Infinite Possibilities…

Civilized meanings deter mental planning…unsure of stability. Perplexed by reality. Revelations of a time deferred by pain and uncertainty. Derived by circumstance…Directional tools used to transform thoughts into actions regardless of limitations…persistence does overcome resistance…

Lashawn, my Granny said, Lashawn, Lashawn! Your Daddy’s here. Get up! It’s one of my oldest memories. Man, I was already tucked in my Granny’s bed for the night and he had the audacity to pop up on a three year old.

When I saw him at the bottom of the stairs of my basement steps my heart filled up with joy immediately. He was so tall to me and rather good-looking might I add. Light brown skin, faded up, and always so fly. When I look back on it we used to dress so mismatched in the eighties but it was the in thing to do at the time. Bright colored shirt and faded stone washed jeans with the shoes to match. This is the first time I can vividly remember laying eyes on my father.

When I descended down the stairwell to meet him, I was like, Ooh it’s my Daddy! He also had a little girl with him. I thought she was my sister because my dad had a reputation with the ladies but to my surprise upon introduction I found out it wasn’t. I think I was pretty polite for a three year old remembering to speak until spoken to so I said hello like I was told.

Now for me, this is Dad number one whom I call Father. He caught his first case when I was one years old. He’s been in and out of jail as long as I can remember. In fact, I’ve never met my Grandfather on his side of the family because he’s been in and out of jail for decades as well. When my mom popped up pregnant the first time, my Granny made my mother get an abortion. I was the second attempt. It does bring my heart joy to know even though I was a bastard seed, I was actually planned. My mother wanted to have a baby by this man. My father was thinking something very different. He didn’t claim me at all until his mother saw me. Shoot I’m definitely the daughter of Michael Myers in more ways than one. Several times growing up he would badger me saying," Why don’t you get your last name changed to Myers? I want you to have my name!

You’re my daughter and you’re a Myers so get it changed." Even at a young age I thought that would be quite contrary to get it changed because what if I get married, I will no longer be a Myers anyway.

So the name I carry isn’t my biological fathers’ which brings me to dad number two. She met this man named Tim after she was kicked out of my granddaddy’s home. My Mah was in a homeless shelter on a fourth of July weekend due to her pregnancy with me. This is the time she met Tim and took him up on the offer he gave her to stay with him and his brother. He was an IV drug user that popped uppers and downers who loved to flash food stamps like he was about to purchase a Benz with them. Little short man, dark skinned, short fro with the Napoleon’s disease. I don’t know why my Mom listened to my Granddaddy when he said, If ya’ll together ya’ll might as well get married! So there you have it. That’s all it took for me to have my first two dads. There’s my father and the man who signed my birth certificate.

When I was born they stayed downstairs on a house in Detroit called McQuade Street. Anybody from the D knows this is the straight up hood. You have the junkies which was dad #2, the hood rats, the pimpin’ cats, the ballers, the players, the trappers, and the whores. Now my Mah was always nice-looking even though she had a complex with her teeth. She stands 5’1’, petite frame and big booty. The kind of booty I always longed to have. You know, the kind that jiggles from one cheek to the other in rotation when you switch.

She’s always been in abusive relationships as long as I remember. Why she attracts those types of men, I can hardly fathom a logical reason. However, generational curses pass through the seeds of family unless the individual recognizes the root of the curse for what it is and exposes the truth, where the root derived.

It was only a matter of time before I would bear witness to such madness myself. Dad #2 didn’t make it as long as the others though. He got shot in the head for a case of mistaken identity as a result of his brother’s mouth. He suffered extensive brain damage and it left him in a coma. The doctors said that he wouldn’t respond to them but maybe he would respond to my Mah. So my Mom and Granny went up to the hospital and he responded to them and came out of the coma. He was like a baby in a grown man’s body because he couldn’t speak anymore; he just uttered and grunted due to his lack of will to recover as a result of his laziness. That needle ain’t no joke, and it’s nothing to die for.

So my Mah moved back at home with my Granny and divorced him. She eventually obtained employment for the City of Detroit through a summer work program as a dental assistant. The pay was cool from what I could tell. I was happy at my daycare center Sleepy Hollow, plus I got to go to McDonald’s every Friday. She would walk me to daycare nine blocks every day and catch the bus from my daycare. We didn’t have a car because the bus was the only way she knew how to get around. She was 23 at the time and didn’t obtain a license until she was 25.

In the mornings I would drink coffee with my auntie Andrea extra early in the morning because we would leave my Granny’s house about 5:00 in the morning. Now I was already an extra hyper child right from birth. My mom teases me to this day about how much talking I would do in the morning when I would pull up in my crib. She said, You would always pull up in the crib early in the morning and start talking like, ‘dut, dut, dutta dat’ baby talk. I believe you were telling me what you had to do in this world as if God gave you visions of what you had to accomplish in life and the tasks laying before you.

