You Got Anything Stronger?

by Gabrielle Union

  He played for sixteen years, and had full custody of the kids for nine of them. Here was a father who was interviewed every day—after every single practice and game—and at no point did anyone ever ask him, “How do you manage it all?” Because there was never an expectation that he—or any man—had to. All the balance he needed to bring home was tied to the bank account. As long as he was making money, somebody else was going to do the rest.

  Dwyane could have a small army of staff and caregivers—and me—to make this happen, but there was never once a sense that he had somehow ceded his authority as Dad. He delegated his power, while retaining all of it. I mean, allllll of it. He could show up at any point and no one would question that he had final say on any subject.

  But women? Moms don’t get to “delegate” power without losing something. That is characterized as farming out responsibility and passing on our duties. Prioritizing career over family, and letting someone else raise our kids. The expectation is that I have to work twelve hours a day, go to the kids’ games, be on top of their homework, look good, see to meals, nurture the egos around me, handle a house, laundry, birthday parties, groceries, checkups, and fuck somebody? What? Yes, because if in all that juggling you drop a ball, it’s on you. Whether you lose your job or your husband’s interest, your high schooler gets an F or your kid is the mean one on the playground, the buck stops at the mother, doesn’t it? “Your priorities are off.”

  Here’s the thing. I was aware that I shared the disparities in power and responsibility that a lot of women do, but they didn’t affect my day-to-day. I was a stepmother who consistently traveled for work, coming home for thirty-six hours at a time to do my best to catch up before I had to leave again. I could know the issues existed, but I had the luxury of ignoring them.

  Then two things happened: we had a baby, and six months later, Dwyane retired. Last year, he told me he wanted the whole family to be together more. My job—my full-time-plus-extra job—was going to become the primary focus. The plan was to now give me and my work the same support and shared focus he had in the years he was the sun we all revolved around. This was a massive change in prioritizing needs.

  “It’s you now,” he told me, meaning it. I know he believed that.

  To do that, we had to move our home base from Miami to Los Angeles. For me to travel less, and be home more, I needed to be where most of the business of Hollywood happens. We moved across the country, I found schools for the kids and a house, and we put everything in place. Here we were all in the same space, with the two of us to attack all of the things. Now . . . balance!

  Annnnnd no.

  Dwyane is wonderful, but like most men, he has never not been the central adult in a family dynamic. A power struggle ensued, one that has continued after this one-year experiment.

  “You need a wife,” a girlfriend told me.

  “No, I need help from my husband,” I said.

  Most women’s work, whether it happens outside the home or in, is not seen. And if it’s seen, it is generally unacknowledged. The saying is “never let ’em see you sweat,” but it’s really about keeping all effort invisible. And how can we expect a family to respect work that they do not see? My work is mainly solitary. Whether I am writing or reviewing a script for production or acting, I go off somewhere. If I were to read a script in the living room, it would be purely for performance in the moment—something out of Soapdish. Like Sally Field’s character making herself the center of attention to show the work of a thespian. Not only do they not see the effort of the work, their understanding of my job is that it takes me away from them. They see absence, and for a mom figure at least, that absence can feel like neglect. But when they talk about their friends’ parents who are forever present, they say, “Oh my God, her mom is so annoying. She is all in our business.” Well, yeah, because her kids are her job. So, which do you want? Do you really want a mom who’s always around and knows all the tea and all the flavors of Kool-Aid? Or a mom with her own life who models power and success for you, but maybe can’t make you brownies?

  I was stuck trying to be both, doing just enough of both roles to not feel like a failure. Even with all my advantages, I remember one day trying to manage my work schedule with childcare for Kaavia James, interviewing a new tutor for one of the boys, and making room for another extracurricular for Zaya. As I was figuring this all out, I realized I was about to be late for a Zoom call about a show I’m producing.

  I was searching for the link when I saw Dwyane pass by. “Babe, can you hand me a water?” I asked, not looking at him.

