You keep that up, you'll die single!

Loving someone else and giving of yourself does not negate you. We live in a selfish society that puts self-preservation over the needs of others. There is a reason that so many black women are single in their 40's! We are too busy trying to get the upper hand over men and not allow a man in close enough to love us. Yes we may be in long term relationships but that's just it. It's a long term relationship, that's not going anywhere!  We put up walls and justify our actions by saying we're independent and don't need a man to validate us.


But maybe it's not validation he wants to give you, but something deeper...


The Black Woman's Rules to a healthy relationship:
Don't ever let a man know everything!
Never give a boyfriend the benefits of a husband!
Always keep one in the back pocket!
Don't let a man be up under you all the time, give him a chance to miss you!


We've all heard these sayings and some of us even live by them. But what do you really hope to accomplish by these rules. Let's examine them one by one.


Don't ever let a man know everything!


So basically, lie and be deceitful to your significant other. Often times this statement is related to money. As in, keep a separate bank account and a stash of money on the side just in case.  But aren't most marriages in ruins over finances? I will say be practical. Yes it's okay to have separate accounts and separate retirement money. Especially if one person in the relationship is not so great with balancing a check book. But the only time you should be "hiding" money is if you are making plans to leave the relationship. I recently gave this advice to a young woman that is struggling in her marriage. She doesn't work and does not feel as if the marriage is salvageable due to his infidelity. I told her to find a means of stable income and start making a nest egg for herself. If he's sleeping with other women then there is no guarantee that he will not one day fail to return. 


Never give a boyfriend the benefits of a husband!


So don't cook, clean, or take care of a man. Don't go out of your way to cherish him and show him how much you appreciate him. I've heard it all before, give him space, his hands aren't broken he can fix his own plate. Well if you don't give a man a preview of what is to come then what makes you think he will be falling over himself to marry you? Just like a man will probably not go see a movie without seeing the trailer, he's probably not going to marry a woman that has not shown him why he should marry her. 


Always keep one in the back pocket!


This rule is just beyond ridiculous! How can you fully develop a lasting bond with the person you're with if you are too busy trying to keep someone else trailing along, just in case! And who wants a woman that has one eye on him and one eye on Tom in accounting? Not only are you not allowing yourself to fully concentrate on your relationship, you are also setting yourself up for failure. Don't think a man doesn't feel when you are not 100% committed to the relationship. In the long run you may find yourself alone with no one!


Don't let a man be up under you all the time, give him a chance to miss you!


A relationship, whether just dating or engaged or married should involve magnetism. Something should be drawing the two people together. It's not enough just to say, we're only dating but even if we were married, I'd want to live my life and he can live his. A marriage is a melding of two people. If you want to live separate lives you should have stayed single. You should be renewing your relationship daily and wanting  the other person to feel wanted. Constantly rejecting your partner and asking for space in a committed relationship is a landslide to ruin. Everyone wants to feel wanted but why do you be in control and say, "Well I'll show you affection on MY time table, when I want to show it to you." This type of emotional mind control and childish games are one of the reasons so many black men are searching for their wives within other races! 


That's where selfish indifference comes into play. If you are in a relationship and you are having separate vacations and you love nothing more than spending time without him then maybe this isn't the relationship for you. If you are in love with someone you should want to spend time together and share your daily life with that person. People often settle for the person that just happens to be present instead of waiting for the one that is meant to be. Just because you have ALWAYS been this way doesn't mean that this is the way it should be. Wanting space in a relationship is like wanting to be dry in the ocean. Telling a man that you don't need or want his constant affection will often lead him to finding it elsewhere. 


Women often equate an affectionate man with the words clingy, stalker, or insecure. Maybe he isn't any of those things but rather a man that is simply more into you than you are to him. But don't worry, I'm sure someone else will solve that pesky problem for you. 


My significant other and I go everywhere together. There isn't a time that we are apart other than work. We enjoy each other's company and we have had only one disagreement in the past year that we've been dating. We are completely compatible and I see now what a real relationship is. When you are in a loving and compatible relationship, you should want to share of your heart, mind, body, and time daily. It's not a sacrifice nor is it an obligation. We don't have separate lives because we are building a life together. 


We will be married soon, he asked after only 9 months of dating. We've never been happier. The joy we have for each other radiates outward and can be seen by everyone around us. I'm not controlled, or confined. I give of myself completely and freely and he does the same. I will forever put him before myself because he does the same for me. 


I really feel sorry for women that think being alone while being in a relationship is the way it should be. Maybe he's just given up on trying to get around your walls that you have vicariously placed in the way of your own happiness! So, yes, he gives you space, and he occupies his time with other things. 


And yes, that's why you're single...

