Struggling to be the Proverbs Woman

Honoring Mothers for Their Many Virtues

Happy Mother’s Day!

When I was asked to be the speaker for today’s program, I prayed to God “Lord give me a scripture ‘cause the last thing I want to talk about is the Proverbs woman. It’s so overdone. All the time I hear single men say, “I’m gonna find me a Proverbs woman,” and I’ve heard more than enough references to this biblical woman in my life. Quite frankly I’m tired of hearing about her because she’s just so darn perfect!

A couple of weeks ago Sue Hawkins called me to share the theme that was selected for today: “Honoring Mothers for Their Virtues” and, of course, I wanted to be obedient and speak along those lines, but God kept redirecting me back to Proverbs 31. When I sat down to write out my talking points for today, God directed me to 2 Samuel 22:31 to remind me that His word is flawless and although I may have thought I had something to say, there is something else that God wishes me to say. And because obedience is better than sacrifice turn with me to Proverbs 31:10 .

Although the Book of Proverbs was written by King Solomon, the latter part, especially Proverbs 31 has been attributed to King Lemuel who learned many things from his very wise mother. It’s interesting that these two very successful men-they were kings afterall- chose to compile what they knew about the virtues of a mother and a Godly woman.

We don’t know anything about King Lemuel’s mother other than she taught her son well, but we do know about King Solomon’s mother. You’ll remember her. Her name was Bathsheba and she was that adulterous woman who was up on the rooftop bathing and submitted to the sexual advances of a powerful man while her husband was away defending their country. Yea, that Bathsheba, King David’s lover who became his wife after she got pregnant and the king killed her husband. But I’m not going there now. We’ll come back to her. Let’s talk about sistah girl here in Proverbs.

She’s a virtuous woman.

She gets up before day.

She brings home the bacon, fries it up in the pan, and never ever let’s you forget you are a man—remember that commercial?

Anyway, she invests in real estate.

She’s eats organically because she has a garden that she feeds her family from.

She works out—her arms are strong

She sews and decorates her home

 She holds down a full-time sales job and she even has time to volunteer feeding the poor and helping the needy.
She helps her husband so that he is successful with his career and held in good esteem in their community.

Oh yea, and she doesn’t gossip. Ugh oh!

Whew! She exhausts me. I’m intimidated just reading this and I know that there are some women in this room who feel the same way if we were completely honest. It’s hard to measure up to her because she is just so…PERFECT!

It’s bad enough that every time we turn on the TV or pick up a magazine we see this ideal image of beauty that none of us measures up to. The world tells us that we have to be this tall and this thin and we must use this makeup or face cream. Wear this designer to be considered beautiful. We’re either considered a helicopter or dragon mother if we’re involved in our children’s lives or an absentee parent if we’re not involved enough. It seems the world is always judging us and then we turn to God’s word and there it is.

Proof that our biggest fear is true.

We don’t quite measure up to his ideal after all, we think.

We’re not the woman described here. How can we be? That’s just too much pressure.

We know deep down in our hearts we’re not her, but we keep trying and we keep striving and that’s what I want to talk about today.

Yes, we honor mothers today, we honor mothers for their virtues, but let’s first address the elephant in the room. You know that big topic that nobody wants to talk about.

Pastor I bet if you had the ability to read minds you would be let in on a dirty little secret that every woman in this room shares. If you asked one question and every mother had to answer it honestly I would wager that every mother in here would say the same thing: “Pastor, I’m tired.”
“I’m tired of trying to be all things to all people.”

“I’m tired of trying to make ends meet.”

“I’m tired of being the designated driver in life.”

“I’m tired of trying to make a way out of no way.”

“Don’t ask me to serve on another committee or do another thing because I can barely hold it together.”

She might turn to you and open up her Bible and point to chapter 31 and say “Pastor, I can’t keep up. I can’t be this woman.”

For many mothers, the best Mother's Day present would be to be left a lone for a while so she can rest.