  “I don’t work for you,” Dwyane said, slow and cool.

  He said this to show he was annoyed by “my needs.” Whenever he has said something like this, I think of the years I did so many things for Dwyane without being asked. I didn’t “work for” him in the sense that I looked at myself as his assistant or employee. I did these things because I saw that he needed something and I could provide it. Anticipated these needs, even. But when I asked for something . . .

  I sat there, drowning and overwhelmed, and I felt the rage of my fight-or-flight bubble up. My impulse in the past had been to silence it by silencing myself—because if I opened my mouth, the meanest, most hurtful words might fly out from the worst place of my soul. Something I would never be able to take back.

  I didn’t want to be the one to kick and scream, “It’s my turn!” But, Jesus, it was my turn. All those years we shape-shifted every day to make sure that D had everything that he needed from us did not mean the same would be true for me. While my expectations had apparently gone through the roof, society still had zero expectations of him.

  So, here’s what I did: I got up and got the water myself. I was a couple of minutes late for the Zoom. I told my team that I was juggling a lot and those couple of minutes were needed.

  “I am trying my best,” I said, “and I know you all are, too. But sometimes, we don’t have it in us to try our best, and we’re going to have to hope we have enough decent human beings around us that are also in the same boat.”

  I would like to tell you that Dwyane and I fixed this immediately after my Zoom meeting. That I called a family meeting and we figured out a perfect 50–50 arrangement. But I know that’s never going to happen. I don’t want to manage the tit-for-tat of fairness. I want to be able to recognize myself and the bigger picture. I am tired of picking marital fights that don’t get us from A to B. I want to be someone who doesn’t sweat that somebody’s not prewashing the dishes before they stick them in the dishwasher. Is it worth World War III because I do things differently? I don’t want to be that person, and I don’t have time to be that person.

  So, I was honest with Dwyane. “In this world we’ve created in L.A., I need your help,” I said. “And sometimes that help is big things. Like moving across the country. And sometimes it’s getting me a water. I just need . . .”

  I paused a long time. The word swam up from somewhere deep.

  “Grace,” I said. “I need grace.”

  Grace, it turns out, is more doable than balance. It’s a renewable resource that Dwyane and I can give each other when one of us is in need. Grace, that combination of love and mercy that we all have to give and yet are trained to think we don’t deserve.

  “I don’t have it today.” That’s all you’ve got to say. “Got it,” is the response.

  That’s as close to balance as I have found. We find someone, or surround ourselves with people, who we can call upon to pick up our slack. We pick up each other’s slack, knowing we will need that same grace soon.

  11

  Dance Battle

  I have never been a fan of Chateau Marmont. Its Gothic architecture looms over Sunset, and a lot of people go in there singing “Hotel California” to themselves, hoping for a residual contact high from its famous inhabitants. No offense, but there is something creepy about the energy. I feel the ghosts of white troubled Hollywood lurking about, turning to look at me like, “And you ar
e?”

  But I knew the party there that night was going to be great, and the only thing I like more than a good time is showing a friend a good time. And mine needed it. Let’s call her Jenae, and just say up front that her husband was new to playing with the Miami Heat, and I could tell she was getting lost in the size-15 footsteps of the players’ fame. This was February 2012, when Dwyane’s team was nicknamed the Heatles because they sold out every stadium they toured on the road, just like the Beatles. They were the biggest things in pop culture—even Barack Obama fan-girled out about them. When grown men give up all pretense of cool around your husband, it’s easy to get lost in the sauce. I wanted to show her a girls’ night out away from Miami.

  “I know that you think the guys provide this life alone, but I have had this life for a long time,” I told her. “Let me take you out so you can see how this shit can work. Where we’re not just the plus-ones, we’re the fucking show.”

  “Okaaay,” Jenae said, sounding not in the least bit convinced this was possible.