Don’t waste your life or your money on college.

It's almost here the start of a new school year! As my son goes off for his first day of kindergarten I have a cousin who is trying to navigate her way into college....3 weeks before school starts! She's stressed to the max and I asked her why she hadn't started this process sooner! She thought she had! This got me to thinking of all of the mistakes I made in college and what ultimately led me to not completing my degree. 

Planning for college starts your freshman year of high school! Oh the sins of my freshman year haunted me during college application time. However, I persevered and made it to college only to not have planned wisely and thus I wasted a large portion of my life and money on college.

Don't let this happen to you! Here are 15 tips on how to not waste time or money on college!

Managing work, your own business, and your home life.

So how does one woman do it? Maintain a 9-5, work her own business, and manage to do the laundry, homework, and cooking for her family? When you find out you tell me! I often sit at my desk at work and say to myself, if I were home right now I could be getting so much work done for myself! This job is in the way of my success!

 I rarely find the time to fold laundry let alone become a guru of social networking, making weekly YouTube vlogs, writing in my blog and manage to produce a solid product. One person can only do so much. But who has the money to hire an assistant or one of those social media consultants? For a start up business with no money those are expenses I just don’t need or have the funds for. So I have this great idea and nowhere to utilize it! I’m at a stand still and I don’t know what to do!

My best weapon of defense?

Why am I still working for someone else?

This is a question that I ask myself all the time. Especially when my boss enters my office and gives me a list of menial tasks that any trained monkey can do. ‘Can you make me some tea, oh and fax this letter, and when you’re done can you open my mail?’ Open your mail? What, are you afraid of paper cuts? How can a person be placed into a position of authority and supervision over a staff of 30+ people, yet has never acquired the knowledge necessary to operate a fax machine.

Okay so maybe they are busy and delegation is the most important trait of a boss but seriously, some things are just degrading to ask your “assistant” to do. I often find myself sitting at my desk daydreaming of owning my own business and being self-employed. So, I ask myself. Why am I working for someone else? Answer, fear! I have 2 kids to support and I need steady income. 

Light Skin vs. Dark Skin

People get over it. You can have three siblings in one family and all three will have a different skin color. Hell my left arm is darker than my right because of driving in my car with my arm out the window. (Trucker's tan)

I've never been obsessed with color. My mom is ebony and my dad's the color of a banana. And they are both Creole. We have so many shades in my family it's not even funny and no one has ever said one tone is better than another. Actually that's a lie, I've always been told that darker skin is better because it doesn't show blemishes as easily. Which is true.

Every little think marks my skin and face and I hate it. And fade cream does not work! I've tried it on my shins and knees from my clumsy childhood scars and they haven't gone away not one bit.

One thing that I can say negative about GH vs. BH and LS vs. DS was the reaction I received when I was pregnant with my son. My son is half Filipino and the whole time I was pregs everyone kept saying how beautiful he was going to be because mixed babies are so beautiful. And black babies are What? Chopped liver? I was having a mixed baby but I wasn't having a mixed baby just to have a mixed baby if that makes sense.

The lady on the Tyra show was saying she refuses to date black men because she wants a mixed a baby with "good hair' then her daughter comes out and has the worst hair on the stage! I fell over laughing. DUMB ASS!

I will admit that I was curious what my baby would look like but I think that's natural of any expecting mom. We want to see their little faces. My son was born looking very asian and it scared me that he didn't look more black. I don't know why. He had slanted eyes and bone straight hair and very pale skin. I was like, I'm going to look like his nanny!

His hair started to wave up a little when he became about two and now if I keep his hair short the ends will curl. If I let it grow out a little his hair turns back straight. So he has what I would consider european hair. I was hoping for a little texture like lenny kravitz or cree summer. That would have been cool. but it is what it is. (he's darker now too) I still get the what is he? question at the super market and I say he's bi-racial and I turn around. I don't have to go into my son's genealogy with a total stranger and it's not good for my kids to see me giving out personal information to strangers anyway.

I don't understand why dark people feel persecuted by their dark ebony skin. And I equally don't understand the misconception that dark skin = more black.

How much european is mixed into your blood has nothing to do with your skin color per se. My nephew is half white and half black and he's darker than me. My daughter's dad is half mexican and half black and he's way darker than me. Even my daughter is darker than me. My really good friend has a mom my color and a dad the color of wesley snipes and he is lighter than both of them and has red hair and green eyes.

Black people need to wake up. We are diverse, beautiful, and unique. That's what makes us special. I love the fact that we come in so many shades and tones. It does make it harder for us women to find makeup that matches perfectly but I don't want to look like the girl next door. I don't want to have the same hair, skin color, and swagger as anyone else.

