Yesterday, I Cried_ Celebrating the Lessons of Living and Loving - Iyanla Vanzant [73]
Every day, Rhonda would write a letter to her children. Most of the letters were apologies for all the things she had not done, all the places she had not taken them. She apologized for never telling them that she loved them. She explained that no one, not even Nett, had ever looked her directly in the eyes and said “I love you.” She apologized for yelling at them when she was angry, and for not always having dinner ready on time. She made big promises to her children in those letters. They were promises she wanted to keep. They were promises she didn’t know how to keep.
She had to do better, just like Gary said. But how? How was she going to learn how to do better? Who was going to teach her? The people who had had the opportunity to teach her, to tell her what she needed to know, had not done a very good job. She had to learn how to be better by herself. She had to learn how to be a better mother, but first she had to learn how to be a better person. Rhonda believed that she was not a whole person. She was something else. Something broken and battered and hopeless. She felt she was hideous and ugly and dirty. She had to figure out a way to get whole and clean and beautiful. Gary had said that she was too beautiful, too smart. The smart part was easy. But beautiful? She would have to think about that for a while.
She could only think of herself as beautiful and brilliant for brief moments. What did that mean? Beautiful like who? As brilliant as what? She didn’t feel beautiful. She had never seen brilliancy demonstrated. How can you be beautiful when you are angry and confused and afraid? Rhonda admitted that she was afraid of what her anger, confusion, and fear would do to her children. They might turn out to be just like her. Oh my God! What a horrible thought! She knew she had to do something quickly. Dr. Miller and his colleagues thought they were treating her because she had lost her mind. Rhonda knew she was really there to find it. She was on a quest to find her beautiful self and her brilliant mind. Sitting in the window, in the day-room window of the Brookdale psychiatric ward, Rhonda remembered how to pray.
“Prayer can do things that you can’t do,” Grandma always told the other mothers at the church. “It can fix things that you didn’t even realize were broken.” There is little you can do when you are in a state of mental fatigue and exhaustion. There is little you can do when you feel that no one loves you or cares about you. It renders you incapable. When you believe that you do not matter, you may be tempted to stop even trying to do better. But somehow, Rhonda remembered that when you can’t do anything else, you can pray. It started as a mantra: Please, God, please help me. Please, God, please help me. It became a bit more definite over time: Please, God, please help me raise my children. Please, God, please help me understand who I am. Please, God, please help me get away from John. Please, God, please help me feel better.
Rhonda would pray all day. She would pray while she was bathing and getting dressed. She prayed while she was eating. She would pray while she helped the other patients find invisible things and dead things they told her were hidden in their rooms. She prayed while she was talking to Dr. Miller. Once while he was counseling her, she prayed out loud.
“Do you see Jesus or some other religious figure?” he asked.
It was true. They really did think she was a nut! Rhonda knew she was a little off, but she wasn’t crazy enough to answer that question. With all the sincerity she could muster, and without laughing in his face, she said, “Dr. Miller, you can’t see Jesus. He’s in heaven