Yesterday, I Cried_ Celebrating the Lessons of Living and Loving - Iyanla Vanzant [129]
I knew I was onto something, and I wanted to do the right thing. I especially wanted to do the right thing for my children. I was bringing a spiritual message to a community that desperately needed to hear it, and I wanted to do it the right way. I thought if I could save the world, then my children would forget what a rotten mother I had been. I was obsessed with the work, I was obsessed with trying to correct my mistakes, and I was obsessed with doing it all the right way. The truth is, I was obsessed by the need to please everybody in the process of doing the right thing. I was losing myself, losing my dreams, and I kept losing my home.
In my mind, the right thing to do was to make sure that I saved the people, all of the people, and I didn’t feel like I had a right to be paid for it. I was trying my best to live up to my name, believing that God would provide for me. At that point, I still had a very intellectual understanding of my name, what I was doing, parenting, and God.
Most of my serious messages came to me in dreams. Had I known this particular dream was coming, I would have given up sleeping forever. I saw myself standing in a room, and there were babies all around me. All of the babies were crying. I was trying to pick them up. I was trying to feed them. I was trying everything I knew to stop them from crying. I started calling for help. When I looked up, Nisa was standing in front of me. She was pregnant.
The next morning I told Nisa about the dream. She turned “puke green.”
“Are you sexually active, Nisa?”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“I mean, are you having sex? Do you have sex with boys? You know, doing the nasty?”
“Mommy, please. I don’t do that.”
“Well, I’ll tell you what. When you come home this afternoon, we are going to Planned Parenthood. You are going to get some birth control.”
“Why?” I gave her a look that shut her mouth and sent her to school an hour early.
I couldn’t be still all day. It seemed like three o’clock would never arrive. Then I had a thought: She’s going to run away. I started shaking and could not stop. I told Gemmia to come with me; we were going to pick Nisa up from school. We did and went directly from there to the Planned Parenthood office. When I signed Nisa in, the clerk asked what services we were interested in.
“She needs to take a pregnancy test.” I almost jumped out of my skin when I heard the words come out of my mouth.
“How old are you?” the clerk asked Nisa.
“Sixteen,” Nisa answered. The woman turned her gaze back to me.
“In the State of Pennsylvania, she doesn’t need your permission to have the test done, and she must authorize us to share the results with you.”
“Do you want me to slap the taste out of your mouth?” I admit I was having a very unspiritual moment. “Just do the test!” I stormed away from the desk and flopped down in a chair. Nisa sat across the room until they called her name. It was an hour later when we saw her again. She headed straight for the exit.
“What were the results?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
“They said they will call me in a day or two.” I knew she was not telling the truth. I walked back to the desk, to the woman I had threatened earlier. In my sweetest voice, I asked if I could speak to the nurse. She called her immediately.
Nisa and I went back into the office. The nurse asked how she could help us.
“I want to know what is going on with my daughter. She says that her test results will take a few days. I thought the results were immediate.” The nurse looked at me and then at Nisa. Then she sat down and offered me a seat.
“We didn’t do a pelvic exam on Nisa because we think she’s about eight and a half months pregnant. It really isn’t in the baby’s best interest to do a pelvic exam now. But I gave her some brochures on adoption and foster care. I told her if she needed