Free Life Is Not a Fairy Tale by Fantasia Page A

women and young girls just one thing, it would be this: Listen to your mamas. Listen to them for one reason only: it is disrespectful not to listen to them. Your mama is the person who gave you life. Your mama may not have gone through the same things that you’re experiencing, but she’s going to have a better idea of what can happen and what to avoid. If your mama hasn’t gone through it herself she probably knows someone who has. A man leaving a woman to fend for herself and take care of a child is a common thing that has been happening to women for many centuries. It’s not new. We didn’t start it.
    I am more ashamed of not listening to my mother’s silence.
    My mama has been through a lot. She has been disappointed and hurt so many times in her life. Mama wanted to be a strong person and a successful singer. She had dreams too, none of which happened for her. The fact that my mother didn’t even notice that I dropped out of school; the fact that she let me go live with and run around with my thirty-year-old friends; the fact that she sensed that I was having sex and didn’t say anything about it tells me that Mama had gone into a deep depression. She wasn’t herself and I should have noticed, mainly because she was not really noticing me. I was watching my mother’s spirit slowly dying, and I was too selfish to see and too focused on myself to say anything. I couldn’t pull her out of her hole because I was too busy diggin’ my own. Looking back on it, I could have been as much help to her as she tried to be to me before depression sucked her away from mothering.
    When I think of all my girls in the projects who have two and three babies, often from different men, it worries me. That is a lot of unprotected sex goin’ on in the projects, and the fact that the fathers have left means that my girls and those guys never had much of a relationship in the first place. Their mistake is not their pregnancies; it was their forgetting that if they caught a disease, they wouldn’t be there for their children anyway. Tears fill my eyes just thinkin’ about what would happen to Zion if I got sick because of being careless with a man who was careless with me. All those times that me and my friends were together, puttin’ on makeup, strapping up our high heels, and squeezing into our too-tight shorts to walk the projects, we never once mentioned diseases or death and the impact they would have on our children.
    It’s pretty simple, but it seems like it’s really hard for us. What is so hard about sayin’ no when your life is at stake? Not just your being alive, but the quality of your life. When you have children that you aren’t ready for, all of your dreams just melt away. It’s not easy being a mama who never lived her dreams, and it’s not easy looking at one.
    But I don’t blame myself anymore, because in those days, I thought my life was nothing to protect. It seemed that death was something that happened often enough that everyone around me had almost lost the fear of it. The aftermath of death was something that we got used to. Being from the ghetto changes your feelings about life and death. Death is just something that happens to people when they’re not lookin’. The news of death is just something new to do when the boredom gets to be too much. The news of murders, car accidents caused by drunk drivers, gangs and drug overdoses travels around town fast like the news of how big the lottery was that week. Funeral arrangements and telling the whole town are all “somethin’ to do” for people who never have nothin’ to do. When the funeral is over and the excitement of death has died down again, everyone returns to what they were doing before. At least for that short period, life around death was exciting. With that as a backdrop for my life and for so many young bored people in America, life is not such a big deal. Being careless with life just seemed like what everyone did.
    My third mistake was