Back In Da' Day

The following is an interlude from the mind of Vickie Bowman.

BACK IN DA’ DAY . . .

Change- such a sweet & innocent word . . . until its required of you!

My life has never been completely without the hardships of change. For example, as a pre-teen I had myself convinced that was going to die of cancer. Yep, that’s right. I was sure that I had two painful, malignant tumors growing & eating painfully away at my bodacious body. Imagine the headache my mama had trying to convince me that it was just puberty & hormones, developmental change, running its course so that I could have breasts. Who knew?

But change wasn’t always such a devastating event. In fact, my whole life took a one hundred-and-eighty degree turn the year of 1996. I was an intelligent & beautiful eleven year old, and believe it or not, eleven was a HUGE year for me. I had decided prior to starting school that year [as a seventh grader] that nothing was worth anything! According to statistics, since I was a young African American girl raised by her single-parent mother in the middle of a low-income community, I was bound to be delinquent & pregnant by the age of seventeen. My biological father didn’t want me, so surely I wasn’t worth anything. My uncle was sexually abusing me for the seventh year in a row, so surely Hell was lined up around the corner waiting to take a stab at me. “What’s the use?!” & “Why try?” were my new approaches to life. Needless to say, that in addition to the sudden flood of hormones & confusion Middle School served, I was- in a nut-shell- a HOT MESS!

Did it stay that way? Yep, for about a month & then it seemed as if God flipped a switch that year & in came “The People,” a group of individuals that influenced great change in my life simply by caring, supporting & not pitying me. This team consisted of five major people- my Mama, the CEO & my consistent support at home, Marie Hendrix, the coolest lady with a gray afro I’d ever met in my life & the consistent support at church, & three school teachers, my consistent source of support at school: Lucy Floyd, my science teacher, Tammy Bellamy, my language arts teacher & Mr. Meadors, my social studies teacher. Each day with them, the “woe is me” attitude I’d started the year with desolated as a glimmer of hope begin to flicker in me concerning my future. After a few months, the glimmer turned into a glow that overshadowed the grim circumstances I faced. However, they didn’t disappear, though. My father still wanted nothing to do with me. Statistics stuck with the “hard, cold truth.” And, none of them, including my mother, knew anything about the sexual abuse I endured throughout the entire school year. Some how, those thing didn’t matter anymore & the process of change I though was killing at one point in my life, proved to be a life saver & stepping stone to the success I am today.

What about you guys? We’re all addicts of change, but at what point in your life did you become addicted to change? When were you marked by change? Who & what influenced you?