When I was a little girl I would see my mother worrying about money. She would tell me “Shell-belle, we gotta make ends meet.” For the longest I thought ends meat was something you could actually make like pot roast or meatloaf. I didn’t get the rope metaphor. She was trying to hold it down by herself and at times it got tough. There was this one time when it was almost time to go back to school and I needed clothes and supplies and she had more month than she had money.

 She was a teacher and she was off for the summer so it would be a while before she got another paycheck. What she did was answer an ad in the newspaper requesting workers to work in a hose factory. “How difficult could that be?” she thought to herself, and she left me with my grandparents and she went off to her part time job. What she didn’t realize was that she wasn’t packing pantyhose in little egg containers, but she was hired to wrestle large metal hoses, the kind that get hooked up to machines, into huge cardboard boxes for shipping..

I saw my mother last weekend when she drove from Indianapolis to Chicago to attend a book event that I had. She told this story to some of the women there and we laughed until there were tears in our eyes. But it wasn’t funny all those years ago when she came home bleeding from the places where the metal hose had cut into her hands. She wasn’t laughing when she had no idea how she was going to make ends meet and she was desperate to do just about anything to put food in my belly, a roof over my head and clothes on my back. She didn’t feel like the Proverbs woman then, and as a matter of fact, this Proverbs woman was just one more painful reminder of how she didn’t measure up to God’s ideal.

But isn’t it wonderful when we look again at this scripture and realize that this is not a snapshot of her life. This is not what she tried to do at one time-- say on a Tuesday. This was her life over a period of time. From her youth to her old age,  and it is her fear of the Lord that enables her to do all of this over her lifetime.

I don’t mean shaking in your boots fear. I mean an understanding that God’s word will not return void. Let me explain. As a child I was afraid of my grandfather. Not that he was a mean man. He was actually very kind, but I understood that there were expectations of me and if I did not follow them then I would have to answer to him. This is the fear our Proverbs woman has. The understanding that God has an expectation for her to live up to all that she was created to be over the many seasons of her life.

As a teacher and a writer many of my students get confused when I mark up their papers because they’ve used the wrong verb tense when writing about literature. You see whenever you write about a character in a literary work, it is important to use the present tense. Although you’ve already read the story in the past, it might seem that you should use past tense verbs but that is incorrect. The reason is that the character in the story is always performing the action no matter when it’s read. For example, when you were in school and read Romeo and Juliet they were star crossed lovers and when your great-great grandchildren read the same story they will still be star crossed lovers. Hence the need for the present tense because the action in the story is always happening right now.

When we look back at our Proverbs woman we see that this ode is written in the present tense. She is doing it now, but not right now. Whether it was the year 12 or 2012. She is doing all of these things, but not all at once. That’s an important distinction.
Remember I told you I that the book of Proverbs was written by King Solomon whose mother was Bathsheba and that I would come back to her. Turn with me to 2 Samuel 12:11.

We all know the story of King David and Bathsheba. Here she was a married woman who submitted to the charms of a powerful married man. She stood by as her husband was killed and she was pregnant with another man's baby. What she and David thought they had gotten away with was discovered when Nathan reported that God was angry and that the baby would die. Yes, this scripture is told with King David as the protagonist, but we have to look deeper and see that Bathsheba was suffering, too. Finally after the baby dies, the word says that David comforted his wife and she got pregnant with another child whom they named Solomon.

I tell my students it’s important to read the whole book and that’s what we have to do here. The famous black playwright Lorraine Hansberry has a quote in her drama A Raisin in the Sun that says “if you’re going to measure a man, measure him right”. I think this applies to how we measure ourselves in comparison to this Proverbs woman. We need to measure ourselves right. We can’t continue to hold ourselves to an ideal that’s just not realistic. It’s like determining who won the race before it’s over.
If we were to take a snapshot of Bathsheba at this moment in time she was hardly a virtuous woman. She was anything and everything but that, but it was her son after all who compiled this book of the Bible. 