My Mah always said I was a special child. The church my Granddaddy Frank used to pastor had given my mother a baby shower and had christened me as a baby. So as she puts it, I have always been covered in the blood of Christ since I was prayed over the moment conception took place.

Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me, hunh…. Yeah right!

The First Move

He seemed to be alright to me for a 4-year-old. One day my Mah took me to a house he was working on as a painter. Upon arrival, he made us feel comfortable and he even let me play Super Mario Brothers and Duck Hunt even though the rest of the house looked like it was a spot. By the way, I believe my Mah loved this man long before she knew it just because of his name alone. She is the singer Prince’s number one fan, so I think she was sold when he introduced himself to her off rip. As a child, she would rock me to his music. She calls it Princitizing the children! Also, this is the age where my Mah started quizzing me on song titles and artists names on a regular basis so I would know good music when I heard it.

Now one of my earliest memories of my Mah’s second husband was that of a short man, about 5’8’, dark-skinned, with a jheri-curl, and the first time I met him he had on a wife-beater and jeans. He seemed like a nice man from what a four-year-old could tell.

I had learned from my Mah that he was a mechanic and a painter. He was indeed a jack of all trades. Spending time with him some days would consist of us playing Nintendo and listening to music. Since we were staying with my Granny, he never came over a lot due to their differences. My Granny was known as the president of the man-haters club and he was not approved as an eligible bachelor. Nevertheless, against my Granny’s wishes, she continued to see him. Princ was five years younger than my Mah, and fifteen years older than me. He already had a daughter named Candy, and he was another man with the Napoleon’s disease. He would come over and kick it with my Mah, but my Granny couldn’t stand him from the get-go. He’s a roller, and my Mah is gullible, a deadly combo.

My Granny thought that he was gaming my Mah, however, Princ already had money of his own. He was bred from the streets of East Detroit. Now Princ had his own place and we would catch the bus to visit him. We always got along great because he was very playful and he called me Knuckle-head. We would spend the nights over there some days and I would sleep on his bed after a long night of watching movies with them.

He stayed at an apartment called West Will. It was in the super-ghetto part of town and it was a very old building. There were always wandering junkies and homeless people lurking. The elevator was very old-fashioned. The gate on the outside of the elevator door was very hard to open and the apartment itself was very outdated even for the eighties. His apartment even had the old steel heaters that used to whistle when you would turn them on and which were too hot to touch. They used to drip dew from all the steam they produced. His bed actually flipped open to the floor from the wall. He had a stereo and I would sit on his crates and watch T.V.

The first time I got my first significant whooping was at his apartment where we now lived. The apartment was a standard studio bachelor pad. I was sitting on a crate watching Eddie Murphy’s Raw with them and I repeated one of his lines because I thought he was hilarious! So much so, that I repeated one of his punch lines out loud and then cracked up laughing because it was one of the funniest things I had ever heard. The room grew real quiet and Mah said, What the hell did you just say? So I told her what he just said on screen and I guess it had too many mf’ers in the sentence and she beat the black off me as a result of what I said. I told her I didn’t know that that was a bad word and she said, Yes the hell you did and that’s why I’m gonna whoop your behind. I was one of those kids who always had to have the last word besides regularly pleading my case. This only made it worst. My Mah was one of those mothers who had to say one word per lick with the belt. Oh yeah, and don’t talk while the whooping is going on because that only adds more sentences which means more licks per word!

Now I don’t remember the exact amount of months my Mah and her boyfriend Princ had been dating, but I believe it was already into several months at this time. My weeks consisted of going to Pre-school and spending time with my cousins Cindy and Jessa on the weekends. Every day we would walk nine blocks to my school and then she would catch the bus to work from there every morning. I had been enrolled in Pre-school as early as six months. I remember when I was four-years-old I would assist the teacher’s with the babies. I had already had a willing spirit to help children as well as my elders; as I lived with my Granny.

One evening, we returned home and my Granny was fussing at my Mah about dating Princ. After blowing up on my Mah, she sat on the living room couch and started crying. She told me, I don’t want you to leave but you have to go with your mom. I didn’t realize we were being put out of her home until I saw all of the grocery bags full of clothes my Mah had gathered together. So as we left, I gave my Granny a big hug and she told me I could always come visit her. I grabbed as many bags as I could and we headed out into the cold to Princ’s house on the bus. This is the first time I had ever been kicked out of my Granny’s home.