  “Trust me,” I said. It was Grammy weekend, and I’d been invited to the Warner Bros. party at Chateau. Since the start of my career, people in the music industry have accepted me and gone out of their way to show me they want me at their parties. I think they just know I am a legit fan, because there’s certainly nothing I can do for them. I have no tracks, I’m not producing anything, and the only time anyone ever offered to pay me to sing was a night out with my best friend and hairstylist Larry at a karaoke bar in Woodland Hills. It was the kind of place older, grizzled singers who had a record deal in ’78 come in wearing the outfit that got them the deal in ’78. Larry and I did our go-to, the Captain and Tennille’s “Love Will Keep Us Together,” and a booker for a Palm Desert resort ambled over to us.

  “You’re a pretty thing,” he said to me, handing Larry his card. “Do you have booking information?”

  I politely said no, and he asked where we usually perform.

  “Um, the hair and makeup trailer?” Larry said.

  I still have his card somewhere, but he’s still the only person who’s ever offered me money to sing. I love to, I’m just not good at it by any music industry standard. And yet, for some reason, artists and executives from that world have welcomed me and shown me a kindness that I have not seen at other Hollywood parties. The parties where I was told to arrive late, after the dinner. Black women were supposed to come expecting nothing more than the fact that they were invited; they certainly shouldn’t expect to be served food. Or even a seat.

  So, all that to say, I felt safe bringing my friend to the party, a girls’ night for about eight of us. In the car over, there were Jenae, my friend Aly, the actress A. J. Johnson, and me. We’d gone all out, dressed to impress in sequins and sparkles, beat for the cheap seats. Jenae was talking about how this was the first night she’d really bothered to get really dressed up in a while, since she’d felt invisible at all the basketball events.

  “Have you had the thing happen with the valets?” I asked her.

  “Where they start to drive off with you—”

  “Still in the car!” I finished for her.

  “You, too?” she said, grabbing my arm. She thought it was just her.

  “Oh, but yes, the valets get so hypnotized seeing Dwyane that I am still in the passenger seat waiting to be let out. We don’t exist.”

  A.J. shot us a look. “Seriously?”

  “Seriously,” we both said.

  But the party was exactly what we needed. We sailed into VIP and the bottles were popping as my friend Serena Williams came over to us for a hug. Serena may be the world’s greatest athlete, but to us she is just the world’s best karaoke partner. My Palm Desert guy would book her in a second. I kept stealing glances at Jenae, and I could see her having fun. She was blooming in this light. So was I. The ghosts that usually bugged me at Chateau took the night off, maybe seeing the diversity of the crowd and the exuberance of Black energy. I was sipping champagne when we heard it—amazing music coming from inside. We didn’t even discuss it, just got up and barreled into the room with everyone else.

  It was Bruno Mars, who was only just becoming the Bruno Mars we now know him to be. Today, he is not gonna be the talent at the Warners Grammy office party, but even then, he was a star. He had a full band, flying through songs with electric speed and energy and swag. They performed on a raised stage, the room lit in purple. Of course, we didn’t know that Bruno had been part of a wedding band for years, a band that knew how to play everything. They were so tight in their camaraderie, playing to each person’s strength and moving seamlessly from Michael’s “Dirty Diana” to Big Sean’s “Dance” and then throwing in Rick James out of nowhere. People put their phones up, and then dropped them just to dance. Around me were John Legend, Reba McEntire, Paul McCartney, Kelly Clarkson, Elvis Costello—like a greatest hits tour of legends. They were all beaming, shaking their heads in wonder because they knew exactly what kind of magic was happening in front of us. These veterans, and us music civilians, recognized a shift in the room and with it the energy of the whole industry.

  By the end of that performance, we were all on a high and the liquor was flowing. Those troubled ghosts had been exorcised, at least for that night, and Chateau was ours. We moved to the dance floor, so full of energy we had to release it somewhere, and we Took. It. Over. People naturally gravitated around us, forming a circle just to be near us. I don’t know if we ever felt more like stars. This, it must be said, is not how this town usually wants you to feel as Black people. If you feel like a star in Hollywood, you might demand your worth. You might want to be treated like white people. When had Black women dared be centered? But there we were, at the center of the dance floor. The big prom scene in the movie that had never been written for us.