When we look back at this Proverbs woman, the line that speaks to me is give her the reward she has earned. Look around. There are women in here with some stories. If we took a snap shot of their lives at just one point each of them may not have been a virtuous woman who felt she was worthy of honor. When we look at ourselves we may realize all of the things we don’t do right and we feel that there is no way that we should be honored. We know how we've failed. But our ways are not God’s ways and if we measure a woman by His standards than we must measure her right.

We measure mothers because of their virtues and it is for this reason we honor them. We must first, however, understand what this word means. Because of our Puritan upbringing we assume virtuous means chaste or virginal, but we know Bathsheba’s story and she was neither of these. So maybe this word means a little more. 

A quick glance in the dictionary will tell you that virtue means uprightness, rectitude, it also means inherent powers. For example, by the virtue invested in me, and lastly it means because of. So I say today we honor the virtues of mothers… because of.

We honor them because of them going on when they were tired.

We honor them because of them taking care of us when we were unable to take care of ourselves.

We honor them because of their faith.

We honor them because they moved beyond the circumstances of their lives and created the best life they could for each of us.

We honor them because of…
And we turn again to this Proverbs woman, instead of feeling inadequate next to her. We see that she is a promise of all we can be if we keep living. She is a reminder that we are just what God said we are, “fearfully and wonderfully made”.

In closing, I want to share a story with you about a large temple in Thailand. In this temple there stood an enormous,  ancient clay Buddha. It wasn’t beautiful or even well crafted, it was just old. For over 500 years it had been revered because of its longevity sheer longevity. Violent storms, changes of government, and invading armies had come and gone but this statue had endured.
At one point, however, the monks who tended the temple noticed that the statue had begun to crack and would need repair. After a while one of the cracks became so wide that a curious monk took his flashlight and peered inside. Imagine his surprise when he realized that inside this old, ugly, broken down clay statue was the largest pure gold image of Buddha that exists in the world. What happened was that this shining work of art had been covered in plaster and clay to protect it during times of conflict and unrest and after a time people had forgotten that it was actually gold inside. They thought that what they saw everyday-the old  broke down clay statue- was really what it was.

Isn’t that our story? We get mired by the much and mess of life that we forget that we could possibly be worth anything. We think we don’t measure up and we don’t believe God’s word about us. But we’re gold underneath all this because we are, after all, made in His image.

And it’s that goldness that goodness that we celebrate today. It is your virtue we honor. We honor you because of….Happy Mother’s Day,  Proverbs women!

Sister Showdown in Grocery Store

Y'all I almost lost my Zen this afternoon in Wal-Mart. It wouldn't have been pretty either. You see I was waiting in the checkout line and this woman rolled up on me and gave me colossal attitude. Although I can't remember exactly what she said, I do know the tone was nasty and I envisioned myself snatching her by her mangy hair and beating her to a bloody pulp right there by cashier #3. I was truly about to set it off in Wal-Mart! Of course I would have had to call my husband to bail me out of jail and I know my children would have laughed unmercilessly for the next fifty years and without a doubt someone would surely include the story in my eulogy, shaming me even beyond the grade.  So instead of beating her, I took several deep breaths and tried to calm myself down.

Even as I was walking toward my car I was angry. Inwardly I was hoping I would see her in the parking lot so I could give her a piece of my mind, but then I had a thought: Maybe her day had been like mine. Maybe she was just as tired as I was and still needed to go home and cook dinner. Perhaps she was short on cash and was trying to figure out a way to go home and explain to her family that she just didn't have enough money to get what they needed. Maybe she was in pain, physical or emotional, or maybe she was just mean.

Could it have been that she felt blue because every magazine on both sides of the checkout lane touted all of the ways she was inferior? Not sexy enough, not young enough, not thin enough, therefore, not good enough. Whatever the case was I know I needed to feel love and compassion for her. Somehow. But I didn't. Not at first. But eventually that little spark ignited in my heart and I felt that she was my sister. No we are not related biologically, nor do we share the same race or socio- economic status. We may or may not belong to the same religion or political party, but we are the same gender and sisters need to remember how to stick together. I, for one, am sick and tired of seeing women on reality television disrespecting each other. Worse yet, I'm tired of seeing it in real life. I'm tired of the cattiness, the backbiting, and the unnecessary attitude. I'm often left dumbfounded asking myself where is the love?

