Defining Solidarity

For years I have wanted to start the conversation about how women can be more supportive of each other. I have wanted to build communication among sisters. How often have women been able to get to a point in life that they can sit back and reflect, and say, "Because of (this woman), I have gotten to this point of my career."

Because of black women, I was able to learn how to work through my anger, and grow through my pain. It was therapy with women that gave me the ability to look at myself as a growing, learning, human being with the capacity to change the world around me.

Woman after woman, gave me their wisdom and pushed me to learn how to love and trust myself. It has always been women that through gentle and tough love have forced me to recognize my own ability to work through tough situations. Women have pushed me, and challenged me, they have tortured me, and they have protected me. I thank God for women, and I love women. I became who I am because of women, not only black women, but white women. White women that had the strength within them, to love and honor what strong and beautiful women look like.

There has been a conversation going on among women for years. I have seen it among black women, but I know that we all have either heard, or been part of the conversation. The statement that gets discussed tends to sound something like "I don't understand how women can allow a man to..." in which the person who is speaking discusses how she could not ever let a man mistreat or degrade her. This statement, though coming from a place of empowerment and strength, often can do the opposite for others. See, women that can make these declarations tend to come from spaces where they understand that they are valuable, somewhere in their journey they had a cheerleader that told them that no man could nor should make them feel less than, treat them as anything other than a queen, or love them any less than they deserve to be loved. These women may have had a dad that spoke with pride as he called her "his daughter," or she may have had a mother that told her, "You are the prize." Either way, it is a beautiful gift to be able to say, "No one will ever make me feel small or less than."

I, however, come from a group of women that could never be so bold as to make such a declaration. For a sister to "not understand" how I or other women could experience mistreatment from someone that is supposed to be my partner, gives me a sense that I have done something wrong. For a woman to undermine marriage as something less than an accomplishment, means that she had a completely different understanding of love and relationships than I do. These women know a luxury that many women don't.

Not too long ago, I began to understand that there are two groups of women (maybe more, but at least two very specific groups that I have been able to narrow down). The women that grew up valued, they expected to get married, and to have a life with a man that appreciated them, and the women that grew up suppressed, struggling with the idea of love and partnership.

Unable to speak for the former, I come from the latter.

I didn't come from a home where I was encouraged to understand myself, and who I was. I was never encouraged to understand what I wanted in a man or a spouse. In order to define my life in such a meaningful way, I had to endure judgment from those closest to me. I had to learn to grow passed the the criticisms and discouraging comments. I needed to place safe space between myself and my family. The two women closest to me have always used our relationship to be able to define me, back to me. They used my love and trust of them to speak their wants for me over what I desired for myself. They clouded my view of my life, and as a result, I had to isolate myself from them, so that I could understand what I wanted for myself.

I never understood that there were girls and women in the world that had men that cherished them. My dad never boasted with pride about how beautiful or talented I was. My mother made me feel small, and as a result, I grew up minimized. When I stood up for myself, it was always problematic. When I expressed interests in boys or showed too much confidence, I was "fast," in this case defined as "slutty." I never knew what being cherished by a man looked or felt like. I was raised to understand that for women to be so bold as to tell a man, "what he wasn't," was "mean" and out of place. For women to embrace the power of their femininity, was intolerable behavior.

It took my adulthood, and many women that understood their femininity to encourage me to embrace my womanhood. It took creating space for myself, away from the women that I grew up with. I had to learn what it felt like to be degraded and abused by a man, many men, actually.

I tell my story to say that, I know I didn't do anything wrong for men to feel like they could be abusive toward me in my relationships. I can't help the cards that I was dealt, and by the time I knew that it was wrong, I was an adult, and had never experienced anything different.

Telling my story is about building rapport among women, bold and the empowered, using my experience to bridge communication. For the strong and the valued, to have a better understanding of the isolated and suppressed. It's time we all broaden our views to understand that not all women know what we have been through, but we can share in our moments, and encourage each other to grow.