The Raw and Real Series: My Mother’s Pain … or My Father’s Protection?

So you know I’m deeply into personal development, right?

As my body heals, I’m working on healing the rest of me, too.

Last year, right before everything hit the fan with my emergency hysterectomy, some things came up for me around my father.

Now, let me go back for a minute, since I know there’s new people coming to my blog now who are still getting to know me.

First and foremost, I am street. Yes, I have a PhD from Stanford, and yes, I’ve done five million on my own in my business. Yes, I pour seven-figure strategies into my tribe. That’s what I do.

Or at least, that’s what I’ve done, for years.

But underneath all of that, I am 100% street in my blood. In my DNA. My lineage is street. My people are hustlers. I come from a lineage of hustlers, dealers, gangsters, pimps … just rough motherf%ckers. These are my people, and I love them with my f#cking heart. I love the street in me.

So my father was a hustler, and my mother is her own badass.

Now, because of her OWN history of hurts, when Momma got pregnant, she made an appointment to abort me.

But then my daddy pulled some REAL gangster shit.

Momma told me he set her on his lap, and said nine words that I will never forget.

"If you kill my seed, I will kill you."

Now, understand that everything is heightened when you’re street. It's not regular. It's not ... how do you say this, God?

It's not measured. It's extreme. Everything is an extremity. And so where I come from, and y'all need to hear me on this—you don't say sh&t you don't mean. You do not bluff. You don't bluff, because if someone calls your bluff, then you lose your credibility. And sometimes, a LOT of times, that’s all you’ve got.

That’s why I don't back down. It's a street thing. If you challenge me, everything in my DNA is going to rise up. There's nothing to talk about; I'm not going to lose. That’s not what I do. That’s not what WE do.

And so Mama caught that, and she backed down. #realtalk: Daddy scared the sh*t out of her.

But then she went to jail for holding his gun when some bullsh%t popped off. And she got all kinds of pissed off at him for not coming to visit her even though he couldn’t, because he had a warrant out for his arrest.

So he couldn’t be around, but he still saved my life before I was born.

And that takes me straight to Isaiah—straight up biblical, you know what I'm saying?

"Before you were formed in your mother's womb, I knew you."

If you're an Old Testament beast like I am, then you know what I'm talking about. God and Father, Father and Daddy are all conflated in me.

My father was willing to threaten, hurt, even kill for me. My mother's life for mine.

Did he know I was anointed before I was born?

What if all this time, I've been thinking it's God, but it's really been my Daddy?

What if, before I was born, I was protected? What if, before I was born, I was chosen? What if, before I was born, I was special?

And what if he knew?

What if he knew before I was born that I have a destiny?

Why else would he fight for my life, and win?

I have spent three decades of my life tending to, dismantling, and deconstructing my mother's wounds, nullifying her pain. Generational pain. Because I believe that each time I heal, she heals. And another black woman heals.

This process is not just me—it goes before me and it goes behind me. There's a lineage in front of me and there's a lineage behind me. And each time I heal, I'm healing a cultural consciousness through me. That is why we heal, and why I teach healing. We don't heal for us. We don't heal for the individual.

I don't heal for me—I heal for we.

So I can’t help but wonder what might happen if I took on my father's protection, now.

After all, in a biblical sense, the blessings that get passed on generationally come through the lineage of the father, not the mother. They come through the lineage of the father's bloodline. That's why the blessings of Abraham come through the sons, not the daughters. Right?

Walk with me, here:

My life makes no sense.

Given the extremity of my PTSD, my anxiety disorder, my dyslexia, my high-functioning autism … given the fact that I'm literally legally handicapped …

How do I hold four degrees? A PhD from Stanford? How did I make five million in less than six years?

How did I close a show off Broadway? How am I an award-winning play writer and poet?

How do I have the ability to love?

And to still love and to still love, and to love again, and to love again?

How do I continuously create something out of nothing?

My life makes no sense … unless we add in my father's bloodline.

Which brings me to these questions that have shaken me to my core:

What if I am not my mother's pain? What if I'm my daddy's pride? What if I'm my father's daughter? What if I am him?

I don’t know what he looks like—I don’t have a single picture of him—but they say I look like him. They say I have his thinking. His swag. They say he was charismatic. A strategist. A leader people followed like the Pied Piper.

I can’t help but wonder.

What if life had been different?

Now, I’m not saying it would have been a good thing if he had stuck around, necessarily. If he had raised me, given how much shit he was in, I'm pretty confident I would have been a f$cking kingpin! I'm not kidding. I think I would have been running the streets. And I would have been glorious, because my daddy would have trained me.

I think God made sure Nanna would find me. Take me in. To give me the compassion that comes with grace and mercy.

But what if I AM my father's daughter? What if the whispers I hear aren't God, but my daddy? What if he is in me? What if I shifted my life? What if I changed my life from tending to my mother's pain, to honoring my father's protection? What if I took on being my father's daughter? What if I took on his ruthlessness for that which he loves? His genius and his brilliance that could outsmart any system? His boldness, his fearlessness of living life on his own terms, above the law, beneath it, in it. You know, what if I really am my father's daughter?

What if I took on living my life not as my mother's pain … but as my father's daughter? What would that mean?

It would mean a completely different life. A different context. A different narrative. A different confidence. A different pride. A different authority. A different walk. A different f#cking power.

And all I know for SURE at this exact moment is how good that idea feels.

Venus Opal