So as life would have it, I transferred schools and began going to Kindergarten on the eastside of Detroit. I still liked my school, and I’ve always been talkative and a heck of a socializer. In the mornings, we would have to catch the bus to my school and my mom would catch a different bus to work. We stayed in a scary neighborhood where there would always be winos, drunks, and addicts hanging out early in the morning. We usually left the house a little before 6:00 each day to get going. I remember getting into the elevator watching my Mah close the gate, locking us in the urine-stenched smelling cage. This is one of the buildings he worked out of as a maintenance man. He would fix cars regularly in front of the building and he would help out at The Shop which so happened to be a friend of my Granny’s as well. He was a certified hood mechanic, maintenance man, and candy man.

Little Sally Walker, walking down street, hey, hey, she didn’t know what to do soooo she jumped in front of me and said, Gone gurl shake that thang, shake that thang, shake that thang. Gone gurl shake that thang, shake that thang stop. If you want a boyfriend I’ll tell you what to do. Take some salt and pepper and shake on your shoe!"

Low Self-Esteemed Over Achiever

Now in Kindergarten, I was by far the smartest in my class. We were at the end of an era where you could still get physically disciplined in school. While in class one day, we were supposed to lay our heads down on our desk while our teacher stepped out of the room. Some of the kids were talking while she was out of the classroom and she must have heard someone because she called it out as she was re-entering the classroom. There was a light-skinned pretty girl named Yolanda in my classroom, and she asked her to report what was going on while she was away. As a result of the boys who were talking, the entire classroom had to line up and get smacked on the hand with a ruler. She was the only one who was deemed good.

After we sat down, I was crying at my desk along with several other students and she was just smiling. Then to top it all off, the teachers were complementing her and talking about how pretty she was as to glorify her. This is when I started sizing myself and began to feel ugly. I was snagga-toothed because all of my teeth started to fall out pretty early in my life. I felt like my head was too big for my body and I wasn’t as light-skinned as I was when I was born, and the other girl was. She had long braids and my hair was braided in corn-rows to frame my face with short hair. None of the other teachers talked about me like that. My Mah always told me I was pretty and my Granny did the same but outside of my family, the world didn’t view me as pretty and I knew it.

Besides me being ugly, I definitely stood out in the academic department. At this time, we had recently relocated to a two-bedroom apartment on Woodward in downtown Detroit and it was very nice. We had bought some hermit crabs and they were my pets. So when it came time for me to do a science project, I did mine on hermit crabs and I won. I received my first trophy at this time. I was already an excellent dancer. My Mah had me in ballet and dance class since I was three-years-old. Now I was on top as a science pioneer. It was a tremendous ego-booster and I was continually encouraged to be an over-achiever. The school even recognized me as the class valedictorian and of course, the salutatorian was Yolanda.

No matter what though, through it all, what GOD has for you is for you. As a young child, I was shown that looks don’t matter if you have the tenacity to achieve something great. I went to my Kindergarten prom and had my first limousine ride. I also said a speech pre-written by my teacher and had a complete graduation where I received my first plaque. My family was in attendance and I was so happy. Now I was rockin’ a jheri-curl and I felt awesome because I had 1st grade to look forward to.

I was sitting down one morning in my freshly pressed plaid uniform in the small vibrant color coated cafeteria at school when a 1st grader sat across from me with his breakfast tray. I thought he was extremely cute. He spoke to me and said, HI! and I did the same. Now in Detroit in the winter time it can reach really cold temperatures when the wind chills affect the temperature outdoors. The weather must have been affecting his sinuses. As we were sitting there eating silently as no more words were exchanged, I heard some teachers whispering and I looked passed him to look at the teachers and because I was being nosey, I tried to read their lips in the process. I could only guess that they thought we were cute since we were the only kids eating in there.

When I returned my attention back to this boy, I noticed a big green glob just sitting in his left nostril. Without laughing, I’m trying to figure out how I should tell him he has a booger in his nose without laughing at him and hurting his feelings. Finally I told him, You have ah, something in your nose. He was like, I do? then he jumped up real fast, grabbed his tray without finishing his food, and ran into the bathroom. I guess he felt really embarrassed but I would have wanted somebody to tell me if the shoe was on the other foot. If you ever wondered if hormones are fully functional at ages five and six, I tell you they are indeed.

I still feel like at this time, I was a rather normal kid. I had extracurricular activities just like the next kid. I was in ballet and tap dance. As I grew older, I would appreciate dance even more and even learn why dance was so important to my spirit as well as many others I have encountered.

Now my Mah, Princ, and I moved into these apartments right off of Jefferson Avenue right next to Joe Louis Arena when I was 6 years old. These apartments were stellar. It housed local celebrities like Cecil Fielder, in which I used to swim with his son Prince in the apartment pool. Aretha Franklin, whom apartment flooded and drained down to our floor. A