FEEL LESS AND DO MORE

They told us we could become everything. They told us we could have it all. 

So we became hustlers then girl bosses then wives and then mothers. We became women who feel less and do more.

Feel less and do more had become my mantra, my savior, my path to salvation. 

Feel less and do more was how I was going to become everything my mother was not - how I was going to become someone that meant something - how I was going to have it all. 

My mother certainly never got to have it all, because the only thing she wanted to become in this life was my mother, and she sacrificed her entire self to give me the kind of childhood she had always yearned for but never received. 

But I didn't value her maternal sacrifice whatsoever, because all I wanted was for her to stop leaving me, and she could never stop leaving me because she could never stop breaking, and I spent most of my life believing she could never stop breaking because she never became someone that mattered enough for someone to want to stick around to help us - because no one ever did.

I didn't care that she spent her entire life providing me with every opportunity to chase my dreams, or that she only shopped for herself at Goodwill while meticulously dressing my brother and me like the Kennedys, or that she didn't have a single girl’s night out, date night, or vacation throughout my entire childhood. 

None of those things meant a damn thing to me if I had to continue to watch her break underneath the weight of it all right before my eyes, every. single. day. 

I grew up in a land of single mothers and fatherless children, where every woman had been abandoned and left behind with all the responsibility of both providing and caretaking for their children.

Women who slept on couches with lit cigarettes in their mouths so their children could sleep in the only beds in the house. Women who worked overnight packing meat in frozen coolers only to return home at the crack of dawn. Women who tended bar every night until 2 am, and woke up to stand in the welfare line every Friday morning because they still couldn't afford to put food on the table.

Not a single mother around me got to have or become anything - much less everything I wanted to be or have for myself.

Virtually all of the women in my family had been beaten, abused, violated, preyed upon, and left behind with no power and zero agency. Meanwhile, I watched as all the men came and went in new cars and fancy suits on their way to all their big adventures.

Men didn’t get stuck in small towns. Men didn't get left behind - in fact, they bounced back from failed marriages with younger and more attractive wives.

When I looked at my father and I looked at my mother, I understood why he left her - my father had wanted a life for himself, and the only thing my mother wanted was my brother and me. 

And it is because of all of this, that I came to believe that women who traded in their wants, dreams, and needs for the wants, dreams, and needs of their children ultimately destroyed themselves.

And so I internalized my mother's pain as a casualty of maternal sacrifice - a concession that proved to be deadly - it had cost my grandmother her life.

And so I decided that if I wanted to become everything my mother was not -- someone who meant something - I had to become so emboldened, so uncompromising, and so utterly ruthless in my pursuit of feeling less and doing more that I would never lose myself the way my mother lost herself in me. 

I was not going to submit.  

I was not going to concede. 

I was coming for it all. 

And hell hath no fury like a woman wearing the cloak of all of those who were scorned before her.