Take him back?? Rianna's CRAZY!!!

I've been resisting writing about this Rianna/Chris Brown situation for many reasons, mainly because of where I am in my recovery from food addiction. I don't need a reason to eat; my food-addicted brain seizes upon every single nanosecond that I don't connect to God and use the tools of recovery to pound me with cravings. I'm not exaggerating; this is what life is like for me right now.

Food numbs me. I don't feel emotions very much when I'm stuffed with my favorite comfort foods, like fresh baked bread smothered with butter. What I get from food is a warm, soothing, euphoric sensation like being safely bundled up in a soft, thick quilt. Absolutely nothing bothers me. Unfortunately, that feeling is only temporary. And I usually find myself having to eat more in order to get that level of comfort going again. This desperate need for comfort has led me to eat so much that I have binged to the point of extreme physical pain, and/or passed on my couch. There's not much difference between what I do with food, and what an alcoholic or drug addict does with their substances of choice. Same behavior, different drugs.

What does this have to do with the Rianna/Chris Brown situation? For me, a lot. At one point in my life, I was just like Rianna, sans the fame. I was an abused woman. Food kept the film clips of that period of my life running on a screen in the back room of my mind.

I don't like to re-visit those memories. I won't say that I've buried them, but I don't live in them everyday. Ideally, I would very much like to forget that it ever happened. But it did. And as uncomfortable as it makes me feel right now, the Rianna/Chris Brown situation keeps reminding me that I have literally escaped with my life.

However, I am also a writer, and one who has always felt the need to pass along information that might be of some importance to the reader. I don't just write solely for "artistic expression" or an ego-centric need to see myself in print, although I won't deny that my massive ego gets involved a lot more than I care to admit. But I am (at least) aware that a writer has a responsibility to the reading public by providing needed information and thereby being of service to others. This is not altruism; it is recognizing what should be done (kind of like smelling a baby's dirty diaper and changing it, regardless of the voluminous amount of stinkiness) and fulfilling it to the best of one's ability. Despite my personal discomfort and unwillingness to explore feelings that have lay dormant for almost three decades, I strongly feel that I should live up to that responsibility. And remain abstinent while doing it, even though every thought in my brain is screaming, you pompous, self-gratifying bitch! What do you think you're doing? You can't tell people about that dark hellhole you used to live in! You just want sympathy, you big wuss! (sigh) I can do this. I can do this.


So, with your permission, I want you to take a journey back in time with me. The year is 1981, and the date is Independence Day, aka the Fourth of July. You, the reader, have become me, circa 1981. You are a twenty three year old African American woman, married to an unemployed artist/musician who is also bi-polar(untreated)and addicted to marijuana, cocaine, and serial relationships with women. You feel he is brilliant, talented, uniquely thoughtful and articulate, and you want the rest of the world to know about his prodigious artistic talents. But he doesn't necessarily want the same for himself, and sabotages every effort you make to bring out vast store of artistry within him. You don't understand this, and you keep trying.

There are many problems with this relationship. One, you have given birth to a gorgeous baby girl almost three months earlier, and your husband seems completely unaware of the responsibility involved in raising a child. He still behaves as if he were single--partying, doing drugs and sleeping with LOTS of other women. This causes an enormous amount of friction in the relationship. Your communication is fraught with accusations, anger and resentment. Your nerves are in state of constant upheaval, and you anxious about the future for you and your newborn girl. Should you leave him permanently? You are already back at home with your parents because your husband refuses to exert much effort toward finding a job and supporting you and the baby.

"I'm no punk for the white man," he tells you. "I can't have no punk-ass ordering me around like a slave. I'll go back to jail before I do that."

He often makes that threat because he knows it bothers you. You don't want him to be :just another black man incarcerated" statistic. He can do so MUCH BETTER than that, if he would only TRY!

The anger and resentment toward has been escalating prodigiously since your daughter's birth on May 15th. You keep trying to come up with solutions to the problem, which you earnestly pitch to your husband on a daily basis. He adamantly refuses your help with a vehemence that you cannot understand. Doesn't he know that you are only trying to get your little family back together by offering a plan to jump start his career in art and music so that he would be happy with his work AND provide a living for you, him and the baby? Why doesn't he understand this and cooperate? It's so maddeningly frustrating!

After two months of increasingly furious arguments, you declare a cease-fire for the Fourth of July. He says he wants you and the baby to accompany him to a barbecue with his family, which consists of his mother (who has been emotionally estranged from him since his birth), and his two sisters. You sense the volatility of the situation, but you consent to go anyway. They pick you up from your parents' house, which fills you with guilt because it also their 24th wedding anniversary. You choose your husband over your parents, who have been supporting you during this tumultuous period. On top of that, you can practically take a bite out of the cake-like animosity between your husband and his mother, which has been thinly frosted over with civility. This is not going to be a very good holiday. But you are going to make the best of it.