We women are so beautiful. We are creative, intuitive, nurturing, and always hopeful. When did we stop encouraging each other, choosing instead to tear each other down insult by insult? Hurtful act by hurtful act. At what point did we lose compassion for each other, forgetting to understand that the load is not spread equitably, so sometimes we may need to help our sister out by carrying it for a while or speaking life to her as she struggles beneath it.

 Recently, while teaching a lesson on connotation and denotation I asked my students to list all of the words they could think of to describe a woman. Easily we came up with nearly fifty words and most of them were negative. Why is that?

I'm glad I didn't beat the poor lady in the store although it would have made for good TV. Can't you just see the security camera video? Instead I'm celebrating her for all that she is as a woman and I'm choosing to call her by her name: mother, daughter, sister, aunt, grandmother, cousin, friend.

Be a Tree

"And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not wither; and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper." (Psalms 1:3-4)

Lately I've been thinking about trees. I realize this may sound crazy, but I'm now beginning to realize that in order to really appreciate life I must learn to be a tree. Trees, you'll notice, bend with the force applied towards them. They lean into the storm and never try to resist. Those trees that hold rigid are soon uprooted and cast aside and forgotten, while those that surrender to the elements remain rooted for years. I'm now only starting to see that when I am faced with an obstacle, I don't need to fight back. I can just be still and let the attack pass. When I try to fight in my own strength, I always fail. I am exhausted and discouraged and I usually don't win because resisting is futile. It is when I surrender and allow the forces to blow about me that I'm victorious. How silly it would be for a tree to throw up it's branches and attempt to fight the wind, yet I try to fight my own squalls with feeble attempts.

Although I've always been fascinated by trees, I've never really stopped long enough to think about how they symbolize all of the lessons that I need to learn in my life. It's true. I've felt most comfortable around trees. When I was a child, I would spend all of my free time in the woods behind my house. I got such comfort from the green sanctuary and have always felt closest to God when I'm near his creation. Just like Jessie in The Other Side of Through, I have found my own way in life whenever I've made my way to a wooded path. There is just something about trees that make me feel safe, protected and a part of creation. Through the years, I've complained about living in Florida and it wasn't until recently that I realized what it is about Florida that I don't like: It's the fact that, for the most part, I don't have access to the huge, towering trees of my childhood. Trees whose limbs I could climb in or whose leafy branches I could sit beneath. Trees that bore fruit that I could reach up and grab. Filling my mouth with the very taste of God. Yes, many of you will argue that Florida has trees, but, in my opinion, it's not the same sitting beneath a palm tree or a citrus tree.

Trees truly are symbols to help guide me--no, all of us-- in life. Almost every major religion and faith uses the tree as a symbol of humanity and creation. The Bible, The Qur'an and other sacred books speak of The Tree of Knowledge or the Tree of Good and Evil. This tree, whose branches reach up toward the sky, connect the heavens to the earth. It is the fruit from the tree that represents the choices we make-- some better than others--but we always have the freedom to make those choices. Like trees, we are constantly growing. I am not speaking of the growth spurts we have as we move from infancy to childhood or childhood to adolescence, rather the growth we make as we live our lives in an attempt to truly live and to finally get it right. I believe God put trees on earth to remind us of these lessons.

Scientists say that they can tell the age of a tree by counting it's annual rings, but more importantly they can read between the lines of those annual rings to discern even more information. They can learn the climate of the area, whether or not there was sufficient rainfall, and they can learn about parasites and other trauma that the tree may have sustained. Isn't that the same in our lives? We can look at the beautiful faces of people who have lived through some stuff, but we can also read between the lines. We can learn so much from laugh lines and furrowed brows.

