, I am old.  I’m the mother who doesn’t know any of the words to the songs on the radio but still tries to sing along.  I always thought that when my daughters told me that I wasn’t doing the Walk It Out right that they were hating, but um, they were serious - I really can’t do the Walk It Out.  When the R&B station plays the oldies on Saturday night I spend the entire evening hollering “that’s my jam!”   

When did this happen?  When did the fliest chick in the room (if I must say so myself turn into the woman who looks good for having three kids?  When did my red Acura Integra turn into a black minivan?  When did all night parties at Lowry Air Force base turn into me being asleep on the couch by nine o’clock on Friday night? 

I’m not quite sure when all of this happened but I have to say that while I am struggling with the changes that come with being older there isn’t one year that I desire to relive.  Each year comes with more challenges, progress and experience and all jokes aside – I am blessed to have made it this far.

I am a believer in true love. And if that love crosses color lines, cool. But what I have a problem with are those brothas that say they can’t deal with a black woman’s attitude, or those money-making brothas that will immediately mark a sista as a gold digger but will marry someone’s Swedish nanny, or the ones that want a sista to be perfect from head to toe but will take a white chick that looks like who done it, or the fool in Athlete’s Foot that told me that he prefers white women because, “their skin be so soft.” What the hell?

There is strength in unity and if we can’t unite with our own men, how can we ever continue to grow as a people?

But check it. It burns me for many reasons. You have to remember one of the reasons my dark chocolate mother married my cream soda complexioned father was because she thought a milk chocolate child would have a better shot in life. She grew up scarred from being too dark for white people which definitely made her too black for blacks. And when she refused to perm her hair and rocked the natural, it was a wrap – brothas went running for the hills.

So no doubt that my mother’s opinions about those weak-minded, brain-washed black men that would jump the race line to date white women influenced me. But I had my own experiences too. When Marie, Rochee, Leslie and I were sitting around the cafeteria table during lunch trying to figure out who was going to go to prom with whose brother or cousin because the black guys at our school preferred white girls – that influenced me too.

And now as I look around my kids’ soccer games, gymnastics events, the day care center and I see the brothas who have the steady jobs, own their own homes, have good credit, being Daddy of the Year to women who have names like Heather and Becky but the girls named Sheenequa and NayNay are dealing with homeboy who just did a bid, has four kids and three baby mamas and STILL lives at home – I just don’t understand.

But black women … we have something to learn from white women. I mean, the idiom is true, “1000 Frenchmen can’t be wrong.” And our men are leaving us in droves. Black men are the only men on the face of the planet that don’t necessarily have a preference for their women. Asians, Hispanics, Indians, Native Americans – name any ethnic group and they love THEIR women first, anything else is an exception. We can’t say the same for black men. “Black, brown, yellow, Puerto Rican or Haitian” black men do not discriminate. But why?

Well think about it. Historically black women have been raised to be independent, strong, assertive heads of the households – which in most cultures tends to be the man’s roles. We are taught to bow to no one, take no mess, to not need any man for anything. And while these characteristics are necessary to a certain extent, when practiced in absolution, they will turn a man away.

Think about the flip side.

The white girls I grew up with had many mothers who didn’t work, or worked part time giving them added time to invest into their men. They were taught that you married a man for his future financial earnings, not for how he made you feel, they were taught how to talk nice to a man, how to stroke a man’s ego – how to make him feel like a man. And today they are married to pilots and engineers and attorneys and while their lives may certainly be filled with strife, they have someone by their side who has stepped out on a limb to build a future with them. And yet I have so many intelligent, beautiful, successful black girlfriends who can’t find a man to treat them with plain, ole common courtesy and respect (much less find one that works a steady 9 to 5). Burns me up.

Now I’m certainly speaking in generalizations, but black women you can’t deny that you haven’t had this same conversation with someone in the last month. As much as it hurts to admit, there is something about us that is pushing our men out the door and into the arms of women that don’t look or act anything like us.

As I celebrate my ninth year of marriage to my black (light black, but black all the same) king I find myself having more restraint over my mouth. No, I don’t need to tell Lamont how he messed up the bacon when he cooked breakfast, damn, at least he’s cooking breakfast. Or he doesn’t need to hear that I don’t really want to go to the restaurant that he picked, let him do his thing. I can’t ask him to man up in the house and then get mad when the tax guy he picks sucks. I don’t need to cuss him out for everything that he doesn’t do but I have begun to celebrate everything he DOES do. My man’s chest has been poked out and I owe it to the white chicks – ya’ll can cater to a man like no other and I’m taking notes. No doubt, he still gets cussed out on the occasional and I still don’t take any mess – I am who I am, but I’m learning.

And if you’re reading this post and any of this hits home you should start taking notes too so we can bring some of our men back to home.

I mean there was my one girlfriend that would always copy my haircuts – what’s up with that? Get your own style.

And there was the other one who was always telling me what somebody else said about me. I can’t stand instigators.

And of course there’s the chick that slept with my man. So cliche.

But over the years, the shady chicks fell off and I learned that the relationships I have with my female friends outweigh and outnumber any other relationships in my life. My girls are there with me ’til the end. I bet you have some too.

