Sample Chapter (Not Quite Black & Blue)

This is a rough draft, but I thought it would be nice for you all to be able to read a sample of my memoir (I feel just a little pretentious when I say that hahaha but that's part of the fun of using that word), "Not Quite Black & Blue":

You Want to Start a What?

“You want to start a what?”

That was all I could muster out after hearing his proposal. He looked at me, smiling, lovingly stroking my arms. Filled with joy and intent, he repeated,

“A family”.

I never knew a womb could churn. I felt my vagina clench at the thought of his aggressive, angry and temperamental sperm coursing through the tunnel of my yoni, passing my cervix and finding its way to my fallopian tube to hunt...for an egg in my ovaries. 

I had always wanted children. When I was a little girl I knew exactly what I wanted. Four…No, five boys…Well, maybe four, this way each one had a friend. I could dress them up in real snazzy outfits and they would be the coolest and cutest boys in school. Totally popular. They would be smart and sweet and I would love them with every fiber of my being. Over time, I learned of the costs of children and the potential pains of child birth and I narrowed that number all the way down to 2. Then as I started to have visions of the future, which always seemed to involve me having a little girl, and I realized the benefits of having a boy and a girl. After all, I wasn’t going to be able to take my little boy to the nail salon with me to get a mani-pedi. 

When we are young, our parents give us baby dolls and we pretend that we are mommy and we walk around holding it, sleeping with it, feeding it with the plastic bottle, and it is not until we get older that we realize the reality of having a child. They don’t just get dropped off by the stork. You can't just enjoy them and then throw them into the toy chest when you are over them, and most of all, they have a mind of their own. They are living beings that have to be created, cultivated and maintained for life, with another person and hopefully the right person at the right time. 

I realized that Johnathan was not ready for children when I saw him grab our bird, Rizzo, and squeeze him so hard that I swore he was going to break him. Why? Because Rizzo nicked his finger. To be fair, Rizzo did lunge at him. 

There was one time when Rizzo bit me and I reflexively flicked my hand and I did it a little too hard and Rizzo didn’t have time to fly and he accidentally hit the wall. I felt bad about that and so I know that things can happen when you get chomped into by an animal, but this was not a reflex. John was in complete domination over the bird. He was just a small bird, just a little bigger than a hand, but man could he chomp down with his beak if he wanted to. 

He was going through hormones and because John was a man, he was a threat. Rizzo was forced to fight for his territory (his bird cage) and his woman (our other bird, Sandy). I tried to reason with Johnny,

“Rizzo’s brain is the size of a pea and he’s only responding based on his instincts. He will never understand discipline. We have tried it. So why are you squeezing him like that?”

But talking to John was like trying to discipline that bird. I thought to myself, "If he’s doing that with our bird, what is he going to do with our child?"

I asked, “Why do you want to start a family?” followed by a flippant chuckle. 

“Well, I really miss my family sometimes. I feel like I wouldn’t miss them as much if we started our own.”

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to have children with him at all, just not now. His mom was already telling me that she had talked to her stylists to see if she knew how to do mulatto hair, because when her "grand baby" came, she wanted to be ready. I had to curb my urge to say to her,

“I don’t know if your son is going to be ready for that anytime soon”. 

I continued,

“You can’t just start a family because you miss yours. If you want to visit we can visit. Shit, we just got back from visiting. A child is expensive, and you’re always saying, that sometimes you wish you weren’t with me because then you could do what you want and go where you want, etc. etc. What do you think is going to happen when we bring a baby into the world? Everything is going to be about that child”.

I found this entire conversation to be a farce as he had just recently done the most absurd thing to me. We were sitting on the couch enjoying a movie when out of the blue, he turned to me and asked,

“Are you pregnant?”

to which I replied,

“No. Why?”

to which he physically replied, by hastily turning his body and proceeding to kick my belly. My mouth dropped open in shock, not from the pain, because he didn’t kick me very hard, but to the insanity of the action. Before I could open my mouth to say anything he said,

“Just in case”. 

That’s when it registered. He thought that by kicking my stomach, he could terminate any potential pregnancy. Now, as I later found out, he did this action…on two different occasions mind you…because he had seen it on a television show. Apparently it was supposed to be funny. Hardy fucking har har. So the fact that he was looking me square in the eyes and asking me to have a baby with him was a joke. After sitting down with him and making clear the costs and sacrifice needed to have a child, he finally closed the discussion and that was the last we spoke of it.