He asks to hold the baby because as he says, "doesn't get to see his little girl very much", implying that you and your parents prevent him from seeing his daughter. This sets your teeth on edge. You don't exert much effort to come see her, you say to yourself. You're too busy getting high and f***ing around with other women. But you say nothing, and pass your daughter to her father, who is sitting in the front seat next to his mother. She is driving, and taking everyone to her friend's house for food and fireworks. Other than the initial courteous greeting, she doesn't say much to you.

Soon, your husband begins the usual litany of complaints about your "Southern, country-ass, think-they-better-than-everyone-else parents" who make it difficult for him to "come see his baby". That's it. You've had enough of this nonsense.

"Maybe if you took care of business and got a decent job, you wouldn't have to deal with my parents' attitudes," you inform him.

(continued below)

Take him back?? Rianna's CRAZY!!! (pt. 2)

He whirls around, his caramel-colored face turning red and his nostrils flaring like a rabid mustang.

"What? A job ain't gonna change your siditty (slang for conceited) assed parents, especially your mama! Your mama ain't nothin' but a stuck-up, country-fried, siddity BITCH!"

He punctuates the last statement by roughly shoving his index finger into your sternum. You see nothing but red, and the entire world falls away, still and quiet, waiting to see what you will do. You snatch his finger away from your chest and bend it backwards. Then you take the can of soda you have been drinking, and smash it violently against the side of his face. There, you say to yourself as you watch the fizzling drops "Tahiti Punch" drip off his cheek, and his natal-spawned, mother-love-deprived primal rage building into a mushroom cloud. Take that, you piss-colored, low-life bastard! No one talks about my mama like that!

He roars in pain and indignity, and orders his mother to pull the car over. She mutely obeys. He hands your daughter to his mother, then turns around. Suddenly, you realize that you are no longer looking at your husband. You are staring in horror at grotesquely twisted face of a monster.

Time becomes meaningless as you watch in complete disbelief as his fist pounds into your face. You hear the smack of each blow, and it sounds like a thick steak being slapped against a kitchen counter top. This isn't happening. It can't be happening. You are a good person, a good woman. Why is doing this? Desperately, you try to return the punches, but he has leaned way over the car seat, and he has the higher ground, the advantage. You can do nothing but land a glancing hit, which doesn't seem to do anything but enrage the animal who has replaced your husband. The barrage of punches land steadily, methodically, and you become dully aware of blood flooding down your nose and out of your mouth. Your arms no longer longer have the strength to raise your hands anymore, and there is no response to the mental command, fight back. FIGHT BACK! But the pounding continues relentlessly.

The world drains away slowly. Your eyes have become tiny slits which offer nothing but hazy, out of focus vision. Somehow you are aware of screams and cries, presumably from your husbands' sisters and your daughter. But you're not sure. All you know is the fists have suddenly stopped tenderizing your face, and you are marinating in your own blood. You can't move. Time has stopped.

You cry out for your daughter, but the animal sound coming from your throat is unrecognizable. You are trying to say, give me my daughter! Give her to me! You want to take her and run away, get away from these primordial ooze-like creatures. They can't be human. Real human beings wouldn't allow such an atrocity to happen to another person. You have to get your daughter and run away from these mutated life forms.

You don't know where you are, and how you got there. All you know is that you are in an unfamiliar place, someone's bedroom. You have no idea what happened to the mutants who brought you to this place, and you don't know the people who have bandaged you and placed cold wash clothes on your face. All you want is to get your daughter and to go home.

During the weeks that follow, you attempt to make sense of what seems to be a totally illogical situation. Somehow, your parents found out where you were, and they came. They saw what was done to your face, and dissolved into tears. You've never seen your father cry before. It was terrible. They immediately called the police, and suddenly, the dozen people or more who apparently lived in the place where you were disappeared. After the police report was made, your parents took you to the emergency room. X-rays of your face were made. The technician called in the doctor of radiology to examine the pictures. The doctor was enraged.

"Who did this to you?" Righteous indignation caused him to sputter out his words as he pointed to breaks in your face that showed up on the x-rays. "Whoever did this to you needs to be put UNDER the jail!"

You are ashamed. How could you admit that you were dumb enough to marry a man who would punch you so hard that he came within centimeters close to shattering the right temporal bone, which would have killed you? He did manage, however, to break your zygomatic, or cheek bone. The entire right side of your face looked like a deflated balloon.

