Piecing it back together.

My future cheeren have been on my mind a lot lately. What will they be like? Will they be smart? Dumb as rocks? Reasons to be proud? Disappointing? Assholes? Don’t worry, I’m in no hurry to have them as I am well aware that I’m still too selfish to be responsible for a child. Now, anyone who knows me knows that when I do have little ones running around, I’m going to love on them like the world is going to end if I don’t. Hell, for me, it probably will. I fucking LOVE kids! Seriously! I play with them like I’m one of them, without regard to what the boring “grown ups” all around have to say. Fuck you, I’m playing right now. But I’m not gonna dupe myself into thinking that it’s all fun and games to raise bambinos. There are gonna be problems. Money, exhaustion, discipline, stress. Kids, I tell ya. How am I going to handle it when it’s really game time?

Too much? Not if your kids are ninja robots like mine will be. You loser. Witcha regular-ass kids.

I wish I could see clearly into the future and know exactly what motherhood will bring me so I can prepare. I like to be prepared. I’d like to know, in advance, about that time my kid finally realizes that the poop is in his diaper and he decides to put his hand down there. In public. And then touches everything. Including other people’s kids. I’d like to go ahead and formulate a plan for that day. Even though I can’t create an accurate, 3D, and color-coded road map for my progeny’s antics, I can at least plot and plan ways to exact my revenge on them, right? I think that’s fair. Read more

I am not a leader. I’m not! I would love to be, but you really wouldn’t know it from the way acted (or rather, haven’t acted) over the past few months. Listing a bunch of qualities that make someone a leader here would be the obvious and (for me) annoying choice, so I won’t. Just know that I’m failing miserably at it. A leader gets it done no matter what. A leader doesn’t let anything, especially not personal circumstances get in the way of success.

If you held me up to those standards right now, you wouldn’t know who I am. You wouldn’t know that I have an organization. You wouldn’t know that I want to build it into a premiere champion of Haitian Diaspora members. You also wouldn’t know that I have a youth choir I need to help rebuild to its former (limited) glory. Or that it’s full of teens looking for any sign that they can be great.

I want, so badly, to push against the ingrained mediocrity that Haitian kids are relegated to. It would take a whole other blog post to get into it, but those of us who grew up in Haitian households are not pushed to become anything special, and we often end up being no more than just cogs in the machine. Ew. I need to do more, but lately I’ve been doing the exact opposite. It’s a crying shame.

Can I turn it around? I don’t know yet. Honestly, I feel the tendrils of depression reaching out at me (Yikes, that was really melodramatic.) I don’t like where I am right now. I have a lot going on, but even more than that, there’s a lot of less-than-good going on immediately around me. My support system needs its own support system, if that makes sense. Anyway, that’s too much for this. I’m just saying though…I am not a leader. Not right now.

Maybe I’m just shrugging.

Against my better judgment, I did something super cliché today and took up an invitation to go to Café Intermezzo for “drinks and stimulating conversation.” Say no more. Something about a group of “intellectual” (didn’t know I counted as an intellectual now) Black women sitting in a “European” café that’s become more of a suburban tourist attraction than anything remotely authentic just screams “Sanaa Lathan flick” to me. I went anyway and you know what? That shit was awesome. We talked about everything from religion, to feminism, to Haiti, and back. If we hadn’t started so late and had other plans, I’m sure we could have been there for hours sharing opinions and disagreements. I love a good conversation, and I love a good chocolate cake. (yeah, I had a slice, and?)

Aside from what we talked about, I learned a very valuable lesson today: sometimes you just gotta suck up your fears of looking like a poser, put on a beret, and have an $8 “French” coffee drink in an Arabic coffee-sized cup (no refills, of course). It just might make your day.