Vette
My name is Vette. I think I'm a writer, among other things, but right now I'm just figuring things out...
The Emotional Violence of Unhealthy Expectations
I had just gotten back home from a seven-day working vacation in Colorado. Although the trip was amazing, I was excited to get home. With my son staying in Colorado for a few additional weeks it was going to be the first time in sixteen months that I would have my place to myself. But things haven’t been working out the way I planned. After taking Dramamine to get through my flight, I made it home around 2 pm, exhausted. My plan was to shower, unpack and maybe do some more research so I could finish a fifteen-page paper that was due in two days, of which I only had six pages completed. But that didn’t happen; I was too tired to focus. I chalked up my fatigue to the Dramamine, and the emotional toll of my visit with family and friends in Colorado. I rested. The next morning I woke up feeling unmotivated, like really unmotivated; it almost felt like despair. I had no choice but to research and write because the paper was due the next day, but it was a painful process, and the paper was not what it should’ve been. I spent the afternoon curled up on the couch, silently berating myself, and watching The Handmaid’s Tale until midnight.
Why Offer Him My Body?
Many years ago, maybe twenty-seven years ago, I worked for a man named Glen, here in Fort Worth, Texas. Glen was a good man, a nice man, very professional in the work place, and he had given a woman like me, with a sordid past, the opportunity to work. The office was a hodge-podge of good, but troubled folk who came from varying backgrounds that simply needed to find their footing in life while earning a living. Well, not quite a living. But, I enjoyed working for Glen, and it was because of him, and his character reference that I was able to move on and become a file clerk with the City of Fort Worth even though I was a convicted felon. Several years after leaving Glen’s business my life fell apart, as it had always done, and I found myself working the streets of the Southside of Fort Worth to support my crack addiction. I never saw Glen again, but he had never left my heart, my mind, as a person who had given me a chance. In 2008 I moved away from Fort Worth. I moved away because being there came me to close to the painful realities of my addiction and I needed to go away and heal.
Black Woman
A prolonged gaze must be set upon her. Upon the grandness of her autonomy, the fullness of her being, her crown, and the wounds that have been inflicted. Wounds that bleed, but the color is hope.
Georgia on My Mind...
After enduring the Texas blizzard of 2021, I was ready for the warm temps that crept in during the following weeks. One morning, after having showered, I realized my feet were in need of some care, and my toe nail polish was from fall of 2020. Giggling, I thought to myself, “today would be a good day for a spring pedicure,” and I grew excited to see my friend, and nail technician, Tina--we just clicked. I go to “U Nails” right here by the TCU campus and they’re always as happy to see me as I am to see them. Tina, who is Vietnamese, asked, “Where you been? I scared you move.” She was using her hand to do the go away gesture to complete her thought. I told her “Oh, no, my program runs another two years. Don’t worry, I’ll be around for a while.” and we hugged. She took my hand to look at my nails, and asked, “What you want?” and I told her, “Just a pedicure, I haven’t had my feet done since you did them last.” She replied, “They look bad then,” and walked away laughing. I followed her to my seat.
Bowie's Funeral
It was during this summer I realized Bowie was no longer acting like a three-year-old; he was lethargic and sad. He didn’t want to go outside and play. He would lean on my sister and me, as if he couldn’t hold up his own weight, and needed to be comforted. I was watching Bowie and my sister while John and Linda worked, and one afternoon I watched as he vomited blood, with clot-like masses. I had no idea what was wrong with him, but one day I lifted his shirt and there was a distinct hand print across his abdomen. I attempted to place my fingers in the fingerprint places but my hand was way too small. I believed John was hurting him, but I never witnessed it. Over the years I had been beaten with switches, slippers, race car tracks, extension cords, and a cubed-stick. John only ever used a belt, so there was no consistent precedent for him to be a violent man, except for when he damn near beat my mother to death, but other than that I had never seen him physically abuse anyone in our household. I mean by today’s standards our whoopin’s were abuse, but not back then and not in my community.
Waiting for the Other Shoe to Drop
It was June of 2016, and I was preparing to move to Westcliffe, Colorado to take my first appointment as a pastor. I wasn't ready, but I took the appointment anyway. Addiction had been a part of my ongoing narrative since I was 9, and in 2016 I was struggling with alcohol and Ambien abuse. I was in an unhealthy relationship, and as it was my pattern, I used those vices to run away while standing still. I drank to comfort my sadness, quiet my hateful self-talk, and numb the rage of my discontentment. These tactics never worked. I couldn’t escape any of it, and I was spiraling--Spiraling. It wasn’t long before I was being hospitalized for bouts of pancreatitis. One evening I was lying in the emergency room, behind a soft gray curtain, tears falling away from my eyes and getting caught in the folds of my ears while the nurse tried to draw blood from my dehydrated body, for the seventh time. Despondent, and in pain, I turned to my partner, and he was looking at his phone, smiling. I looked back up at the ceiling, and wondered if I would ever be free—whole.
Nappy Hair, No Hair
This morning, after grieving through a five-year journey with androgenic alopecia, I’m going to get my little afro cut off, well, what’s left of it. Two weeks ago, I completed my second round of follicle transplants, in which the surgeon shaves off all the hair on the back of the head to harvest follicles to place where I’m balding in the front. Ugh. Although my stomach is churning with anxiety, I’m excited because the surgical process is over, and I know from here my hair will come into its own. Within myself I’m okay with my journey, but there’s this nagging that keeps poking at my “okay-ness” it’s this thing within me that dreads my hair process being witnessed, ridiculed, and judged. Here’s an example. Several weeks ago, I was with some people I care about. I don’t love them. I don’t hate them, but I care about the quality of their existence. It was my fifty-first birthday, and I was speaking to a room of women who are in the same recovery home where I had worked on my own addiction many years ago. It was a full-circle moment. I was in my element, encouraging women just like me that change is possible, always possible.