"You're lucky to be alive. We have to do surgery to repair your cheek. Someone will schedule the appointment."

He stormed out in disgust, leaving you alone in the exam with your below-dirt sense of self. One-celled organisms probably felt better about themselves than you did.

Little did you know right then that your self esteem would plunge even lower. Everyone seemed to know what you should do, yet you had no grasp of which path led to your way out of this mess.

"LEAVE HIM!"

Your family and friends made the decision seem so easy. But then what? Stay with your parents? That just didn't feel right. The aching despair that overwhelmed you every night was already unbearable. Stay with him? Well...he cried so much as he told you how horrible he felt about himself. He thought about suicide because everyone would be so much better off if he were dead. That was alarming. You couldn't have that on your conscience. After all...he was your baby's daddy! With a lot of marriage counseling, you could make it work! He would feel better about himself, get a job, and everything would work out JUST FINE! You just needed to be alone with him to talk it over, make the counseling appointments and get your little family back together.

So that's what you did. And you stayed for six more years, even though the promised counseling appointments never happened. He didn't beat you up anymore. Your father and brother went after him with loaded deer-hunting shotguns after the cheek bone incident, so he didn't try that again. But he stole all the household money for drugs and his extra-marital affairs. And he lied, lied, lied. Constant upset in your home, continuous drama. And it didn't end until the day he pulled out a huge Bowie knife and tried to stab you. You fought back with a closet pole. The police called it a draw, although they gave you a slight lead in the cards. He was the one who went away in the squad car. And you were the one who finally filed the papers.

I wrote this in response to all the questions that people seem to be talking about concerning Rianna's decision to get back together with Chris Brown. I am not condoning her choice, in fact, I suspect that nothing good will come from it. I have personal experience with this. But what I wanted to do is give the reader an inside view of what goes on in the mind of an abused woman. Of course she needs extensive help through counseling. And so did I. That is my point--the solution (LEAVE HIM!) always looks easy when viewed from the outside, but it's not so clear when you are right in the middle of it. All we can do is pray that Rianna finds her way to some form of recovery from this issue. I wouldn't want to read that her boyfriend has roughed up (or worse) that beautiful young lady again.

Mom and me

I published this on October 12, 2007. My parents had come back to California after living in from Moss Point, Mississippi for only two years. They had to come back; my mom was extremely ill, and my dad was in denial about the extent of her illness. Somehow, my sister and daughter convinced both of them to come back out West so we could keep an eye on both of them. People in Moss Point were knocking on my parents' door and asking for money. Not borrow, or work for it. Just ask, or rather demand. Hurricane Katrina made desperation a permanent home for some folks. We had to get my parents out of there.

The problem was, Mom and Dad had sold the house our family had lived in since 1973, and they didn't have anywhere to live right away. So they moved in with me. At the time, I was living in a two bedroom, one bath duplex. It definitely wasn't big enough, but it was all we could do for them at the time. Of course, a lot of old, unresolved issues came up for me. I was struggling mightily with my food addiction, and I had re-gained 85 pounds. And, I didn't know how to deal with my parents without resorting to what I had always done--put a lot of food in my mouth to make me numb. It worked, of course. It always did. The problem was, the numbing effect always wore off, and I had to eat more and more to REMAIN numb.

This post is a recounting of one interaction that was indicative of the type of relationship I had with my mother. She's gone now, and although that makes me sad, I realize now that I had a part in the emotional roller coaster that was typical of our conversations. Mom was not "the bad cop" trying to manipulate my emotions all the time. She was just doing her, being who she was. And I was stuck in being a five year old kid who didn't know how to cope with her mother as an adult. So I kept eating. It's sad, really sad. Luckily, she got to see me losing weight and getting recovery before she died. Our communication did improve because I became a lot less fearful and quietly angry about the past. For that, I am humbled, grateful and relieved that God for granted that grace to my mother and me.

In part, we're afraid to face the fact that daughters with eating disorders are carrying their mother's disowned pain and anger. Mothers have a powerful effect on their daughters' lives because girls watch their moms' every move. No matter how much mother's try to cover up their pain, they still serve as models for womanhood, and their daughters have a keen and vigilant eye. Too often the mother-daughter wound is based on unconscious enmeshment, a blending of boundaries, a failure to see where you begin and your mother ends. This failure creates self-destructive behavior that is played out on the plate.
Preface to Women and Food Obsession: Fat and Furious by Judi Hollis, Ph.D.

