Just as I cannot pinpoint when my looks caused me to self-flagellate, I don’t remember exactly when I went back to that little girl in the pictures in that box and began to love myself again. The strange thing is, it wasn’t that I didn’t like myself per se. I had unwittingly separated my outward appearance from my inner attributes, so I actually always liked me. I was always confident in my personality. I knew myself to be genial, witty, empathetic, sociable, clever (but self-deprecating—I am British, after all), funny, kind, generous, interesting, interested but also bold, spirited, and curious. When I was a child these latter traits would get me into hair-raising situations—from pretending to be a street hawker in Nigeria to deciding it was “fun” to run away from home in London. I would always drag my more reserved elder sister along for the ride. Invariably we’d end up in trouble, but boy did we have a blast! As an adult, I am the same, except unlike many of my contemporaries, particularly in the industry in which I work, I haven’t needed to take mind-altering substances to be all of these things. But in a world obsessed with aesthetics, these qualities have felt diminished. I’ve felt like a desirable present packaged in an unappealing box. A gift can be rewrapped in a more appealing package, but what do you do with a human being not confident in their skin? Yes, ultimately one can consider bleaching creams, hiding under weaves and wigs, forking out for rhinoplasty, and donning colored contact lenses (which embarrassingly I experimented with briefly in my late teens because I considered my brown eyes banal), but where does it end? It doesn’t; it’s a slippery slope.
So my belated process of self-acceptance began with me looking at the inside and working my way out rather than the other way around. I began to believe the scriptures I had grown up with that told me, “I am wonderfully and fearfully made.” I began to take pride in my qualities, my character, and my gifts. And I began to value them more than the traits I could never have but that the world deemed beautiful.
Beauty in itself is fleeting and in its very physical form deserves no accolades—it’s no different from glorifying someone because they were born rich. Celebrating someone (or not) on the basis of what they look like has gradually stopped making sense to me. Simultaneously, the rules of beauty are beginning to shift, positively but also negatively (white women desiring and paying to wear cornrows or to own the fullness of our lips and our rears just tells me that the world still won’t view a Black woman’s beauty as acceptable until the White space gives it their stamp of approval). Regardless of how it moves, however, I’ve decided to rewrite the rules of beauty for myself so that whichever way the wind blows, I personally am not moved by it.
Now, I’ll be honest, it wasn’t a snap-your-fingers-and-you’re-there situation. It was a process. And I’m not perfect; my relationship with my face is like one of a reformed alcoholic with the spirits that once held her captive. In the past I would eliminate images of myself and for weeks be weighed down by the face that had been staring back at me. In this age of social media, where it is almost impossible to hide from a camera, the background noise of my former self rears up on occasion. It reminds me of who, and what, the wider world says is beautiful. It is not dark; it doesn’t have a wide nose or a protruding side profile. It is not me. And it tells me I have no right to have my kind of beauty captured by a lens. Back in the day I would have been left bereft, struggling to “come to terms with my face.” Now? I shut it down, and I tell it this: “I am so much more than my reflection.”
Chapter 8
Motherhood
“Now count down from 100”
It wasn’t what I’d envisioned for myself—lying on a table in a brightly lit room in a women’s health clinic on the Upper East Side in New York as an anesthesiologist held my arm and inserted a needle, calmly instructing me to count backward. The soft music playing in the background seemed tragically ironic, if not an intentional act of God, using the exact medium that would get my attention most: Beyoncé and Michelle imploring Kelly to let a bad situation go. With the exception of two people in the world, no one knew where I was or what I was doing: having an abortion. And yet I had never felt more seen. I stared at the white fluorescent light above my head and tried to ignore the familiar lyrics and my reality:
Girl [100] I can [99] tell you been crying
And you needing [98] someone to talk to [97]
The sound of Beyoncé, Kelly, and Michelle’s harmonized tough love seemed serendipitous.
Girl [96] I can tell he’s been [95] lying
And pretending that [94] he’s faithful and he loves you
I grew up with a range of motivational maxims instilled in me by my charismatic, Virginian mother. They ranged from the Deepak Chopra–esque (during high school: “Reach for the sun because if you miss you’ll land among the stars”) to Ratchet Lite (when I was climbing the ranks in publishing: “Werk don’t twerk”). Meanwhile, my dad quietly reinforced lessons about personal finance management and maintaining integrity in school, life, and later work.
But there was a piece of slightly less poetic advice from my formative years that stuck more than others: “Don’t mess around out here with these boys and get pregnant.” The message was omnipresent, coming from the mouths of aging relatives, well-meaning school guidance counselors, and church pastors. There was rarely ever talk about what happens when you do.
For the entirety of my formative years and a chunk of my adulthood, the discussion about Black women and babies centered on prevention. I’m not alone in saying this. When a friend told a godmother in her seventies about her plans to have in vitro fertilization, the reaction was deadpan: “I didn’t know that Black people actually pay people to help them have babies. When I was coming up, everyone was trying to make sure we didn’t get pregnant.”
The racializing of pregnancy—the general treatment of it as desirable for White families and undesirable for Black families—stretches far back, from American government–sanctioned eugenics programs that saw clinics sterilizing women of color without their knowledge or consent to the narrative that teen pregnancy was predominantly a Black, inner-city problem. The idea of Black women as hyperfertile, giving birth too soon to too many babies without being able to afford them, didn’t ring true in my world. Instead, the pressing matter was when and how to give birth in a way that felt right.
As I write, a petition is making its way through my social networks to improve maternal care for Black women in response to the revelation that due to a range of factors largely boiling down to institutional racism, we are five times more likely to die from birthing complications than White women in the UK (and four times as likely in the US). We spend so much of our lives trying not to get pregnant that it’s not until we’re ready for children that we realize the paucity of support systems in place for when things go right or terribly wrong. Or the lack of open dialogue about our reproductive desires. Or the fact that much of the content written about our fertility hasn’t even been authored by us at all.
The issue wasn’t on my radar when I was twenty-eight and my boyfriend observed that my period was late. (It was prone to irregularity ever since I’d gone off the pill after reading an article about how the hormones could increase the risk of cancer.) I hadn’t noticed. With seventeen years on me and three sons of his own, he told me he knew the signs.