How Are You Doing It?

I stand close to the face in the mirror asking her what it is to be me. Most times I forget how she looks: her naturally kinky locs, her rounded face and waning-moon eyes, her full lips and rich skin. “How are you doing it?” I hear myself ask through her mouth. “The same way that cream has always risen to the top,” we say in agreement. I usually get conversations like this in as early as my body will allow–before the sippy cups and pick-me ups, before the writers block, public transportation, and outreach programming. And just as the last affirmation escapes from my mouth, I’m right back at it. Sometimes I don’t get to see the work that I’ve put in until I watch from other people’s point of view.

Raising my son, going to college, running an outreach, and paying the bills: people ask me all the time ‘How are you doing it?’ Usually I have no reply. It’s not like I’m building pyramids or freeing droves of slaves; I’m just a twenty-year-old black woman trying to build a strong family. But, in this day, building family is no small feat.

Sometimes it feels like it should be my only feat. I am often tied between spending hours in a classroom or with my son. I question why the thousands of dollars that I handed over toward building this institution wasn’t used to build my own. In the confines of these intimate conversations, I realize that many of my choices were a result of mis-education–something that we have to work at reconditioning daily. The truth is, before I even knew why I wanted to go to college, or what I wanted to study, I had already signed over a huge loan and a major portion of my future. Soon afterwards, I was lying in a hospital bed, legs hiked on stirrups. Only then did I begin to question exactly what my purpose was in school (and on earth).

The way I saw it, I could have become the teenage mother that the media promotes–an illiterate black girl sitting on a step, begging for welfare–or I could quietly meditate on my purpose and then execute it accordingly. Really it’s just that simple. The quieting of my mind has all the answers. How do you get off welfare, Jeannine? Grind. Make and sell products–everywhere that you go. Why go to school, Jeannine? Manipulate the resources that are at your disposal, use them to make more things to sell. What is a strong black family, Jeannine?

A self-perpetuated system that produces economically, physically, and spiritually. Once I seriously asked for guidance, there she was standing at every crossroad. My goal was–and continues to be–building a strong black family. After this understanding, boot camp began. When I say boot camp, I mean the discipline to wake up and meditate, the discipline to control my diet, the discipline to teach discipline to my son, etc. From self-discipline came all the benefits of being a part of a strong family: support in all my endeavors, responsibility for the future, and a strong work ethic.

Though my tribe is by no means where we aspire to be, we do have a plan that we work at together. Essentially that is how I do it: by keeping our overall goal in the forefront of my mind. All the small goals–-like running my own publication or a media and communication classroom–-are secondary to being an example. Believe it or not, the at-home lessons that I learn from having a child, rebuilding my house, and raising a garden cross over into every realm of my being. Essentially life has been teaching me to pay attention to each one of its steps toward a solid foundation for my son. Along the way I keep in mind my greatest responsibility, what great historian and griot, John Henrik Clark said, “Remember that the family is the soul, spirit, and cornerstone of the nation. If the family dies, so does the nation.”