Okay, how do you build a stash? You go to the bank, open up an account in your name only (an account only you know about), and you proceed to put money in there. The money should be the money you put in after your bills are paid with the household and after your kids are taken care of. That little money you would use for the new pair of Jimmy Choo shoes or tax-free shopping day over at H & M, where you might blow three hundred to five hundred dollars, put that money away for you. That’s your “fuck-you!” fund. I’m big on fuck-you money. It’s the first step to building your foundation. And I suggest you start doing this as early as possible. And it’s never too late to start building a foundation.
A woman with a foundation is never scared to leave. She might be a little nervous, but she executes and she does it because that’s what she has to do. Some women get the idea that they have to be with a man—as in the case of this eighteen-year-old, who is talking about some man at work who is saying the “right things” and making her feel good. Pu-lease! The thing that is luring her from her relationship is the man at her job telling her what she wants to hear—not the man whipping her ass at home. That man at her job doesn’t really want her! No disrespect, but nobody wants an eighteen-year-old girl with a baby and a crazy baby’s daddy. Right?
This girl’s got nothing to offer anybody. This girl’s so worried about the men that she can’t even concentrate on her own well-being. And her own well-being is the key to being a good mother to her child. She needs to leave all of the men alone.
And this physical abuse happens all too often with these young girls, because men prey on them. And the girls get it in their heads that they are fat and dumb and ugly. Older men love this. But if she has a foundation, he can’t step to her and exploit that.
By the way, a foundation is more than money, it is also about self-esteem, the way you feel about yourself.
My advice to this poor girl is to go home to your mother, and tell your mother this story. If your mother isn’t around, tell your grandmother or an aunt or a godmother—tell some wise woman in your life who cares about you. Tell her the very same story you told me and see what she says. Do not go to your eighteen-year-old girlfriend, because she has little to offer in the way of advice. That’s the blind leading the blind. And if she’s not chasing men and having babies like you, then she really has nothing in common with you to share and probably does not want to be bothered with your mess.
Talk to a wise family member and purge and get some help for yourself. And more importantly, leave these men alone. Concentrate on building yourself up. There is a reason why the flight attendant on an airplane instructs you in case of an emergency to put the oxygen mask on your face first and then place the mask on your child. They don’t tell you to mask the child, then mask yourself, because a child needs its mother and a child needs its mother sane and whole and prepared.
It’s not too late for this young girl, but she’s got to get it together now.
Don’t let any man hit you and if you’re one of those provoking girls, you need to stop! A lot of women say the worst stuff to their men and wonder why when he hauls off and hits them. You cannot beat a man down with words and turn around and be shocked that he has smacked the hell out of you.
It’s tough enough being a black man these days. And shout out to all the black men! This is not me sticking up for you all, but in this particular case I am. Being married to a black man I see how tough it is out here in society. If you work on Wall Street you are still a nigga. If you sell dope on the corner you’re still a nigga. Society doesn’t know how to separate you all. You get stopped while you’re driving for being black. You get looked at as criminals as white women clutch their purses when you walk by. It’s tough. I’m not saying that you all need to be handled with kid gloves, but a little extra care and a little extra sensitivity is in order.
That’s why in my opinion nobody handles a black man like a black woman. But that’s another book for another time.
WENDY:
I need some advice. I’m a thirty-two-year-old white Latina, very independent and self-sufficient. And I have two kids. I’ve been talking to/seeing a premier NFL football player where I live. Over the past two years we have crossed paths at the grocery store and in the neighborhood. We started talking in September and spent two months talking before going out on our first date. Since our first date we have talked every day and seen each other a couple of times a week. We have been going to the movies, to dinner, he comes to my house, I go to his house.
His team has since lost the play-offs and now it is off-season. He has multiple houses in different parts of the United States and only occasionally comes back where we live during the off-season. I think we’ve built a legitimate friendship and there is a definite interest on both of our parts, but there hasn’t been enough time spent to establish anything solid.
As of late, though, I have been showing more interest in the situation than he seems to be. And he seems to be backing off a little. I’m not good at the whole dating process and I don’t want to mess things up at this point, but I already may have. I think his initial attraction to me was that I didn’t pay too much attention to him. But things have progressed and I’m not that hard-to-get person anymore.
My question is, since over the past couple of weeks I have been more available and I jumped when he’s called, is it too late to back up and gain his interest to where it was?
—JASMINE
PS: My sons’ father is an athlete, but we fell in love after three weeks and were together eight years. So even though I’ve seen the game with athletes and I know all about the groupies with the jump-off situation and how it goes down, I do think there was more, but I don’t want to be naïve. Any advice is welcome. Thanks.
JASMINE:
I don’t think that it’s too late for you to back off and play that hard-to-get role again. I don’t think it’s too late. But you must be realistic: You are thirty-two with two kids. And unfortunately, the chances of an NFL player really digging the scene—and I’m talking about love, marriage, and the baby carriage—with a thirty-two-year-old woman with two kids are slim to none. I’ll be honest—and, remember, I’m not professional, I just answer these questions based on my particular experience and my observation—an NFL football player, if he has his pick of all kinds of women all over the place, is going to go for the twenty-five-year-old with no children, with a more flexible schedule who is able to travel with him. Because if it is love and marriage and baby carriage, she can just pick up and go. You’ve got two kids and you’re thirty-two.
