Phone Calls From the Edge: "I got a baby. When you gon have one?"

I know I'm black and female, but that doesn't mean I want to have illegitimate children. My mom and her two sisters all had their children out of wedlock. They figured if my grandmother, their mother, could raise six children without the help of a husband (my grandpa was a rolling stone), then they didn't have to get married or have a man in order to raise a child.

I don't want to go into the details of the three (four if you count my grandmother's sister) generations of illegitimate children born on my mom's side of the family. You'll just have to read it here.

Let's go back to Father's Day.

I spoke to my dad on the phone for about an hour. I really enjoy talking to him. He doesn't wine in my ear or ask me when I'm going to give birth the next generation of America's Most Wanted, future penitentiary bounded, etc.

I then spoke to an uncle of mine. That was a relief. He didn't ask me about a baby status. I think I will call him more often. He happens to be the only child of my grandmother to have children after marriage! Of course, his first marriage ended but at least he tried. Wife number 2 is helping him raise his two children.

Then there was my cousin R who's four years younger than myself. He and his chickehead girlfriend had a baby back in October. He just couldn't resist asking me the question "When you gon have a baby?" I felt like explaining how I don't think it's right to have children outside of marriage, but it would have completely went over his head. He's used to seeing it. Heck, his girlfriend didn't make it a requirement that he marry her before she started having his baby.

Since the birth of my cousin's baby, that means I am one of the last of my grandmother's grandchildren without a child. My other two childless cousins are still children. Did I mention my grandmother lived long enough to see her first great, great illegitimate grandchild? Yep.

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Graffiti

There's nothing I hate more than graffiti. To me, it's a sign of moral degradation.

I went to the grocery store around 12 noon to buy my lunch for the week. When I drove through the neighborhood, the walls surrounding our subdivision were graffiti free. When I went to Walmart around 7 p.m. the walls had graffiti.

This is a brand new neighborhood. The houses here are less than a year old and their value ranges from $375,000 to almost $1,000,000. Yet, the neighborhood, has graffiti.

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Shavonne

The Duggar Family

I was flipping through channels when I came across a documentary called 14 Children and Pregnant again. It was a documentary about the Duggar family. I've heard about this family before and I always had my doubts as to how this family could function.

I was basing this on the fact that, well, my mom seemed to have the hardest time raising just me and also a friend of mine can't seem to get a grip on her two children.

I think the family was very charming and facinating, and I couldn't help but wonder what it would have been like to grow up in such a home. The children were healthy, well-dressed, well-mannered, and happy. Their home was clean and in order. I know, I had it in my head that the children were loud, uncontrollable, and miserable as well as living in a home that looked like it was hit by a tornado. But this wasn't the case. Amazing. How is that this large family functions so well while most families a third this size seem to fall apart?

The Duggars, of course will give the glory to the Lord. Maybe they have something there.

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Diary of a Tired Black Man

There’s movie coming out that I have no intention of seeing. Diary of Tired Black Man.

I went to the website to watch the clip. I was about 1/20th of the way to getting mad but I didn’t.

I used to be one of those bitter black girls. I say ‘girl’ because I was very a bitter black female teenager. Teenager! Not even a woman.

In junior high and high school, I was an ugly duckling. I was skinny, I had a huge gap in my front teeth, I wore glasses (still wear glasses), I was skinny…and I was black. Those were the things that boys, black boys in particular, found unattractive about me. Black boys who liked black girls liked girls with meat on their bones and I had no meat, and then there was the black boys that just wouldn’t be caught dead with a black girl even if she was cute. So there you have it.

There were of course, a few black boys that found me appealing. But their hormones were surging and they probably would have found (insert the name of the ugliest female you know) attractive. Sex is a great motivator.

I don’t even want to write about college but I’m going to anyway because I know you want to read it.

I worked in the Davidson library as a part-time gig. One day, one of the star basketball players (he was black of course) was walking through the library hand-in-hand with this female. The basketball player was clearly an attractive male, his girl, is a different story.

