Page 2 of Turned Out by His Hood Mentality 1

Back to my childhood. Growing up, I was the chocolate girl. I was called everything from weird to even funny looking because of my dark skin and gray eyes. The crazy thing is, I didn’t even go to a predominantly white school. I’ve always attended black schools, but no matter where I went, as a dark-skinned girl, I was always picked at. It was mainly the boys who would pick on me and call me names like black attack, blackey, oh, and let me not forget their favorite one, which was charcoal.

In elementary school, I used to come home to my parents every day, crying to them about the names that I was called in school. While my mom would be ready to go to the school and cause a scene, my father would always tell me to ignore it because, in his exact words, “They’ll be asking you for a job in a few years.”

My father always had high hopes for me, hopes so high that he couldn’t even come out to the school and say something to the principal, so the kids could leave me alone. It built character in me, though. It made me less sensitive, so I guess it was a good thing that I’d gone through that terrible experience.

When I was a little girl, people from my school weren’t able to appreciate this type of beauty yet… this type of black girl magic, this melanin. Then again, even I wasn’t able to appreciate this type of beauty because, for the longest, I swore that I was ugly. I don’t know why as little girls, we often connected dark skin with being ugly. I don’t understand why we do it, but a lot of us go through that stage where we use the words, dark skin, and ugly interchangeably, and that should never be okay to do.

Why is it that to us, people with fairer skin are the ones we think are beautiful? I blame society for this absurd concept of beauty. Not only did I get picked on because of my dark skin, but people also bullied me because of my size. I’ve always been little. I was in the fifth grade, and third graders were taller than me. I wasn’t a midget, but I was indeed shorter than a lot of people. I took my height from my mother because she was short. My sister took after our father and got his long legs, so she ultimately was taller in stature, which I used to be soooo jealous about. Back then, I would risk it all to have my sister’s tall, slender frame.

As I grew older, I learned to accept every imperfection that the Lord had blessed me with. My mom used to tell me that while I may have lacked height, I made up for it with my brain.

By the time I hit middle school, and all the girls were hitting puberty, I was still walking around, looking like a little boy with no ‘chest,’ hair on my legs, none of it. I didn’t get my period until I turned fifteen, while a lot of the girls started getting it as young as twelve years old at my school. In high school, I was ninety pounds for the longest.

Not only was I bullied about my skin and my size, but I forgot to mention that I was also the daughter of not one, but two pastors. I never understood why that was considered to be such a bad thing. I mean, people would literally sit up in class and make jokes because my parents had their own church, and I was their daughter. PK is another nickname that I was called, which was short for Preacher’s kid. I think it had a lot to do with the fact that I wasn’t allowed to do a lot of the things that my peers were able to do.

From elementary through high school, I attended public schools. Both me and my older sister, Naomi, did. One thing about my parents, although they were pastors, their church was located right in the middle of the hood, so they never tried to keep my sister and me away from certain things. Although we didn’t live anywhere near the hood growing up, that didn’t mean we didn

’t get our education from there as well.

Both of my parents grew up in the hood, Overtown, to be exact. My father’s father was a pastor, so my dad had pretty much been in the projects his entire life. The thing is, my grandfather didn’t have his own church at the time. He would literally set up right in the middle of the projects, and everyone who lived in those particular projects would come out to hear him preach the word. Local gang members, drug dealers, prostitutes, kids, parents, you name it. No, I wasn’t there to witness these priceless moments, but I was told this story thousands of times by my father. It was another one of the examples that he would give to me when I sounded like I was giving up.

“If your grandfather can preach in the middle of the projects without even having a church, then why are you making up excuses again?” was something he loved to throw in my face.

I went through the pits of hell, trying to finish medical school. Daily, I was mentally tested. At one point, I really felt like giving up because it was getting so hard, but my father constantly rode me, leaving me no room to drop out of medical school. So, yeah, after years and years of my grandfather preaching in the projects, what he was doing had gotten out to the right people, and they gave him the money to open his own church. It later became one of the biggest, most talked about churches in Miami.

My grandfather died when I was two years old, and his church was one of the many things that he’d left for my father. My grandfather didn’t have a wife. My father’s mother passed away when my dad was two, after fighting breast cancer for three years. That same church that my granddaddy worked so hard to get was the church that my parents now preached at. Every Sunday, if you don’t get there on time, you will find yourself either standing up or sitting on the floor because it got crowded each Sunday like it was Easter.

I grew up having basically everything I wanted. My parents weren’t filthy rich, but I can’t remember ever wanting something and them not being able to get it for me. We grew up in a four-bedroom, two story home. There was a lake in the back, which provided beautiful scenery, and my mother had staff that would come and clean the house twice a month, but that was it. We didn’t live some crazy, luxurious lifestyle, and anything that was given to us, we earned it. Good grades, doing our chores, and helping out around the church were all things that afforded us the privilege of having something nice.

We had a white picket fence, and Yo-Yo, our Yorkie puppy. For breakfast and dinner, we would sit at the dining room table together, and each time, we would take turns on who would be in charge of saying the prayer. That was our lifestyle. It was what I was accustomed to, and I honestly wouldn’t change anything about it because I loved how family oriented we were. I mean, we are still very family oriented. Sunday dinners in our family were mandatory. After church every Sunday, we meet up at my parents’ house to have dinner as a family.