You can back up and play aloof and play hard-to-get and see what happens. I don’t think it looks good. I think he has put the writing on the wall, and you just don’t seem to see it. You’re his in-town jump-off. But you never know.
I know the draw of athletes, rappers, and movie stars, but they are such dogs. And it’s bad enough that men are doggish to begin with, that we all have to worry about our men cheating and we all have to worry about the lure of other women. But a star athlete, rapper, or actor? I couldn’t deal with it at all. That’s an interesting world to dabble in, and when you’re eighty years old you’ll have great stories to tell, but the heartache that accompanies situations like this is crazy.
I get a few letters from women who are dealing with or have dealt with athletes or rappers and actors. And they all have the same story. I mean, by the time somebody is asking me for advice they really don’t have anyone else to ask. You know how pissed off the rappers get when they find out that their baby’s mother is talking to me? What?! Do you know how bad it must be for a rapper’s baby’s mother to even come and want to talk to me as opposed to one of her girlfriends?
But you see, once they hook up with one of those stars, either their girlfriend is sleeping with him, too, or their girlfriend is hating on them hard. So at the end of the day, they really have no one to talk to. So they talk to me. And by then they are in too deep— they are a couple of kids in deep when they
discover he’s secretly married or has given them herpes or also likes to sleep with men. It’s crazy.
I got a letter from a girl one day, a twenty-year-old, who was telling me she spent one week in a luxurious Manhattan hotel room with a rapper. She tried coke for the first time, she tried E (Ecstasy) for the first time. And during this glorious week, this rapper gave her herpes.
This letter was a real heartbreaker for me, because I had been hearing whispers about this same rapper that was becoming loud talk that he was infected with HIV. So if this young lady got herpes from unprotected sex, what else had he given her that she may not find out about for a while?
This rapper has been looking sick. The last time I saw him he didn’t look well—he had lost a lot of weight and his skin was sallow. But he was blaming it on other issues.
This particular rapper’s modus operandi is well known—he loves young girls around seventeen and eighteen years old. He gets them high on E pills, weed, coke, and champagne. And by the time he gets their clothes off he knows no one is looking for sores or asking questions.
This girl writing me about herpes with this same rapper, what am I supposed to do with the other info that I have that he has HIV?
It’s terrible watching him rap himself into a grave while slaying young girls all the way. To kill himself is one thing, but to take others with him is criminal. And he targets young girls because they lack experience and the confidence to speak up for themselves. They are more willing to do whatever. But, ladies, please be mindful that all that glitters ain’t gold. Some of these rappers and athletes and actors may have more than just their star status to offer you. If they don’t break your heart, some of them can kill you—literally.
And if you’re a parent of a girl, you can be working your fingers to the bone every single day for your child—sending her to private school, saving to buy her a little car for her seventeenth birthday. You can give her diamond studs on her eighteenth birthday and even pay for the full ride to college. And still you can lose your little girl to the lure of some damn rapper.
And for that girl, it isn’t the material things that are the lure, it’s the bragging rights, it’s the special feeling she gets. Do you know what it’s like when a man who can have anybody, any girl, looks at you? I do. It’s special. At the end of the day you’re thinking, “Out of all of the girls in the world, he wants me!” That is special. You could be gorgeous and know it, but to have it confirmed by a platinum artist who is number one on the charts, do you know what that is like? That is sheer heaven even if it’s only for one night. “He wanted me, I must be hot!”
But consider this: Not how many rappers have herpes or other diseases, but how few don’t. Doctors’ offices are not private. I get faxes, letters, and actual medical records from doctors all the time. It’s disgusting.
I see the groupie thing so much that it has stopped me from wanting the few girlfriends that I have to come out with me when I have to do appearances or when I have extra passes for a party. It’s disgusting to me because I consider my girlfriends to be smart women with graduate degrees and good family backgrounds. But put them in the room with a dirty rapper, what?! They love it. Even they turn into chicken heads.
I had one friend who was messing with a rapper. It was just about the sex, but she thought it could be more. As a matter of fact, I had two girlfriends who messed around with rappers, and they both thought it could be more, because the rappers live such hard lives and deal with nothing but chicken heads. Both of my friends thought they would be different—a breath of fresh air from the chicken heads—a cut above the rest. Guess what? They got treated just like the so-called chicken heads—graduate degrees, good-paying jobs, solid family background, and all. They were nothing special to a man who could have anyone.
To women who think they can settle a rapper, I wish you luck! I’m not going to deter you, because I hate blanket statements. Unless you were down with the man from the time he was broke, the way Cookie was down with Magic from the beginning, you have only a slim shot at bagging one of these men for good.
