Yesterday, I Cried_ Celebrating the Lessons of Living and Loving - Iyanla Vanzant [63]
I sat down to rest on the granite bench beside the pond and listened to the gentle sound of the water lapping at the shore. It gave me clarity. How long did it take Rhonda to learn that you cannot fix a broken something simply by replacing it with something else? A replaced thing is still a broken thing! When you discover that something is broken, you must determine the cause of the break. In order to do that, you must open the thing, examine it, and find the origin of the break or malfunction. Once that is done, you must make a determination as to whether or not the thing is worth fixing. If you determine that the fixing is worth your effort, it must be done carefully. If, on the other hand, you decide that the thing is not worth fixing, you must get rid of it. You must throw it away, clean the place it once occupied, and when you are ready, find a suitable replacement. This is called “closure.” It is a prerequisite for healing.
When the thing that is broken is your life or your mind, your heart or your spirit, you must follow the same process. Determine what is broken and how it got broken and decide whether to fix it or not. You must dismantle whatever isn’t working piece by piece, find the broken part, fix it, reassemble the whole thing, and give it a test run. Everything in life must have at least one test run.
When you decide to fix something, it is important that you fix only what is actually broken. Not what you think is broken. If you fix the top when it is the bottom that is broken, the thing is not going to work. If you fix the left side, and leave the right side hanging and broken, the thing will fall apart again. If you fix the outside when there is something broken on the inside, there is no way the broken thing can work to its full potential. Rhonda was trying to fix the outside. She did not understand the relationship between what was going on inside and what was happening outside.
The day after the wedding, Rhonda, Curtis, and Damon moved to Fort Benning, Georgia. They rented a house and filled it with rented furniture, using the money they’d received as wedding gifts. While Curtis was in Vietnam, he had started using drugs. Heroin, speed, and psychedelics. Rhonda discovered he was a heroin addict when he started slapping her around and burglarizing their neighbors’ homes. Eventually he was arrested and pled guilty to the burglary charges against him. The army informed Rhonda that she could no longer live in the subsidized housing complex and that she would no longer receive her monthly allotment checks. She called Nett and asked her to send the money for them to fly back home. By the time she got back to Brooklyn, she’d found the courage to tell Nett that she was four months pregnant.
Rhonda named her baby daughter Gemmia. Damon was thrilled to have a baby sister and fascinated that something so tiny could make so much noise. Gemmia would cry all night. The walls in the two-bedroom apartment were thin, and neither Rhonda nor Nett was getting much sleep. It made Rhonda so nervous, she was down to wearing a size 8. The crying drove Nett absolutely crazy, and it made her uncharacteristically evil.
Being a young mother with one child and working and going to school was hard. But being a young mother with two children and frazzled nerves made work an impossibility for Rhonda. She was forced to go on public assistance. Nett went from being evil, to being disgraced and ashamed.
“I never thought I would live to see the day when my own child would stand in line for peanut butter and cheese!”
“I won’t go get the cheese,” Rhonda said. “I hate the cheese.”
“Well, you still have to stand in line with the