I was getting ready to leave for work one morning when my mother lifted her head off her pillow and pushed herself up from the pull-out bed in my living room where she spends most of her time when she isn't in the hospital. She looked at me with her eyes shining with an inexplicable mixture of pride and pleasure that seemed incongruous with the fact that she is very ill and never going to get better. Like mother, like daughter. Always unbelievable contradictions.

"Angie, come here a moment, honey."

My stomach lurched because I knew she was going to tell me something that I didn't really want to hear, especially since I was trying to get out of the door to catch a bus. But I'm an obedient daughter. I went over to her bedside and held her hand. She grasped my hand with both of hers, looked up at me and cleared her throat.

"Did you know that I now weigh 122 pounds? I'm the same weight that I was back in high school!"

Whoa...is she kidding? I stared at her. My mother is pretty much a collection of bones with loose skin hanging off them. Her eyes have shrunk back into her head, and they have an out-of-focus look to them. The doctor's had to cut off her right leg because she has diabetes and developed an infection there. There's a stint in her heart, the latest in the long line of procedures she's had since her eight bypass surgeries and a debilitating stroke back in the early 90s. She cannot feed, bathe, or dress herself. And she is incontinent. Yet, she is thrilled that she back down to the weight that she carried while she was still a teenager. But at what cost to your health, Mom? I wanted to ask her that, but I couldn't. The mother-daughter enmeshment rules forbids that level of honesty, especially about weight. I was horrified, though. Does she actually believe that it's good to lose 150 pounds through chronic illness? I shuddered, told my mother to have a good day, and hurried off to work. Thank God for the Learning Resource Center.

Mothers suffer a great unhealed woundedness because the myths surrounding being a wife and mother promised them things that didn't come true. And then they've had to stand by and watch their hopes for their own daughters end in glaring disappointment.

My mother took me to see a doctor about my weight issues when were living in the Philippine Islands. She never said this out loud, but I believe she was embarrassed that I weighed 135 pounds, which would be fine if I was a 25 year old woman. But I was nine years old, and I stood five feet four inches at the time. I was upset that she would humiliate me by sending me to see a military doctor about my weight Not only that, I was suspicious of her motives. I had come to believe that my mother's actions concerning my body had more to do with her than me. Of course, I couldn't say that. I would have been slapped for "getting smart" with her.

The doctor, an Air Force captain, handed me a ditto sheet that had a copy of the weight loss diet that was given to overweight draftees during the Vietnam War. I felt a lump gather in my throat as I stared at it. One hard-boiled egg. One slice of dry toast. Eight ounces of grapefruit juice. Tea or coffee, no milk or sugar. Lunch was a tomato slice with a scoop of cottage cheese. Dinner was a broiled hamburger patty, three ounces, with carrot sticks. I would to lose weight on that diet, that was certain. I could almost hear Mom's brain calculating how she would make me stick to the diet. My plan, however, was to undermine my mother's well-meaning weight loss goals for me, and failing that, commit hari-kari.

"Don't worry, Doctor, I'll make sure she follows this diet," Mom assured the captain.

I went from despair to rage in a nanosecond. I'm not doing this. She can forget that. My mother followed me like a bloodhound whenever I walked into the kitchen. There was no escaping her. She was more upset by my weight gain than I was, and she wasn't the one being called "Aunt Jemima" at school.

We've been doing this dance nearly all of my life. Even now, she seems to be hoping to "inspire" me to lose more weight through her "example". When I was in high school, she told me that I would never get a boy interested in me unless I took off the pounds, and bought me a membership in Weight Watchers to "help me out". She helped me to be offended by her concern. I would walk out of the door, climb into my 1970 Ambassador and take off for Wendy's with my friends. What's a boyfriend compared to a double cheeseburger, large fries and a large chocolate "Thick and Frosty?

"You're starting to look good, Angie," she told me a few days ago. "Just keep up your diet, honey. Don't worry. You'll get there."

I winced and escaped into the safety of my bedroom before I could say something to my very sick mother that I would later regret. I turned on my computer and started playing Funkadelic. Best cure for the mommy blues. Don't get me wrong; I don't blame my mother for being concerned about my health, if that's what it really is. But it's never been that simple. I'm a reflection of HER, and as she has told me over and over again, I represent her whenever I'm out in public. If I'm fat, she's failed in her duty as a mother. It doesn't matter that I'm now nearly 50 years old. I'm still her daughter.

Unresolved issues in the mother-daughter relationship does not mean that your mother is bad, or that you are bad. It means that the innate dynamics of this relationship create profound tension around eating. The only way to address disordered eating is to fearlessly examine your relationship with your mother.

It ain't easy, Dr. Hollis. But I'm doing it. One day at a time.