I am happy that you are studying with the brothers. However, being a Muslim, a Christian, or anything else means absolutely nothing if it does not help you find a better way to live. If your chosen faith does not open your mind to the great possibilities of life, it means absolutely nothing. I know that while you are in prison, reading helps you to pass the time. The issue is how is it going to help you when you get out, if you are still thinking the same way, feeling the same way, acting the same way? You do not need God or Allah to keep you where you are. You want the Creative Force of the Higher Consciousness to move you to a new place in your mind and heart.
I was quite shocked to read in your letter, “a divorce would crush me,” and “I want for my daughter what I did not have—two parents.” The fact of the matter is, you are already divorced. You do not live with your wife. You do not support your wife. You have broken your marriage vows by being unfaithful and not fulfilling your responsibilities as a husband “to love, honor, and obey.” The fact that your wife uses your name, if she does, and the fact that you exchanged vows do not mean a thing. Where is the honor? You have not honored her. She does not honor you “in sickness and in health.” Right now, you are in a state of sickness. Where is your wife? “For richer, for poorer.” Aren’t you poor in spirit and finances right now? Where is your wife? And where were you when she needed you? You cannot correct a wrong, Damon. You can learn a lesson, ask for forgiveness, and move on. You cannot build for your daughter what you did not have, because that may not be what she needs. You can give her what you do have, with the best intentions and unconditional love. It will be up to her to accept or reject what you give her.
The truth of the matter is that you have always had two parents. I have always been your mother. Gary has always been your father. You have always known where I was. You have always known who and where Gary was. We may not have lived together, but you have always had a father. You also had Grandpa. You had John. You had Eddie. You had Adeyemi. None of them was your biological father, but they were there for you when your biological father was not. You must accept your blessings, however they come. You have always had a man in your life. John, however badly he treated me, never let you children be without everything you needed. You had a home. You had food. God knows you had clothes. While you were growing up, there was nothing you needed that you did not have. It was not until you were sixteen that things got bad for us. Think about it. What did you ever do without? You were eating shrimp for lunch when you were five years old. There was always a man to play with you, nurture you, and support you. There was a male presence there for you at the worst of times. Each of these men treated you the same way they treated their own children; in some cases, you were treated better. It is unfortunate that when they left me, they also left you. I always asked them to speak to you. They chose not to.
If you are saying that you wanted your father in the house, that is a different issue. Knowing the kind of person your father is, tell me what difference would it have made for him to be in the house? He has proven himself to be irresponsible, emotionally unavailable, selfish, and undependable. These are things you have discovered about him. You said, “He is and always has been out for himself.” Is that the kind of father you wanted present? Is that the kind of man you would want me to live with? Knowing what you know about him, would you have wanted me to go through life with your father? Think about it. When you love someone, you want them to be happy, even when their happiness means you must make a sacrifice.
Your father separated himself from me when I was three months pregnant with you. He demonstrated that he did not respect me as a woman, nor as the mother of his son. He is not to blame or at fault. The truth is, Damon, I did not respect myself. I did not know who I was or what I had come into this life to do. I was a sick, frightened young girl, with no guidance. I was looking for love in the bed. I was using my vagina instead of my head. There is no reason I should have had sex with anyone when I was sixteen years old. Your father and I did not have a relationship. We were not even boyfriend and girlfriend. I was looking for a daddy. He had a hard-on. It is really that simple. Why you chose, in your spirit, to come through our bodies is part of God’s plan for you. If you want to know why, ask God. I realize it is not easy to accept certain things about your mother, but you must remember I have not always been your mother. I came into this life with my own issues, challenges, and obstacles to overcome. When you came into my life, I was knee deep in a pile of crap. Unfortunately, you had to walk through it with me. God knew that it would someday pay off for both of us.
Things happen in our lives so that we can learn from them. The reason I have had so many relationships that have not worked is because I have always tried to build for you what I did not have: a family. It did not work because you have to do what you do because you want to do it, not because you are trying to make up for something else. My lesson in life was to live with what was given to me, see the good in it, and strive to do better. I spent most of my life trying to find the father I did not have growing up. I did not realize it at the time, and I have only recently learned my lesson. Now you must learn yours.
Old eyes can see much better than young eyes. As parents, we often see what our children are doing and want something better for them. Unfortunately, we do not always know how to say what we see, so we say the wrong thing. I have told you from the very beginning, your relationship with your wife was not built on a stable foundation. It always appeared that she was using you to escape the unstable relationship she had with her mother. Perhaps what I should have said was, “Damon, I know our family life has not been what you wanted or needed: however, you can make your own life what you want it to be. If you want the best, you do not have to settle for less than the best.” In your eyes, your wife was/is the best for you, but what are you comparing her to? The environments to which you have been exposed have not been the best. The people you have known have not been the best. How can you evaluate what is good and what is bad if you have only experienced mediocre?