The most obvious symbol is that trees bear fruit. It may be an apple, an orange, an olive or a pomegranate. It may not actually be something we eat, like an acorn or a pine cone, but trees produce something. Just like the tree, each of us is producing something in our lives that is meant to sustain someone else. Is the fruit that you're producing helping someone grow as you are growing? Are the trees you're eating from yourself sustaining you or is it time to do some pruning in your life? Do you need to cut back those areas that are not producing what you need or perhaps you need to feed from another vineyard or orchard.

So, as I sit beneath my favorite tree and write this, I realize that I must be a tree and stay planted near all that sustains me so that I can produce fruit at the appointed time that helps someone else.

The Only Way Out is Through

Sometimes bad things happen:
People we love get sick and die; people break the promises they’ve made to us; our dreams get deferred, and all too often people who we trust betray us.

          When we are going through these things- in the midst of our despair- the first, probably most natural reaction , is to flail. To kick our legs about wildly and to scream. To try desperately to escape the agony which surely feels like it will be the death of us.

During these times we panic and don’t take a true assessment of the situation. We go into full survival mode.

         When I was a small child, my mother and I were at a wedding reception at the clubhouse of an apartment complex in Indianapolis . The other kids and I had grown bored so we decided to go outside and play by the pool. Since some of my cousins were teenagers the adults didn’t hesitate to let us smaller kids tag along as long as the big kids promised to watch us.

         A group of us were running around and one of my male cousins, who was a year younger than me but much larger, thought it would be funny to push me into the pool. Either he assumed that I knew how to swim or in his immaturity he just didn’t think it all the way through.

         People say that when you’re dying your life flashes before your eyes. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I do know that everything seemed to be happening in slow motion  and even to this day I can vividly remember the details of those moments as if they were time-lapse photographs showing each action  moment by moment.

What I remember most vividly was thrashing about desperately in a vain attempt to get my head above water. My legs, though long, were not quite long enough to reach the bottom of the pool and I kicked frantically hoping that I would be able stand on my tiptoes and crane my head up toward the blue sky. I had never thought about the air I breathed before, but as I gasped for it, I realized how beautiful it was and how much I had taken it for granted.

         When one of the older cousins realized what was going on, he threw in a life preserver, but in my panic I accidently pushed it away.  Had I calmed down I would have been able to hold on to the buoy and he could have dragged me over to the side of the pool. Finally my cousin tore off his suit jacket and jumped into the pool fully clothed. It was necessary for him to wrap his arm around me from the back or I would have hurt him in my attempt to save myself.

         Later when I was in flight attendant school and we learned water drills. Since I worked for Eastern Airlines and was based out of Miami a possible crash in the Everglades was always a possibility. At any rate,  I was instructed that in the event of an emergency landing, I was  to always subdue the person first and if that didn’t work to basically put them  in a headlock so they wouldn’t knock me out as I attempted to save their life.

         It’s interesting how that happens in real life. When we are going through something we sometimes hurt those very people who are trying to save us. We are so desperate to get our head above water that we lash out, often striking and sometimes hurting those who love us most.

         There is an expression that hurting people hurt people and it’s true. In my novel The Other Side of Through the readers see it with Edgar who is hurting from his own abusive childhood and hurts his wife Claire and later their daughter Jessie.  We see it also in Claire who is trying so desperately to hold it together that she hurts Edgar, Daphne and unintentionally Jessie. And of course Jessie hurts David, Marcus and potentially Shayla should the story continue.

         It seems the older I get the more the wisdom of my older relatives speaks to me. Growing up I often heard that the only way out is through. Had I not gone through the ordeal of nearly drowning I probably would never have learned to swim which would have kept me from water and prevented me from having some of the experiences I’ve had. For one I probably would have never moved to Florida-too much water-no one ever said fear was rational. I also wouldn’t have been adamant about my children learning to swim and I don’t dare think about what could have happened if they  hadn’t learned at an early age.

         Those first days at the YMCA learning to swim were not easy. I was afraid but I had to keep pushing.

         The only way out is through because on the other side there is freedom. Not

 necessarily in a physical  sense, although some may infer that, and not just in  a physical sense, though that’s true too.

