Lessons in Loneliness

by Ashley Chaney

Young women of my generation have been conditioned since we were little girls to be strong and independent. We’ve been taught since an early age to fend for ourselves. Our mothers, and in some cases our fathers too, have taught us to bring home the bacon and to fry it too. I distinctly remember my grandma telling me on numerous occasions to go to school and get an education in order to find a career so that I would always be able to support myself. She didn’t tell me this so that I might grow up with the confidence of knowing that I could be anything I wanted to be. On the contrary, she told me this so that I would NOT grow up thinking that it was okay to be totally dependent on a man. “Don’t get stuck.” “Make your own money.” “Don’t ever put yourself in a position where you have to depend on a man to survive.”

My grandparents have been married for 52 years. My grandpa has always been the primary bread-winner. The only job my grandma held was a position as a home health aid for Hospice. She worked because she wanted to, not because she had to. One day my grandpa told her, “What you make in a week at that job, I make in a day.” My grandma quit shortly after that.

Every lesson that I was taught by my grandma, my momma, and my aunties (most of whom are, or have been, married with children at some point in their lives) was centered on the idea of maintaining and sustaining my independence. And then there’s the lessons my daddies taught me (yes, DADDIES, as in plural. As a result of the blended family phenomenon, this is my reality). No matter who I ever brought home, in my stepfather’s eyes they weren’t good enough for me. I remember when I had my first real bout of relationship drama in college. My biological father adamantly discouraged me from being with a young man who I think really forced him to see his twenty-something self, the version of him that my mother loved in spite of flaws, immaturity and infidelity.

So, I went to college and got the degree. I held on to my dream of finding a career that encompassed my passion for writing. I traveled and never waited for a man—or anyone else for that matter—to grant me permission to do so. I moved away from home and conquered a new city on my own. And, no matter how much I’ve ever loved a man, I never let him stand in my way or stop me from doing anything I set my mind to. And now, as I approach age 25, I am what some people like to call a strong, independent black woman. I am educated. I can take care of myself. I am successful. And…I am single. I’ve made my momma, my grandma, my aunties and my daddies proud. What they DON’T know and what I am NOT proud of is the fact that I am more lonely now than I have ever been.

While on the METRO train one evening with a friend discussing the future of my love life—weighing the pros and cons of quitting my job, transferring the credits I’d earned towards my masters degree at Georgetown University, uprooting my life and relocating from DC to the South to be with the man that I loved at the time—my friend said something to me that turned a light on in my head. “Fifty years from now who’s going to be lying next to you in bed at night? Is it going to be your man or your degree from Georgetown?”

Now that my head is out of the clouds, I realize that I was not in love with that man—I was in love with the possibility of what a more mature him could be.  I am glad that I hadn’t made any plans to quit, transfer, uproot or relocate anything, however, my friend’s statement in and of itself, put a lot of things in perspective for me. I finally saw some truth in  something that an ex (my first love) said to me before I, in his words, “left him” and packed my car to head to DC for a new job and new opportunities. Although I will never admit this to him, I now see some truth in what he said. He argued that I was leaving behind everything that mattered—my family, my friends, him (or so he thought)—to chase things that in the end, would mean so little—a career, education, independence, new experiences. Now, I know that in saying these things, he was doing nothing more than trying to make me feel guilty about walking away from our on-again, off-again, seven year hiatus of a relationship. But, I also accept the notion that in the end, relationships—those with family, friends and significant others—are the things that really matter in life. What’s a successful career, a few degrees, independence and new experiences if you have no one to share it with?

Is making my momma, grandma, aunties and daddies proud worth my personal happiness? Out of all these role models and authority figures in my life, how come no one thought that it was necessary to teach me the importance of living a life that was balanced? How come no one ever told me that I could be educated and successful and still find love? How come no one ever taught me how to be in a relationship with a man while still maintaining my independence? I feel like I was cheated out of these lessons that were embedded in the upbringing of many of my white counterparts. Why is it that in the black community, many of our little girls are taught to see the world as a merely a battleground and to survive on there own instead of teaching them to coexist with someone that they love?

Now, please don’t read this as a display of ignorance because I minored in African and African-American studies with a special concentration on black families. I am well aware of the implications that slavery had and still has on our family structure. I am well aware of the fact that a majority of our black children are being raised in single-female headed households. I am also well aware of the fact that little black girls in our community are conditioned to be able to stand on their own two feet because that is what many of our mothers and our mother’s mothers had to do. But, despite these harsh realities, is this a reality that we want to continue to perpetuate in our communities? Do we want our little black girls blossoming into beautiful, successful, independent black women who are battling with loneliness?