I see what you are doing and have done, because my eyes are sixteen years older than yours are. I am not saying that things will not work out for you and your wife. That, I do not know. What I am saying is that, at twenty-three years old, your eyes are still closed. When you have spent more than seventeen of those years in my house, looking at life through my eyes, and another almost three years in and out of prison, how many years have you really used your own eyes? And when you did use your eyes, what did you see? Quick ways to make money and break the law. Ways to make yourself feel important in violation of man’s law and God’s law. You are still blind as to what life is really all about. The Bible says, “Eyes have not seen and ears have not heard what God has in store for those who love Him.” You are still blind as to who you are and what God has in store for you.
If you think God made you to be “crushed” by a mere human woman who comes from the same God you do, you cannot know God. How do you know why God brought you into this woman’s life? Maybe you came to save her, to help her, to teach her a lesson. Now you want things to go the way you think they should go, not the way God planned. In the past, you were very good to your wife and her mother. Perhaps you were the tool God was using to help them out. When God’s plan is fulfilled, you must move on to the next phase of the plan.
If you believe God brought your daughter onto this earth for you to take care of, you are not only blind, you are dumb. Kahlil Gibran wrote a book entitled The Prophet. In that book he wrote, “Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of life searching for their own. They come through you but they are not from you. Although they are with you, they belong not to you.” God has a divine plan for us all. Our job is to tap into the energy of God and bring ourselves into alignment with that plan. Sometimes things do not go the way we plan or the way we think they should go. That does not mean we are wrong or that God is wrong. It simply means we have to dig a little deeper, search a little harder to fi
nd the meaning, the lesson.
There are many things I wish I could have done for you and your sisters that I did not do. That is because I had my own blindness and sickness to heal. That does not mean I was wrong or bad. It simply means I had to work to get my eyes open. That did not happen for me until I stopped the drama of looking for a daddy, trying to please Daddy and make him proud of me. In all the time I spent doing that, I was trying to be who and what I was not. Not so long ago, I stopped the drama and said, Okay, God, what am I supposed to be doing? At that point, my life totally fell apart.
You see, Damon, whatever is going on in your life comes from inside you. Even my telephone being disconnected is an internal issue. All the negative thoughts and emotional crap must be cleaned out before God can build a foundation inside us. When the crap starts surfacing, it looks like trouble, it looks like things are going bad, and it looks like we are doing the wrong thing. Nothing could be further from the truth. The truth is, when we go to God, He must tear us down in order to build us up. God cannot build upon our distorted ideas, foolish beliefs, miseducation, and misinformation. All of that must come out as conditions we live through so that we can see what we have been thinking. When things go bad in our lives, we try to fix them because we don’t realize God is fixing us. Until we see the bad stuff, we cannot make up our minds not to do the things that brought us to that point in the first place.
I am almost forty years old, and I am just beginning to understand who I am and what God wants me to do. There are times when I doubt. That is when I pray. There are times when I am afraid. That is when I remember, “Fear not, for I am with you.” There are times when I want to throw my hands up, go get a real job, working for somebody else from nine to five, and say, “Forget this crap!” Then I remember, “For everything, there is a season. A time to laugh and a time to cry.” I have been crying for almost forty years. It is time for me to laugh. In order to laugh, I know I must work through the crap, live through the bad, and have my eyes opened wide to the miracle of life called ME.
Right now, I want nothing more than a family, a home, and a man to love me and work with me, to build with me, and share life with me. I do not want to raise any more children. I do not want to suffer. I do not want to be broke. I want to live my life to the fullest every day, enjoying every moment. I know that is about to happen. I also know, in the divine time and the divine way, it will happen. I am no longer willing to accept less than the best. I still make mistakes, but now, when I do, my eyes are open enough for me to say, Okay, that is a mistake, I cannot do that again. I catch myself in the process and change what I am doing.
You have always wanted to have your way. You have always wanted things to go the way you want them to go. When you get an idea in your head, you will not let it go. I remember how you would always say, “If it kills me, I will …” If you do not open your eyes soon, this thing with your wife and mother-in-law will kill you. It will kill your spirit. It will kill your mind. I know you have prayed and asked God to show you. Well, I think He is showing you, but your eyes are closed. Your wife does not write, she does not send you money, her hair is more important than your coat. She makes absolutely no attempt to mend or heal your relationship. You continue to hold on and insist. Could it be that God is showing you who your wife really is? Could it be that you need to use your mother-in-law to excuse your wife for what she is doing? She married you without her mother’s permission and against my advice. She knew you were selling drugs and stealing cars before her mother knew it. She knew that the two of you were not prepared and could not afford to have a baby. When she wanted you, she did exactly what her mother told her not to do. Now she is showing you she does not want you, and you want to blame her mother. Why? Because your eyes and ears are still closed. You are still blind, and you are making yourself dumb.
