"Remember, you are a lady."
“Remember, You Are A Lady.”
January 7, 2017 By El Jones
My grandmother’s mantra to her daughters was, “just remember, you are a lady.” When my mother’s oldest sister, the first Black woman to enter the convent school, was taunted by classmates, she was reminded she was a lady. My grandmother would wake up early in the morning and do all the chores so that when her daughters’ friends came by to walk with them to school, she would be sitting at the table, dressed perfectly, as if the maid had just left, like a lady. In all the humiliations and oppressions of colonialism, pawning the possessions to eat, scraping for school uniforms, my grandmother insisted, “you are a lady.”
And when my grandfather’s women one after another knocked on the door of her house and asked for him, she never made a scene. She was a lady. When he met women in the park across from the home, taking my mother with him as an excuse to go outside, she never breathed a word. She would turn her head, and salvage her dignity by pretending she never saw what was happening.
At my sister’s wedding, my 92-year-old aunt approached her. Leaning in, she gave my sister advice. “When he has other women, just remember, he put the ring on you,” she said. “Remember, he might be running around with them, but he’s coming home to you.”
This is what our elders knew about survival, and what they taught us. They never dreamed of leaving marriages, whether there was infidelity, whether there was abuse, whether he disappeared, whether he sold all her jewelry, whether he took a hammer and broke down the kitchen wall, whether he made her get out of bed and scrub the floors all night, even when he hurt the children.
https://www.halifaxexaminer.ca/featured/remember-you-are-a-lady/
(Background to the article was this recent murder/suicide.)
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/rcmp-lionel-shanna-aaliyah-brenda-desmond-murder-ptsd-1.3924178
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