The dark side of black girl magic
I have spoken recently about consequences. I really believe in the power of consequences. Ultimately. We all have 1 life and we can choose to create or destroy that one life.
We are not however, responsible for anyone else’s life but our own. When we die we only answer for our own sins, when we live we only have our own life to take care of, no one else’s.
I know of which I speak, I’m a black woman after all. That means that the weight of the future of the black community is on my shoulders.
My parents are first generation immigrants, that means they came to the UK with nothing. My dad was 39 and my mum was 26. Same age as all my mum’s cousins came to the UK. They came with nothing and they built themselves from the ground up.
Except my parents. My dad gave away the family money to everyone and every cause. He supported grown up children, he supported grown up niece and nephews and he was generally bad with money.
Being cruel the consequence of that is that my dad should have had to work until he was 70. He retired at 65 as my mum built a property business in 5 years that enabled them to do so. Brilliant you say? However everything comes at a price. The price was always paid by me.
I am not a “good daughter” I am an exemplar daughter. A model of self sacrifice. And I want you to know that because it is not a good thing. I have sacrificed my life for my parents retirement, for a folly of their own making. A foreseeable consequence of spending all your money now is that you have no savings when you are older. My parents used to say “God will provide.” And God did provide. God provided me. I am their pension I am their future. If I had died before my parents they would have not just been heartbroken, but destitute.
My personal success has been inextricably linked to the future prosperity of my parents. I have managed to create a beautiful life with one hand tied behind my back. Their lack of future planning has cost me thousands. From lack of first time buyer privileges that they took from me to my divorce where I had to, no word of a lie, buy my ex husband out of assets that were under my name but had nothing to do with me. I had to pay £60,000 (plus interest) for my parents poor decisions. It is a third of my mortgage and has crippled me with debt. It is another reason for my tax course. I needed to find a way to make money to pay for the horrendous decisions my parents made on my behalf as an adolescent.
My personal journey has been from victim to victor. I have often said, your life is completely your own making after 25. I believe that. Upon my divorce I had to make the heartbreaking decision. My life or my parents. There was a sum, worth tens of thousands thar had to be paid, by someone, and because my parents were struggling for money at the time (I’d actually loaned them thousands of pounds during the course of my divorce, at times when I myself wasn’t working) I knew that even though the price was a just consequence to what they had done, it is a next level savage who can sit by and watch the people who loved and nurtured you all your life take on a debt that would cripple their golden years that they couldn’t afford to pay. So I chose myself. I chose to take it on and I did so so calmly that my parents weren’t even cognisant of the extreme sacrifice I’d made until much later. I didn’t rub it in their faces, I didn’t Lord it over them. I actually mentioned it once to my dad when discussing a financial decision. Shortly before he got sick there was a business decision to be made, to cut losses and lose £16,000. He was adamant he didn’t want to do it. I begged him to let it go, saying I’d taken a £60k hit for him, to which he said to me “you can afford it.” Those words hit me deeply.
True, I can afford it. However it has impacted my life none the less. I’m taking a tax course to make myself able to earn money to pay that debt down. I have less disposable income than my peers, I have less holidays. Everyone believes I can afford to take on their problems, which means that my life isn’t my own, it’s the service of others. I resent that assumption that I am here to help you when you haven’t helped yourself. Its not just money this has cost me. It is stress. Whenever my mum needs something for her business she’ll hound me to the ends of the earth. As someone with mental health issues you can’t imagine how that feels.
During my divorce in the first 3 months of 2021. I worked ridiculous hours, had to do 2 re-mortgages and a sale of a house in my parents property business, as well as my financial settlement and my own mortgage. My mum treated me extremely badly. I’d be in tears from the pressure. Then there was my ex, also abusing me. I honestly don’t actually know how I managed to forgive my mum and move on. I think it was because when April rolled in my dad got cancer. I had to let go of my own pain and focus on the task at hand, i.e. my dad’s last 4 months of life.
The problem with being the strong one, the one who manages to create wonder and grace and beauty despite all the challenges you face is that it surrounds you with weak people. People expect you to keep being strong and so whenever I have mental breakdowns I have to have them in private. My parents were able to indulge in their prideful hobby of giving money to people that they couldn’t afford to maintain this façade of “success in England”
One of the things that nearly broke me was when my mum mentioned casually a few months back that she’d just completed giving money to Joy Jones, a cousin of mine on my mum’s side. My mum paid for her university education. The thing about Joy Jones is that her dad, John is my mum’s half brother. She didn’t grow up with him, merely with the knowledge of his existence. So she wasn’t close to him and she’d met Joy no more than 5 times in her life, and yet she was paying for her university education. Plus paying for medical school in Ukraine for her sister’s daughter. Plus paying for private school in Ghana for my dad’s grandchild. Then there was “Loretta” Lets have a paragraph about her.
Loretta is a distant cousin of my dad’s form his village. My dad actually sought her out. She’s a woman in her mid 30’s training to be a nurse. She has a young son and didn’t marry the father. This is an important distinction to make because in Sierra Leone there is no such thing as child support, so if you didn’t marry the dad, you have no leverage to make him pay for his child. So she is a single mother in the truest sense of the word. Dad first met her when he went to Sierra Leone about 12 years ago. She’d then call my dad incessantly for money. Whenever I’d answer the phone, she’d demand “to speak to her uncle” then if I said he wasn’t home could I take a message she’d bang the phone down on me. I complained to my parents about this sustained rudeness, and they muttered about “cultural differences” “She can’t afford to stay on the line because of the phonecard” (this was before Whatsapp) I said she can take 5 extra seconds to say “Okay, please tell him I called” and calmy put the phone down. Anyway, this harassment continued and got worse. She started looking up my mum’s family, finding out that they were wealthy, she targeted my uncle Max. She went to his workplace (He worked for the UN) and demanded money, he’d never met her before, he’d never even heard of her. Then when my brother got engaged to a wealthy family in the US she went after them too, going to my brother’s future father in law to ask for money. Anyway, this story culminates when as my dad was getting sick and my parents were doing all of these financial transactions, she asked dad for £400, he didn’t have it. I did. But I’d leant my savings to my parents at the time and I had also got a divorce to pay for and a re-mortage. So I was being very careful with my money I refused to give my dad the money. He got into such a temper he called my elder brother for the money, he called a family friend for the money. Eventually my mum had to scrape together that money because he was so distressed at not being able to give her what is the equivalent of 4 months salary for the average person in Sierra Leone (think £10,000 in UK equivalent) that we thought that was what was making him ill. The stress. As it turns out it was cancer. But he’d worked himself up into such a state that he’d caused an international incident, asking people for the money from the UK and the USA. We, my mum and I, were enablers not empowering and that is an important distinction to make. We essentially enabled his ego and his addiction to stress. Which eventually killed him. If we’d empowered him to be his best self, we’d have blocked Lorretta, and my dad’s whole family from our lives, because they were in no way helping us. They were and are sucking the life out of us.
As my parents see it they have chosen to live their lives in service. I have chosen that my parents are the last people I help. Because there is always a price to be paid. And I don’t want my children paying it.
Grace and Courage.
Annetta Mother Smith