Yesterday, I Cried_ Celebrating the Lessons of Living and Loving - Iyanla Vanzant [72]
Rhonda remembered many of the things she had done and said and felt. She was trying to remember the reasons. She remembered being scared most of the time. She remembered feeling sad that she was always so scared. She remembered being angry a great deal of the time. She figured out that it was the anger that led her to lie to people and to steal things from them. She tried to remember all the lies she had told and all the things she had stolen, but she stopped when she realized that it would take her all day. She had done those things, she concluded, not because she wanted to, but because of something she wanted. She couldn’t remember what it was, but she knew she wanted it badly.
Maybe, she thought, what she wanted was to be loved and to be pretty and to be acknowledged by Daddy. Perhaps she just wanted to be more than the s——her grandmother had condemned her to be. What she really wanted was for Nett to be her mother and for Ray to stop drinking. She wanted money and a nice place to live. She wanted to know the truth, the real truth about her real mother. It’s hard to be a person when you don’t know the truth about your mother. And Rhonda wanted very badly to be a person, not a punching bag. She wanted to live a normal life. The way she was living, and had lived, was not normal by any stretch of the imagination. People thought she was normal, and she knew that was what made her situation so dangerous.
If you do the things people think you should do, the way they think you should do them, they mistakenly believe that you are okay. Rhonda knew that she was not okay. She wasn’t crazy, but she was neither normal nor okay. What she did not know was who cared about her. She did not know what was wrong with her or why it mattered. Rhonda really wanted to matter to somebody.
Then she remembered that she mattered to her children, her precious babies. It was only by the grace of God that she found the strength to take care of them. It was only by his mercy that she was able to give them something she had never had. Love. But did she really love them? Yes. Rhonda knew without a shadow of a doubt that she loved her children. Admittedly, she did not want them at first, but she loved them. If you have never been loved, have never known real love, how can you love? Rhonda pondered the question for a moment, then decided that unlike the adults in her own life, she loved who her children were. They were three unique personalities who possessed qualities she could love.
She loved their beautiful faces and the warmth of their little hands in hers. She loved the way they smelled after she had bathed them and put them to bed. She loved to comb Gemmia’s hair and kiss her neck. She loved the way Damon always made her laugh. He was such a little jokester. A real showman. They were smart, too. Damon could count to one hundred by the time he went to kindergarten. He didn’t like to do it, but he could do it. Gemmia was an artist. She would draw with anything, on anything. Gemmia was fragile and delicate, just like Nett. Rhonda’s eyes filled with tears when she thought about her baby, Nisa. She was only six weeks old, and they hadn’t gotten to know each other yet. She wouldn’t even let herself consider that Nisa was not being cared for, or that she might be wet or hungry or missing her mother. She decided that she would know and believe that Nisa was just fine and knew her mother loved her.
She didn’t cry until she allowed herself to remember the frightened faces of her children when John was beating her. When she was crying about John not being there, it frightened them. When she remembered their faces, she also remembered her own fear, and that made her cry. When you are a patient in a mental ward, you cannot be seen crying in the common areas. If you are, it is believed that you are having an “episode.” Mental patients who have episodes