The ones that hold your hair back when you’ve had too much to drink on your 19th and 33rd birthdays.

The ones who showed up for the surprise dinners when you graduated from college or got that bomb job.

The ones who talked you out of your mid-life crisis.

The ones who put you in check and let you know that your stuff does stink (sometimes).

The ones who just laughed, cried, listened, argued and rejoiced with you.

I’m an only child (most self-proclaimed princesses are) and that has always been a blessing to me because I was able to choose my sisters. You know who you are.

Mom always said that, “if you have one true friend you are lucky.” Seems like I’m blessed ten times over … and the list keeps growing.

This particular movie detailed the paralleled experiences of two women being tossed around by life as they try to get through one horrendous day. One of the women was obviously struggling to make ends meet and lost her job on the day of her handicapped son’s birthday (typical LMN plot right?) As she tries to pay for the telescope he has yearned for her credit cards are denied one after another. Eventually she decides to pawn her cherished gold necklace to obtain the money necessary to make the purchase and it was at this moment that my oldest daughter, Mikayla, spoke up. “Wow, I can’t believe she would sell her necklace to buy that gift for her son.”

It brought me back to a memory that struck me so vividly that I decided to share a story about my own mother with the girls.

When I was five years old I was quite the thumb sucker. I mean, I wasn’t just your average thumb sucker, my thumb sucking required an embellishment, a piece of the satiny fabric that adorned the edges of the blankets that were so popular in the 80s. You remember it, it was satin and soft and when you rubbed it together, or better yet, rubbed it on your nose … heaven. Well my mother would cut the satin off of the blanket so I would always have it with me when the urge to suck my thumb hit.

Fearing I would turn into the dreaded buck-toothed child (as if my Coke bottle thick glasses, gaped teeth and dusty, nappy hair didn’t already mark me) my mother made me a promise that if I agreed to stop sucking my thumb she would buy me anything I wanted. Anything I wanted? What would I ask for? A new house? A revamped wardrobe? All the toys my room could hold? A swimming pool? No.

A Barbie dream house.

You remember that too. It was a two-story, orange and yellow, plastic fortress made to entertain Barbie and her friends to no end – and I wanted it for myself. Well, like I said, that was when I was five. We still lived in Philadelphia then. Many things happened between then and the year of my seventh birthday; we had hopped a Trailways bus to Colorado, sight unseen, with a duffel bag full of our possessions and were residing in an efficiency constructed out of the owner’s attic. Not an ideal place for a Barbie dream house. But needless to say, two years later I still wanted my dream house and my mother had not forgotten her promise to me.

On the morning of my seventh birthday my mother took me to our only closet, opened it, and presented me with my beloved Barbie dream house. And it was everything I ever thought it would be. It was stark bare and over the years I had to fill it with furniture, including the bedroom set that mom caught Barbie and Ken getting busy in, but at that moment in time it was the best gift ever!

I found out many years later that my mother, who at the time was struggling to find steady employment and could no longer depend on financial support from my father who had passed away, was going to the local Red Cross and donating her blood to raise the money for my beloved Dream House. The Dream House for her Ebony Princess.

As I told this story to my daughters I knew they didn’t quite grasp the sacrifice she made over the years to be sure she fulfilled her promise to me, but I wanted them to know that true sacrifice doesn’t just happen in the movies.

When I was a little girl I was born to two very loving, doting parents.  As an only child, I was given their undivided attention and showered with love and affection ad nauseam (so I’m told).  My mother made it her mission to convince me, and anyone else for that matter, that I was the most perfect, most cherished, most adored little girl in the world.   And while I surely never lacked anything I truly desired, I wouldn’t consider myself spoiled in terms of  materialistic things.  In all actuality, after my father died, my mother was probably always one paycheck away from destitution, but hey – who knew?

So as this oh-so-cherished child, my mother painted pictures in which I was crowned the Ebony Princess, I mean she literally painted a picture of me titled The Ebony Princess.  She sang songs about me being the Ebony Princess (again she literally recorded a song she wrote herself called The Ebony Princess) and over time I actually became The Ebony Princess.  In high school I would do the morning announcements and end each one with my tagline of sorts:  “Gaudia es Regina,” making reference to the Latin translation of my title (random I know, I wanted to be a doctor hence the Latin courses.)  In school the boys would call me Queenie and when I debuted my senior year, no one could have convinced me that I was anything but an actual princess.   

In college my nickname was Miss Colorado, for my home state and of course shedding light on my pageant-like characteristics.  My first car, a little red Acura Integra, was quickly adorned with vanity plates:  EQSTYLE, Ebony Queen style (why settle for being a princess when you can be a queen?)  My first and only tatoo, Ebony Queen of course – I mean I took the royalty thing to the next level. 

So here I sit in my open cubicle, about to enter my mid-thirties, a wife and mother of three, working a thankless job, driving a minivan, living in a central new york city that might as well be in North Dakota for its lack of NYC influence,  and I have to wonder – how in the hell did I get here?   How did this princess get trapped in this average woman’s life?