After home and school, the church was my third home. I probably went to church at least four times a week as a kid. Oh, and I could forget about staying home because I wasn’t feeling well because my parents didn’t play that. I remember when Naomi turned fourteen, and she started her period. My sister was four years older than me, so I didn’t even know what a period was at the time. I just remember her going on and on to our parents, saying that her stomach was cramping very badly and asking if she could skip going to church, but of course, they wouldn’t allow her to. That’s just how they were. They never allowed us to sit anything out, to give up on something, or to not give everything that we did our best.

I hate to use the Lord’s name in vain, but God, my parents rode us. They rode us so hard, especially my father. I remember my senior year of high school. I came home the first quarter of the school year with all A’s on my report card and one B. I had always been in advanced classes. In my senior year, not only was I taking AP and IB classes, but I was also doing dual enrollment at a local community college. It allowed me to earn college credits and graduate with my AA degree at the same time I received my high school diploma.

A lot was going on, and the class that I received the B in was AP physics. Mind you, I had the highest grade in the class. No one had ever passed her class with a C or higher, and I told my father that. His response was, “Since when is it okay to try to be like everyone else?” I remember being happy about getting that B, but the second I showed it to my father, he crushed me with his words or rather his lack of words because I expected him to be just as happy as I was. I wasn’t complaining because I needed to get rode like that. I needed to be pushed, because if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have completed half the things that I have achieved in my lifetime.

I was only twenty-six, and I had already completed so much. Not only was I the youngest and the only black doctor working in my office, but when I wasn’t working there, I taught children’s Sunday school and children’s bible study at my parents’ church. I had over ten Christian children’s books online, and they were even sold in major bookstores like Barnes and Noble, Books-A-Million, and a few other places. I was good. I felt like I was at a point in my life where I was set, but with all the success I had, my love life was non-existent.

Men these days were just… different. Maybe I watched too many romance movies, so my standards were probably too high in terms of what I was looking for when it came to a man. Or maybe it could be that a man raised me, and I watched for twenty-six years how my father went out of his way every day to be a perfect husband for my mother. Every Monday, he still sent her flowers to the church office, and mind you, they work right alongside each other. I knew that good husbands like my father existed, and I wasn’t going to accept anything less.

The thing is, what I wanted in a man wasn’t too much to ask. All I wanted was a God-fearing man, someone who wasn’t going to be insecure when it came to my successes because I really didn’t need a man to take care of me. I wanted someone who was my age, or at least three or four years older, and that’s only because I wanted someone who I could learn from. Teach me something that I don’t already know, you know? That isn’t to say I couldn’t learn from someone younger than me, but ultimately, I just wouldn’t want to be the older one in the relationship; I was very firm on that.

I hate to write certain men off, but I also didn’t want a man with children. It’s so crazy because I loveeee children. I love children so much; that’s one of the reasons I decided to become a pediatrician in the first place. Whatever man God had out there waiting for me, I wanted us to share a lot of first times together, and having kids happened to be one of those things. That, and I wanted the marriage to be the first marriage for us both.

I didn’t need to have the most handsome man in the world, and he didn’t have to be insanely rich. As long as he was good enough for me to look at, and as long as he had enough money to somewhat be a provider, I would be okay. If push ever came to shove, I could always take care of myself. Let my father hear me say this, and he’ll probably have a heart attack because he preaches daily how a man should provide, and how I shouldn’t even have to bring my wallet with me if I’m out with a man that I’m dating or even married to. I mean, I get it because my father has always been a provider for our mother and us, but I was okay with pulling out my wallet and helping to pay for things. The cost of living was too expensive to fully rely on just one person.

At twenty-six years old, I was a virgin, and I still wore my purity ring. Here’s the thing; I felt like there were no men around who wanted to hear about me waiting until I was married to have sex. To them, it was childish. I know this for a fact because I have entertained guys in my college days, and I’ve even gone on a few dates after college. Right after I announce that I’m saving myself for marriage, the conversation just goes left. I had one guy get up from the dinner table and call me childish for wanting to wait until marriage to have sex.

Is sex that good that a man can’t wait for it? It’s like, men didn’t want to put in the chase anymore to get a woman. They had to get it now, and I just wasn’t going to be the

type of woman to give in to their needs! Even if I did decide to give it up before marriage, and that’s a stronnnngggg if, because I was steadfast in my beliefs, I promise you that this man has to be almost perfect. I mean, the male version of me, because other than that, I just don’t see it happening. I’ve had some of the most handsome men try to talk to me, but if you can’t respect what I’m about, then God bless you, and let us both go on our way.

I had visuals of what I expected sex to be like. As I mentioned before, during my free time, I liked to watch romance movies, but I often felt like those passion filled moans were fabricated, overacting in a sense. I remember having a conversation with my sister, Naomi, when she’d gotten back from her honeymoon. My inquiring mind wanted to know how the sex was because, just like myself, she had been a virgin before she jumped the broom. In my sister’s words, “It was okay.” If sex was just going to be okay, then I could wait.

The way I like to keep myself busy, half the time, I don’t even remember that I’m a virgin in the first place. People may think it’s embarrassing for me to be this old and hadn’t had sex yet, but I’ll take this kind of embarrassment any day because something as special as sex, I could wait for it.

My patient, Destiny, was under the impression that she was going to get stuck with a needle this afternoon. I knew that was why she was crying. It was why all my little patients cried when they saw me; they knew I was the one who ordered the shots. You would think they would cry when they saw the nurses, since those were the ‘bad guys,’ who actually had to stick them with the needle.

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