After all that has happened between you and me, I am still here for you, doing what I can for you. That is my choice. I could have said to hell with you a long time ago. I did not, because I am your mother, in good times and in bad, for richer or poorer. Parenting, like marriage, is “until death do us part.” That is what it takes in a relationship. You must take the good and the bad, do what you can, and pray for better. God is trying to tell you something, Damon. I think it would be wise for you to listen. I know it is not easy. I know you think you are right and your current situation is not fair. I know you wish it were another way. Maybe one day it will be different. If God has it in the plan for you, it will be different. If you want so badly to be with the wrong person, imagine how wonderful it will be when the right person comes along. For right now, take your blinders off! Get off your knees! Praying is not a nine-to-five job. Prayer must begin in your heart. Pray for yourself and then for your wife. Remember that what you let go will come back to you if it is yours. Also remember that God never closes one door without opening another.
When I was pregnant with you, a very dear friend of mine offered to help me get an abortion. This was in 1970, when abortions were still illegal. I thought about it for a very long time before I decided that was not what I wanted to do. Something inside of me knew I would make it, no matter what, and you would make it. When I looked in your little face, I knew I had made the right decision. You were a beautiful baby. You were never any trouble. You grew into a beautiful child who was not difficult to love or take care of. You are now a beautiful man. You are strong. You are healthy. You are a master! I was once ashamed to say, “My son is in jail.” I would lie about it and tell people you were away with your wife, who is in the navy. Now I want the world to know, because I know you are healing. As you heal, a part of me heals. When I think about it, I was in the prison of needing to be loved for most of my life. Now I know I am loved and that God loves me. I also know God loves you, Damon, even when your wife isn’t sure she does.
There are many types of jails. Some people are in the jails of their limited minds. Many people are in the jail of drinking alcohol, taking drugs, working on a job they hate, or living in bad relationships. We are all doing some kind of time. The only difference is that some of us have keys to our cells and others do not. Nobody but you can imprison your mind. Nobody can imprison your spirit. My son was born of the Master, and nobody who makes a deal with the Master can lose!
I love you.
I support you.
I pray for your highest and your best.
I am Iyanla, your Great Mother.
Speaking engagements were coming in, I was still seeing a few clients, I had financial support from the ministry, but I still had money woes. Gemmia decided that she didn’t like college and wanted to come home and work. That was a big help. I talked to Balé about the conflict I was having about doing spiritual work and getting paid for it. He told me to start thinking about what I was doing as a business and to charge accordingly. He wasn’t speaking about the consultations; he was referring to speaking and writing. I would speak for fifty or a hundred dollars. I would speak for free if I were asked. Balé reminded me that I was a lawyer and a priest and had a right to charge people for my training and my skills. He asked me one of those questions that cause my brain to fry: “How much do you think you are worth? How much is an hour of your time worth?”
“I don’t know. What do you mean?”
“I mean that people are going to treat you according to the value you place on yourself. If you come cheap, they will treat you cheap.”
“But Balé, how can I say I am doing spiritual work and charge people lots of money for it?”
“Gravediggers do spiritual work. They create the space that houses the body that the spirit lives in, and they make a lot of money for an hour’s worth of work. If you do not see the business aspect of this, you are never going to reach the place you are trying to get to.” It was time to go back to the list.
What do you want to do? I want to earn a living speaking and writing. What is your greatest strength? Oral communication. What is your greatestweakness? Not having the money I need to t
ake care of my family. What is your greatest fear? If I ask people for what I want, they will say no and they will not like me.
I knew I was onto something, and I wanted to do the right thing. I especially wanted to do the right thing for my children. I was bringing a spiritual message to a community that desperately needed to hear it, and I wanted to do it the right way. I thought if I could save the world, then my children would forget what a rotten mother I had been. I was obsessed with the work, I was obsessed with trying to correct my mistakes, and I was obsessed with doing it all the right way. The truth is, I was obsessed by the need to please everybody in the process of doing the right thing. I was losing myself, losing my dreams, and I kept losing my home.
In my mind, the right thing to do was to make sure that I saved the people, all of the people, and I didn’t feel like I had a right to be paid for it. I was trying my best to live up to my name, believing that God would provide for me. At that point, I still had a very intellectual understanding of my name, what I was doing, parenting, and God.
Most of my serious messages came to me in dreams. Had I known this particular dream was coming, I would have given up sleeping forever. I saw myself standing in a room, and there were babies all around me. All of the babies were crying. I was trying to pick them up. I was trying to feed them. I was trying everything I knew to stop them from crying. I started calling for help. When I looked up, Nisa was standing in front of me. She was pregnant.
Yesterday, I Cried Page 28