  The DJ created an epic soundtrack for us, every song leading us to grab each other to scream, “This is my jam!” or “That’s my song!” He reached back into our childhoods, taking something like Jermaine Stewart’s “We Don’t Have to Take Our Clothes Off,” and giving it a new sound so we could perform it, not just dance along. The crowd around us got thicker, surrounding us as we were giving and serving all of the life force.

  It was as Jermaine sang about cherry wine that the crowd suddenly parted to make way for a group of men. I looked up to see a wall of five or six Black guys, smiling at us as they moved toward us in rhythm with the music. Like a schoolyard fight in the best possible way, these guys wanted a dance battle. The crowd started yelling in singsong, “Oh shit! Oh shit!”

  I clapped my hands in the air, once, signaling that we accepted the challenge of the dance-off.

  Then, fighting to get around somebody at the front, came this whirling five-foot-five dervish of hair and soul. When I say this little motherfucker was the sexiest person at the party? Believe it. Now, we’re obviously partnered with some of the biggest athletes in the world, well over six feet, bodies of Adonis, tens of thousands of people screaming for them, every night. But none could compare to the sex appeal of Bruno Mars, Mighty Mousing his way through to stand before us.

  Oh shit, I thought. I just took on the best band in the whole world.

  Bruno nodded at me, leader to leader, even if I was just the de facto one for being foolish enough to accept. But I believed in my girls. I looked back, and Serena’s sly smile gave me confidence.

  Whitney’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” came on, and Bruno started easy with some nice moves, lulling me into a sense of security that he was of this earth. The beat dropped and his feet moved so fast, spinning around like an egg beater, as the guys around him hyped the crowd. He dipped to the ground in a split, and came up to this complete moonwalk that made the crowd lose it.

  He winked at me, like, What you got?

  I couldn’t compete with that, but the sexy grown woman kicked in for me. I’ve been here a lot longer than you motherfuckers, my moves said, dropping it and springing up, giving you the full operation. I whipped
my head around, using my weave as an accessory to murder on the dance floor. But I think what sold it, what covered any brief misstep, was the genuine smile stretched across my face.

  Reader, I held my own.

  Bruno tagged in another dancer, a superflexible long-limbed gymnast incorporating dance tumbling to impress the crowd. I looked at my squad. Aly, who we all affectionately call Tia Aly, locked eyes with me. I nodded, a general in the battle. “Get him.”

  Aly came up as a dancer, and has this move we all called “Wider” because that’s what we chanted whenever she did it. She got in a squat and moved her feet apart farther and farther as she arched her back to do a pop and drop. It was twerking before there was twerking, and it killed with the Chateau crowd, who’d probably never seen anything like that.

  Bruno threw up his hands, still in a draw, and his next dancer came in break-dancing to “It’s Tricky” and I panicked. We don’t have a break-dancer, I thought. But Serena was champing at the bit.

  “Tag me in! Tag me in!” When the most decorated athlete in the world says she can do something, trust her to deliver.

  And Serena Williams proceeded, as the crowd chanted her name, to break it the fuck down. Some rando screamed, “What can’t she do?” They were right, but if you have spent an evening hanging with Serena and her sister Venus, music becomes the focal point. Name any city, and she will know some basement club to take you to that takes karaoke dead serious.

  Serena was springing up and kicking, and the crowd went wild. Now the whole entire party had closed in around us. It was hot like a basement party in the Bronx.

  When the DJ segued into Full Force’s “Ain’t My Type of Hype,” we knew he must have spotted our secret weapon: A. J. Johnson. A.J. was in Kid ’n Play’s House Party, and her iconic dance battle scene gave “the dance-off” the importance that it has in pop culture. To this day, people re-create her moves at weddings and parties.