When the basketball player and his lady left the library, my coworker, a white male, turned to me and said, “I don’t get it. That’s (basketball players name) and he could get any girl he wants. Why would he be with her? She is a total white man’s reject! He is attractive. She is clearly ugly. Does it bother you to see black guys with ugly white girls?”

My response, “It used to but not anymore.”

Then there was this one black guy that always went out of his way to be rude to me. One day when I was working in the library I was talking to a male friend, when Jack@ss comes up to us and interrupts me mid-sentence to talk to my friend. Not only that, but Jack@ss stood right in the middle of me and my friend, AND he turned his back to me. How rude was that? I didn’t even know this guy.

I’m tiring of this subject. I’m almost at 500 words anyway. Go figure. Let me say this, I haven’t dated a black man in two years, and if I had gone with my first instinct two years ago, I would have been five years since I dated a black man. My roommate convinced me that S was a nice guy and he really liked me. So I went out with him and as soon as I felt comfortable dating him, he flirted and exchanged phone numbers with the bar tender right in front of me.

Bitter black woman came back for a while after that.

Black men don’t like bitter black women, and let me tell you, I don’t like bitter black women, especially when I’m the bitter black woman.

Being a bitter black woman is exhausting mentally and physically and I don’t want to be a bitter black woman ever again. I will do anything to avoid being a bitter black woman, including swearing off all black men as potential mates. I just won’t go there.

I’ve had great friendships with black men, but I don’t think I can recover from the really bad dates and relationships I’ve had in the past.

I’ve only seen a clip of a Diary of a Tired Black Man, and like I said, I don’t think I’ll be seeing the movie. The difference between this movie and Diary of a Mad Black Woman is, Mad Black Women went running into the arms of a BLACK Man. That was a true Christian woman right there.


Note: I've changed the setting on this blog so that only members can comment. Since I'm the only member, no one else can comment on this blog. Though I still post here, eventually, I will delete this blog but only until I get shavonne.org exactly the way I want it. If you want to leave a comment, please go to shavonne.org and leave one there. Thanks.

Affirmative Action

I have a cousin (K) who’ll be going off to college next year. She’s been looking at colleges for a while now. K’s had her eyes set on Duke, but with the cost of out-of-state tuition, her mom and dad told her to look locally (California) or do what her brother and sister did and go to a predominately black college like Hampton University.

K’s been to UC Riverside and she said she likes it a lot. She’s also toured some other UC school, I believe it was Irvine, but she didn’t want to go there because there weren’t enough black students. And I thought going to college was about getting your education.

The discussion then turned to Affirmative Action and my alma mater UC Santa Barbara, which is ranked #4 out of the ten UC schools and UCLA. Apparently enrollment of black students at UC Santa Barbara has dropped since my days as an undergraduate and UCLA isn’t doing much better in recruiting black students.

I absolutely hate discussing Affirmative Action. It always brings back the memories of my undergrad years during the time Proposition 209 was on ballot. I couldn’t shake the feeling that my when my white counterparts looked at me, they saw someone that shouldn’t be there-like I hadn’t worked my ass off in a predominately white high school and graduated in the top ten percent of my class. The only reason I was at UCSB was because I was black.

The truth is, even if the reinstate Affirmative Action, blacks will still be 2 percent of the student population in the UC system. The only people that can change that are blacks themselves.

I say this because out of my black female friends from high school and myself, I was the only one that went to college. My friends went the chickenhead route and chose to stay home to become somebody’s baby’s momma. The males became somebody’s baby’s daddy and made many failed attempts to be the next Tupac Shakur. Did I mention that we went to predominately white schools and that my friends came from households where the annual incomes exceeded six figures?

I’m going to be very blunt because I’m losing interest in the subject. Affirmative Action, racial preferences, etc., aren’t going to make up for the fact that even middle class black folks can’t get their shit together and raise their children right-you know, instill an importance of a higher education, hold off on the baby making UNTIL MARRIAGE, set higher standards for themselves, work hard, mind your business, keep your nose clean…must I go on?