Why do black people always feel like we don't measure up? We are just as smart, beautiful, talented, and driven as any other race. Don't let your own ignorance be your own limitation.

You can't blame white people anymore for not understanding your culture and heritage. They may not have taught you more than "you were a slave then martin luther king came along and now you're free" in High school history but now you have unlimited resources to find out who you really are.

Just like you found this blog there are so many internet tools available to find out about your heritage and where your people came from. Read some slave journals, learn about how people of the time thought of slavery as a business, and a way of trade not just a way to degrade people.

Understand how that reflects on how your company treats you now. It's all about the almighty dollar, that bottom line. Why pay people to do something when I can make them work for free? Which is why many companies today ship our jobs over seas because they can pay them less and make them work 18 hours days for $5 a day.

Watch African American Lives. This originally aired on PBS and it is the study of a man that did DNA sampling to trace back black people's origins. He also told them what percentage of what each of them were. It's available now on netflix. This was really fascinating to me. There were white people on there that turned out to be actually black. And black people saying they had "indian in they family" that turned out not to have not one drop of indian in them. I wish I had the money to have this done. I would like to know what part of Africa my ancestors were from.

I have spoken to my grandmother in depth about my heritage and learned that her grandfather was their slave owner. She remembers living on his plantation to a share cropper father. When her grandfather died they were forced to leave the plantation. She of course never called him grandfather, but she knew who he was. Her grandmother was his slave and house woman and she worked in the house with him. he was never married and he kept her on as his servant even after slavery ended. It's amazing the stories your grandparents and elders can tell you about the "bad ol' days" as my grandma says.

Now that I know who I am and where I come from topics like this doesn't matter to me anymore. I don't care what skin color or hair texture I have. I'm just happy to be a strong black woman!

Standards, GET SOME!

Standards, Get Some

Being a single mother doesn't mean that you can't have a great man that will love and appreciate you!

Love is available to everyone regardless of your situation. You do not have to make a certain amount of money or social status to find a great guy. Do not let other's define you and dictate to you your worth!

Oyin Handmade, WHO?

Often times a natural will ask me what products I use in my hair because my hair looks so awesome. Well Right after I blush and thank them for the wonderful compliment I tell them my secret is the Oyin Handmade product line. I'm soon given a what the heck is that look. It's crazy how so few people are hip to Oyin Handmade. They are wonderful products and much more affordable than traditional all natural products. I have been using them on me and my children's hair since December 22nd and I'm no where near running out. The products are so heavily concentrated that you only need a very little bit. 

The Products I have used are:

Head to Toe Honey Wash - $10
This is a sulfate free shampoo. Intended for people that do not use products that contain silicones. I will be honest it is not a clarifying shampoo so I do recommend Clarifying the hair once a month. This is perfect for semi weekly wash and gos. Does not leave the hair stripped in any way.

Honey Hemp Conditioner - $11
If I could, I would marry this conditioner!!! I love love love it. I also love the fact that you don't have to rinse it out because everything in it is good for the hair and scalp. I have deep conditioned with this conditioner also. I noticed a change in my hair from the first use. I will never use another conditioner on my hair. It leaves your hair soft and silky. Great for detangling hair too. Gives hair plenty of slip. This has a pleasant citrusy smell. I noticed my pillows all smell like this now from me going to bed with wet hair. lol

Shine and Define Styling Serum - $6
I use this to twist my hair. I noticed it does not lay down my edges but it does make my "baby hair" curl up. This isn't a GEL it's a styling serum. It's a creamy consistency. twists are soft and pliable. not sticky and stiff. The shine and define does not flake. which i love best about it. Once it dries in the hair, you won't feel anything on the hair. (unlike my IC fantasia gel.)

Juices and Berries Nourishing Herbal Leave In conditioner - $11
I use this to refresh my hair the next day. It has glycerin in it so it's a humectant. It smells like jolly rancher candy. I spray my twists with it. Or I use it to reactivate my Kinky Curly. This is so versatile, and the only product that I'm almost out of.

Whipped Pudding - $6
I love this stuff so much better than the shea butter mix I made. It's not waxy and it's very smooth. A little goes a long way and I can definitely tell when I've used too much. This is great on Arrington's super thin hair and keeps away the frizzes all day. Has a little bit chocolatey, cocoa butter smell. YUMMY!

Oyin Handmade also has products for Skin care, children, and men. I've never tried any of those but If they are half the quality of the products I've tried then they are worth their weight in gold. Their website is: http://oyinhandmade.com/

This is a black owned company and they have been around since 2003. They really do make everything by hand and they take pride in their products and it shows. I actually didn't buy these products directly from them I bought them from Curlmart.com only because Oyin was on a winter hiatus at the time.