That’s what the old woman in the woods was trying to explain to Jessie. Push, baby, push! Push even when it hurts and it seems easier just to give up because it hurts too much.

         There’s a story that you may have heard before. It’s about a man who prayed to God because he wanted to be closer to Him. God spoke to the man and said “See that enormous boulder over there? I want you to push it.” The man was so excited that he had gotten a word from God that he immediately went out and began pushing. He really put his back into it and used all of his physical strength to try to move that huge boulder. Hours went by and sweat was dripping from his face. His body ached from the strain but he didn’t give up. Hours passed and then weeks. Still no progress. Before he knew it years had passed and finally after ten whole years he cried out to God: “Why are you doing this to me? Why are you making me suffer Lord? For ten whole years I’ve been pushing that boulder like you told me to and it still hasn’t moved.”

The man heard a gentle voice that said “I told you to push it. I didn’t ask you to move it. Moving it is my job! But look at yourself now. Notice how beautiful your body has become. Look at how strong you are today as a result of pushing. You were so weak ten years ago but look at what you’ve now become.

         Like that man, like the characters in my novel, we all face boulders in life. The boulder may be regret, fear, anger, doubt, jealousy  or temptation but to get to the place where we need to be we have to push. We have to push through to the other side.

         People ask me all the time what is my novel about and that’s it: I think it’s really about pushing through no matter how badly we want to give up          There’s another expression that I heard the old folks use and that’s “I’m through” as they would throw their hands up in surrender. Unfortunately they were sometimes doing that in response to something outrageous I had done.

But like the man with the boulder and me in the water once we surrendered and accepted help and the reality of the situation-not as a punishment but a lesson-  there is an understanding that the process of struggling is necessary to get to the product of who we are supposed to be. 

         It’s all necessary because the only way out is through.

         Not long ago I was talking to a friend who told me about some one of the horrible things he had experienced in his life. When I asked him how he  had managed to keep on going when most people would have given up because the odds were stacked against him. He said that he realized that those negative events were commas and not periods.

         As a writer and a teacher of English, that really resonated in my spirit. Commas. Not periods. Commas you see are a place to pause and then you continue on with the rest of the story. In life those setbacks, those commas, are places for us to reassess what we are pushing for.

         The writing process is very lonely. We writers spend hours sitting alone at a computer screen or with a pen and pad of paper pouring our souls onto the page.  Never knowing if this painful work will produce something beautiful, but we keep pushing.

There are so many times when we want to give up. Nathaniel Hawthorne said easy reading is damn hard writing and anyone who claims otherwise is a liar. Writing is hardwork because it comes from a place deep inside of us. I know I agonize over every word hoping that I’m saying exactly what it is I mean to say and I grow frustrated because my medium is words. My mother is an artist and she has the luxury of choosing between oils or watercolors. I just  have words and words can only do so much. But I keep pushing. Every discarded draft ultimately brought me to this place.

         And to hear people tell me that Claire’s story, Jessie’s story, Edgar’s story, David’s story and Marcus’s story helped them push through to the other side has been worth it.

Thank you

"He says he hits me because he loves me..."

Several years ago a friend called me because she had decided to leave her husband. Although he had been verbally abusive for many years, she never really saw herself as a victim of domestic violence. In her mind, that was something that happened to those women. However, it was when he threw the puppy against the wall in a violent rage and then pulled his gun on her that she realized she had to get out of the situation. Immediately. When she arrived at my house, she had her purse slung across one shoulder and her young son bundled in her arms. She looked so young and vulnerable it made me want to cry. As we sat in the comfort and relative safety of my living room drinking coffee, we explored her options. The only problem was that she had few. Like many women she had given her husband  complete control over their finances and he rationed out an allowance to her although she worked full-time outside of the house. Additionally she had allowed him to poison her relationships so that she had very few friends left. 

