Epilogue

What’s Worth Fighting For?

Seven years ago, I decided what kind of man I wanted to marry. It was the fifth anniversary of my parents’ second marriage to each other. My parents decided to throw a huge party at Tavern on the Green. They invited everyone they knew and requested that they all arrive dressed in white. My mother had the Tavern decorated with bouquets of assorted white flowers and candles, and she had black and white pictures of the three of us put up everywhere.

It was a beautiful evening. The Tavern looked like heaven and my parents and all their guests looked like angels. That night, one week after my eighteenth birthday, was the happiest I’d ever seen my parents. They danced and danced, kissing each other like teenagers who’d just met. Before dinner they had a short ceremony where they renewed their vows. My father surprised my mother by restoring the original engagement ring he’d bought her when she was eighteen. A single tear fell from my mother’s eye when he slid the golden solitaire ring on her finger. Her face turned completely red, and while I’d never seen my mother look quite the same, I knew that she felt like the most beautiful woman in the world.

Looking at my parents—half drunk from champagne and the idea of spending the rest of their lives together—I made a vow to myself that I would find someone who loved me the same way my father loved my mother. No matter how much they fought, or how much they disagreed, he loved her for who she was—the good and the bad. And no matter what happened, as had been proven once before, he would always come back to her. That’s what I wanted.

When I met Julian five years later, somehow I forgot about the look on my mother’s face. I was so concerned about other things—how things looked to other people and what I could gain by being on his arm—that I couldn’t even be honest with myself about how I was being treated. All that was important was the man and being with him. And for a short while in my life, I thought that was all that mattered. But then…along came fate in the form of a six-point plan and a man named Kyle.

While the Take Her Man Plan is far behind me now, and the drama surrounding it serves to bring me and my girls lots of laughs as we play with Tasha’s new baby girl, Toni (yes, we’re the 4Ts now), looking back, I realize why I had to go through what I did with Julian. While it hurt me so bad in the beginning, in the end, every tear I cried forced me to turn the mirror I was pointing at everyone else toward myself. The breakup wasn’t about Miata, it wasn’t about my mother’s curse—hell, it wasn’t even about Julian. It was about me and the changes I needed to make inside of myself to find the love I deserved. And when I finished looking at my own reflection in the mirror, there, standing beside me, was Kyle.

After Kyle and I discussed everything that had gone on between us, we finally decided to date each other. Nothing serious or heavy—Kyle needed his space to work through some things and I needed some time to focus on myself.

On our fifth “real date,” I bought Kyle a bouquet of wildflowers and made him dinner at my place. Kyle looked so happy when he walked in the door. He pulled me into his arms and hugged me so tight I could hear his heart beating.

Standing there in Kyle’s arms, I thought about the day I almost lost him. While I fought so hard to ignore it at first, Kyle reawakened in me the love I saw between my parents on that starry spring evening at Tavern on the Green seven years ago. It was the sweetest thing, the most indescribable feeling I felt so deep inside of me that I knew it was right. I could fall in his arms and know Kyle would be there to catch me, and if he ever needed it, I’d fight like hell to hold him up. What it was between us, as we stood in my living room slow dancing to the music in our heads, was hard and strong and more real than anything I’d ever felt. Listening to Kyle breathe, I realized that I was in love with him.

Just then, before I could open my mouth to say to the man who would later become my husband, “I love you,” for the first time, Tamia’s question came to my mind: What’s worth fighting for? The answer came to me so quickly that I began to cry.

Like my mother’s love, my friends’ support, and my man’s forgiving heart, the best-loved things—the things that are truly worth fighting for—are not things that you have to take from other people. They are simply the things that come to you…willingly.

So, in the end, I did have my man; it just wasn’t the one I’d set out to get. Life is funny that way. God is funny that way. As I said in the beginning, I’m a fine, successful, educated black woman. The situation God put me in made me question and respect all of those things. I just had to find my way out.

The Guide to Riding Off into the Sunset and Living Happily Ever After Because You’re a Fine, Successful, Educated Black Woman and You Don’t Have to Put Up with Anyone’s Crap…

Patience ‘p-sh n(t)s\n 1: the capacity, habit, or fact of being patient—bearing pains or trials calmly or without complaint (Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary) 2: Knowing that the best things come to those who wait (The Real It Girl Guide by the 3Ts)

 

 

 

 

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