“Lost it how?” Tamika asked.
“I told him I could not accept it. I told him I had a car, and he couldn’t just make decisions like that for me without asking. We had a whole fight, and he left. And I’ve been sitting on this couch for hours feeling like a complete ass.”
I ran the whole thing down for them, the entire hour of it, play by play, and when I finished there was silence. Nobody spoke.
Then Jada. “I’m sorry. I have to make sure I understand what is happening here. The man you’re crazy about. The man who’s been turning you every which way but loose. Smacking it, flipping it, rubbing it down. The one who looks like— Jordan, what did you say he looks like?”
“Like a MAN,” Jordan answered.
“Like aMAN.That one.Thatman. Bought you a hundred-thousand-dollar car. And you yelled at him?”
“I can’t believe you did all that,” Jordan shook her head.
“I can believe it,” Tamika said, activating her big-sister voice. “You know where that comes from. We all do.”
I didn’t answer.
“Ma did not raise us to know how to receive. She raised us to be able to do without. And she did that on purpose. She had five kids and two and a half jobs, and she was preparing us for the world she knew. She gave us a spine, work ethic, and the conviction that we did not need to rely on a man for anything we could not get for ourselves.”
“True. She didn’t let us be soft,” Jordan nodded. “Becauseshecouldn’t be soft. Grandma wasn’t soft. Great-grandmama wasn’t soft. ‘Carter women have not had the luxury,’ that’s what Ma would always say.”
“That’s my point,” Tamika continued. “She raised us for the world she knew. And it worked to an extent.Look at us.Four grown women. Two businesses. A master’s. A law degree. Not one of us has ever waited on a man for a damn thing.”
“Ok, but what’s your point, Tamika? That Alyssa shouldn’t accept it because Ma raised us to be independent? That’s bullshit.”
“No. I’m not saying that. Let me finish because this is the part that years of my marriage to figure out. Hell, I’m still figuring it out some days,” Tamika went on.
“I have been married to that man for sixteen years. He is the kind of man who wants to put me in the passenger seat and drive me places. Wants to carry the heavy bag. All of that. And for the first few years of our marriage I fought him on everything. ‘I got it’should have been my middle name. It was killing the marriage. We almost didn’t make it.”
“Tamika, I didn’t know that,” I said.
“Mhm. He almost left because he felt like he couldn’t be a man in our house. I was so busy proving I didn’t need him that I didn’t let himbeneeded. I had to unlearn a lot. It’s the hardest work I have done in my adult life.”
“Tamika…”
“The conditioning we were raised in is foundational. It’s load-bearing. And it’s doing what it was built to do. It helped us survive. But once you don’t have to be in survival mode anymore, and, for example you have a man who isnota threat, trying to give you what was supposed to be yours all along? That conditioning becomes a thing that gets in your way. Like walking out on a hundred-thousand-dollar gift and calling it him trying to handle you.”
“I didn’t walk out on it,” I said. “I made a point.”
“Is there a difference?” Tamika didn’t even look up.
“He erased my car, Tamika. Traded it in without a word, like I wasn’t…” I stopped, because I could hear how it sounded out loud.
“He’s going to lose patience with you, Alyssa.” Jada blurted out.
“Jada,” Tamika shook her head.
“I’m sorry. I’m just saying. He’s been good to you in every way possible and you are doing this. Finding ways to make him sorry he’s being good to you. You are going to run him off.”
“Jada, really?”
“What? She is! You know how many women would love to have this problem? He has been the kind of patient that men only stay for so long before they decide they are tired.”
“Okay,” My heart began to race, and I tried to cover my anxiety building. “You made your point.”
“I’m not trying to be mean, I’m just saying?—”
“No, you’ve said it. He’s going to get tired of me and leave me. You think I don’t already have that on a loop? You think there’s a version of this where I’m not waiting for it?”