While she attended to her son, I called domestic abuse shelters and organizations in our area from my home phone. My husband placed calls from his cellphone. The more calls we made the grimmer the situation seemed. The reality was that she would have to leave her home and most of her belongings behind in order to go to a shelter, and it would only be a temporary fix. In the shelter she would live, for a while, with other women whose plight was similar to hers. She was completely defenseless: no clothes, no money, no security. She couldn't even go to work because she knew that eventually he would show up there.

Thankfully the shelter was an option, but a dreaded one.

I could feel the fear pulsating off my friend. I shared with her the information that my husband and I had gathered while making the phone calls. She listened still unsure of what she was going to do. And then something broke in my spirit and I told her my story. I told her about the boyfriend from years ago before I married who managed to place seeds of doubt in my mind about the trustworthiness of my friends and family. I told her about the time he and I were on the freeway and I said something he didn't agree with that made him hit me so hard that my head knocked violently against the glass in the passenger side window causing the semi-driver in the next lane to lean on his horn and yell something at my boyfriend that I could not hear because of the buzzing in my ears and the throbbing in my sore head. 

I told her about the courage I finally summoned to break up with him, but when he showed up on my doorstep with two dozen long stem red roses and a sheepish smile saying how sorry he was I foolishly opened the door. And it was only when he had wrapped his massive hands around my neck and squeezed did I realize he was going to kill me. It  was the look in his eyes as he looked into mine that left no doubt that I was taking my final breaths. 

I told her that it was only God that made him get up and walk back out the door leaving me gasping on the ground with a black eye, bruises and roses strewn everywhere. He had come to kill me and I had gotten lucky-that time. 

Like I picked up the destroyed roses that day, my friend ended up having to pick up the pieces of her own life. I won't lie. It was hard. There were tears, doubts, anger and mourning for the relationship, but she survived. I survived.

There are many survivors of domestic violence and then there are those who don't. There are those women who the system fails. Women who get restraining orders and who are later murdered when he chooses to ignore the law. Then there are those women who foolishly go back home thinking that the situation will get better. Unfortunately according to the Domestic Violence Awareness Project, an average of three women die as a result of domestic violence each day in America and one in every four women will experience domestic violence in her lifetime. Keep in mind that statistic only includes the women who share their experiences.

Each of us must work to end violence against women in all forms. We have to speak up when we hear young men objectify women and call them outside their names and we must remind our beautiful young women that it's what they answer to that matters. He might just be calling them a bitch now, but if he is disrespecting her like this today, what will he do tomorrow? If we suspect domestic violence we have to find ways to help without making the situation worse. We must provide financial support to shelters in our communities who open their doors to abused women and children.

We also have to get past the belief that "he only does this because he loves me" or "a woman's place is..." This logic is idiotic and we have to call it out. If he hits you, belittles you, or threatens you he does not love you in the true sense of the word because love is "patient and kind."

Further, women must have their own resources. There's absolutely no getting around this. I know my mother, aunts, and godmother always told me to have enough money to get my own place even if I never needed it. Even Billie chimed in at times when she sang, "God bless the child that's got [her] own."

Recently my heart leaped for joy when a young student came to my office. Anthony had just finished reading The Other Side of Through and told me that he had truly been moved by it. When I asked him what it was that affected him, he said it was Claire's story. The way she suffered at the hand's of her husband and how it ultimately affected their daughter, Jessie, the protagonist. 

I guess that is what this month is about. Making sure that people, like Anthony, become aware of the reality of domestic violence because it's more pervasive than we realize. It truly is not just those women's problem. According to the DVAP website, this month is about connecting "advocates across the nation who [are] working to end violence against women and their children."

Please do not think that I have forgotten my American brothers, one in every thirteen who is victimized in his lifetime at the hands of a loved one. I feel his pain, just as I felt the pain of my situation so many years ago and the pain of my terrified friend who had fled an abusive marriage. Perhaps I feel my abused brother's pain even more because he may not be able to speak up because of the added embarrassment of being an abused man. 

This issue is so big and we have so much work to do that I fear that the month of October just isn't long enough. Nevertheless, will you join me this month in making others aware?