What a Fool Belives.......He Sees

One of the things that I admire most about myself is that, I am on a perpetual quest to be better.  I am fool enough to believe that, if I believe success and healing in my future I will see it.  Like many of us, my childhood was a supreme train wreck.  I was born to a teenage single mother.  While she left me in the care of my family to continue to pursue her education, I was molested repeatedly by a male family member.  My mother, didn't know the best way to care for a young child, so there was a lot of neglect.  And when there wasn't neglect there were merciless extension chord beatings that left marks on my legs and back but even deeper than that they left marks on my soul.  I had no clear representation of who I was.  I didn't see the beauty and the intelligence and the sweetness and the talent that I possessed in abundance.  I felt as though my life was lived inside the fun house mirror section of the carnival. 

You all know when you go to a fun house and you go through the mirror section that distorts your reflection?  The reflections in the mirrors can make you real short, real fat, real skinny, real tall or real anything other than what you were.  And that was my life.  There were no clear images of what I really looked like.  My grandmother who raised me in my formative years was an uneducated twice divorced depressed woman.  My grandmother was nursing a broken heart from two alcoholic husbands who beat her.  My mother was looking for love as well.  My father left us.  It devastated her, and she dated.................. as many young women do.  But I felt that the love that I was supposed to receive as her child was lavished on her gentlemen callers.  And anything that I did wrong was met with violence. 

I possessed zero self esteem. 

BUT............what I didn't know is that I was a very pretty little girl.  I was a very smart little girl.  I was a very talented little girl. When I went to school, I was often bullied and teased.  I was very tall and statuesque and I looked older than my age.  This would cause school mates to hate on me. "Who does she think she is?"   What is so ironic about that rhetorical question is that I really and truly didn't know who I was.  I never understood ( and still to this day don't understand) is why anyone ever got the impression that I thought that I was all of that.  I wanted so deeply to be liked and treated as one of the girls.  But chicks ALWAYS wanted to fight me. 

I remember a girl named Robin wanted to beat me up because she had heard that her boyfriend thought that I was cute. I was 12-years-old and she was 15-years-old. When she would see my friends on the street she would tell them to tell me that when she saw me she was going to "whup my ass".  I was petrified.  I was getting enough beatings at home and not knowing why.  Now I had to dodge this chick for two summers.  Thank God she never caught up with me.

I grew up with the belief that something supernatural must be wrong with me for me to have been born into this helpless situation.  I must be a horrible witch of a little girl to make my mother beat me so mercilessly.  I must be a natural born whore to make the men of my family molest me as early as age three. What a fool believes........he sees.

BUT................God knew that I was there in my little corner of 77th & Yates dying a slow agonizing death each and everyday.  And She spoke to me through music.  My mother had a massive record collection.  And I would arrive home everyday to an empty home beginning at age 7.  I would do my homework which would take no more than 45 minutes to an hour.  I would take the other 2 hours to listen to music.  I would learn all the words of all the songs.  I would learn the bass lines to all the songs.  I would listen to the different drum tempos and changes of the songs.  I would learn the different background vocals and of course the lead vocals.  I would make up dances to all of the songs and would perform all my songs before a audience of thousands.  And in that time there was GOD.  I didn't know that it was Her at that time.  But She had left her musical Holy Spirit bread crumbs on my heart for me to follow and find my way back to Her later on in life.  

I went to Holy Angels, a catholic grammar school. The school was BIG on the arts.  I began singing in the Little Angels choir when I was in the second grade.  We had a school wide show every year where we would perform on stage at either the Arie Crown theater or The Auditorium Theater.  And it was this time that I KNEW that there had to be something good in me.  I felt pure love and jubilation when I sang and danced. 

In high school I joined the choir.  In church I joined the choir.  And when a church that I was attending was looking to train a choir director, I knew that this was for me.  You see my God had trained me for years and years and years to have a career in music.  That is what all of those daily music lessons were about.  I thought that I listened to my moms records because I didn't have anything else to do.  But I realized that God was calling me to Her service through that massive alone time I spent with the music.

I was fool enough to believe that I could leave behind all of the pain of my childhood behind when I poured myself into music.  I believed it, and I saw myself having a career in music.  I knew it in my soul.  And to be honest that was the only one thing in life that I REALLY DID KNOW.  I felt so worthless about everything else in my life.............BUT NOT WHEN I SANG.  NOT WHEN I DIRECTED. NOT WHEN I DANCED.  My whole life had to fit into the melodies of the music.  And I believed that...........if I could just surround my whole life with music...........Music would heal me.   And I saw myself beginning to be healed through my love and passion for music.  Music is the only thing in life that I felt loved me back.  And I was fool enough to believe that if music could heal me in all of my turmoil and degradation.........then surely it could heal others.  What a fool believes........he sees.

I have so much more to say about this.  I want to get into the meat and potatoes of why I believe such great and marvelous things even in the midst of the tons of deep rooted negativity that I wade through on a daily basis.  But I had to start at the beginning.........I am realizing that I will have to break this up into about four parts.

Remember that what a fool believes he sees................and that may not always be a bad thing.