If you meet him when he’s on top, he’s looking at you like you’re a groupie. We don’t care to see it that way, but it is what it is. And if you don’t believe me, go ahead and try it. Maybe you are different. Too often it ends up that he has women in every state and will end up having children outside of your relationship.
And if you’re looking for security and he’s a rapper, beware. What looks good with the money today is bad the next day. He won’t have the money for the child support once he’s no longer at the top of the charts. It would end up being a disaster.
Again, that’s why I believe women must concentrate on laying their foundation. With a good foundation you can weather a storm. You can weather any storm.
DEAR WENDY,
I have a problem that needs to be addressed. During the past few months my six-year-old son, who is in the first grade, came home and told my husband and me that his teacher said that there was no such thing as Santa Claus. This raised a red flag for us, but we didn’t care too much because we are not big advocates of Santa Claus anyway.
Then recently, my son lost his two front teeth and even though we were not Tooth Fairy freaks, we put a five-dollar bill under his pillow. Well, imagine my surprise when my son came home saying that his teach told him there is no such thing as the Tooth Fairy and that we were the ones who put the money under the pillow.
But this is not the worst of it. Yesterday, my best friend and I caught the end of the Martin Luther King documentary on PBS. Since I know my son was studying Martin Luther King with the pending holiday, I called him into my bedroom to see the end of the program. Afterward he turned to me and said, “Mommy, you know, Mr. Johnson said that white people killed Martin Luther King.” I turned to him and said, “What does a white person look like?” He said, “Like you, Mommy. You’re white.”
Wendy, I am not white. I’m Cuban and Puerto Rican with green eyes and very light skin and my husband is black. Can you imagine the shit this teacher is feeding him? I need to know what to say to this teacher and to my son. I feel as if this teacher has done a lot of damage to my son and that I have to be very delicate in undoing it. I need to know how to approach this from both angles.
I know you can help me, Wendy. I listen to you every day and I know you will have an intelligent solution to my problem.
APPALLED AND CONFUSED IN BROOKLYN
WENDY’S ADVICE:
This is a woman who shares my sentiments regarding Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. I believe you should go along with it and tell your kids the truth sooner or later. But the parents should be the one doing the explaining—not some teacher!
This teacher was way out of bounds. I would have jumped on my broom and flown into that classroom and ripped that teacher a new behind hole. Then I would have gone to the principal and let the principal know that it is unacceptable for the teacher to say the things this teacher said.
Then I would be sure that I was at the next parent-teacher conference or open house, because you know there are other parents there and I would need to find out if this teacher is a killjoy for their children as well.
It is not a teacher’s responsibility to kill a child’s joy, nor is it the teacher’s responsibility to drive home mythical people like Santa and the Tooth Fairy. I don’t want them telling my child that there is a Santa or Tooth Fairy either.
I am more concerned about the Martin Luther King matter. Santa and Tooth Fairy are easily explained. I told my son that the Tooth Fairy lived a long time ago and this is what she used to do and we continue the tradition, and Santa Claus lived a long time ago and he spread joy to those less fortunate so we celebrate Santa every December 25.
In terms of Martin Luther King and Mr. Johnson (that’s a black name, but is this a black man or a white man?), the best thing that I can suggest is that you get as much material as you can regarding Martin Luther King, including videos and things that a six-year-old can
understand, and explain the nonviolence that Dr. King believed in. I would show him why he is able to go to school with black kids and white kids.
I think your son will be fine. Mr. Johnson needs a beat-down but Dr. King said no violence, so don’t let your son find out about that beat-down.
DEAR WENDY,
I know you’re a busy woman, so I’ll speak quickly. Wendy, I’m pregnant and I want to know how I can go about professionally telling my employer that I’m pregnant and how long should I wait to do so? Should I wait until I’m three or four months pregnant or should I wait until I begin to show? How did you inform your boss about your pregnancy? This is my first pregnancy, so I dreadfully need your guidance.
Signed, PREGNANT AND SCARED
WENDY’S ADVICE:
Well, I see that this fax is coming from Washington Mutual, so this person is working at a bank or lending institution—not an industry, like entertainment, where your waistline matters.
I would inform your boss at three and a half months. Doctors always suggest waiting that three-month period because that way you find out if you’re having problems with the pregnancy. If you have to take time off work and so on, you will know then. And God forbid if something happens, you don’t want to tell everyone earlier and then have to go around and explain things to everyone. Wait until you are officially out of the woods to spread the news.
Do you know what you intend to do once you have the baby? Do you know how much time you’re going to take off of work? Will you even be returning to work? What are the stipulations for maternity leave at your job, and how long have you been at the job?
All of these things need to be taken into account, and I know nothing because you haven’t included it. But the newer you are at your job, the more nervous you should be as to whether your job will be there when you get off of maternity leave. If you’re in entertainment, you really have to plan your pregnancy. You have to plan right after your platinum album has hit the top of the charts. Then you can lay low for nine months and chill and take another three months off, then go into the studio and work on the next album.
The Wendy Williams Experience Page 21
