Turning Filth Into Fertilizer Part 1

Have you ever had something weighing on your heart so heavily that it feels like you can’t really move forward until you confront it? I feel like I am in such a space right now. I am fresh off of the emotional roller coaster that was Iyanla Vanzant’s, Peace From Broken Pieces. To read this book, you would have to wonder how she ever got out of the bed again after all of the mess she has been through. The book was very personal for me because it brought up feelings about the men in my life or should I say the lack of men in my life growing up. It also brought up the idea of negative family patterns that I witnessed and the struggling women I knew who had to raise their children on their own. I read this book right after reading Getting the Love You Want by Harville Hendrix. In his book, he traces relationship difficulty to the patterns people develop in their childhood. I felt like the book by Hendrix prepared me to confront the information presented by Vanzant even though that was not the intent. Both books were my wife’s. Sometimes I read what she reads so that it will help us with our own communication. I actually read Getting the Love You Want before she had a chance to get to it. After I read it I got excited because it seemed like it gave words to things I had been trying to express for years about my observations with relationships.

Frankly my dear I don’t give a…

Hendrix confirmed the false romantic ideas that are prevalent in our society as well as the false belief that we can be completed by another person. He also talked about how people come up with their ideas of what a relationship should be when they are children and that what they often look for is someone to give them what their parents never did. Reading it, I had flashbacks of saying to my partners that I didn’t owe it to them to be what their parents were not. And I definitely could not be the God that it seems some people expect from their partners–a person who anticipates their feelings and wants and addresses them without being asked. I admit that I could’ve probably have said these things in a more sensitive way and Hendrix’s book gives tools on how to do that. But what the book really did for me was confirm that I was not crazy for believing that every person has the potential of being whole and can learn to be in a relationship with another whole person. He called it a conscious partnership and sadly I have rarely seen such a thing. My wife and I are working on it, but I’d be lying if I said I knew a lot of people out there who are doing the same thing. I still know that a lot of people have this false belief that their partner is their other half. And you know what that means? If you are a half person who depends on another person to be whole, the only way you will get there is to either control your other half or to allow yourself to be absorbed by the other half. I call BS on that. There is a better way.

Despite my belief in the better way however, I still had the challenge that came with the realization that I wasn’t crazy. Growing up without any consistent examples of stable romantic relationships, I came up with the idea that no one was promised such a thing. Secondly, I decided that I could not make my existence dependent upon the approval of others. If I was going to be in a relationship, I wanted it to be with someone who could stand on their own who was choosing to be with me rather than being with someone who made me their reason for being or who thought I was here to be an extension of them or worse yet wanted me to make up for their parents. Unfortunately, it seemed that our society has watched so much television and romantic comedies that I often came across as a jerk when I refused to buy into some elements of romantic relationships. Eventually resisting Hollywood inspired romance kicked my butt (they have a bigger budget and more star power) so, I went about trying to just give in to the prevalent way rather than trying to force the “better way”. Then I read this book and I snapped out of it and started confronting my own relationship trials trying to understand how to get around this childhood programming that is doing a terrible job of preparing children to enter into mature and conscious romances. While I was in that process, my wife suggested Peace From Broken Pieces because some of what Vanzant was saying in the book reminded her of things she had heard me say about my background. She was right.

I am not going to give a synopsis of Vanzant’s book here. What I will say is that if I were a Black woman I would have written this book. Even though it is one-sided–up to the point where the book ends, no man has ever treated her right–she does take responsibility for her own experience and wholeness. Even though the moral of the story might seem like it is “women can’t trust men” I took it to be “woman know yourself and your value”. And as a Black man raised almost primarily by Black women, her book gave me a lot of perspective of what was happening around me as a child. Being raised by women, I never questioned that they have as much authority in this world as anyone else. Women were the primary authority figures in my life until I was adult. That’s why it surprised me when I entered into romantic relationships and had women either accusing me of chauvinism or devaluing their own thoughts so much that they would acquiesce to me and then live in silent resentment. But the worse disappointment was when women would disrespect me for respecting them and then seek out another relationship where they could find someone to disrespect them the way they were used to. If anything ever broke my heart, it was watching so many women devalue themselves because of their childhood like Vanzant spoke about and then expect their partners to make it up to them like Hendrix talked about. It’s a bad recipe for a lasting relationship. Believe me, I know.

to be continued….