Relax, you're a baby mama now. I hate that term but since we know that term, let's digest it. See, marriage was there but when over, his resentment was so deep that he went from calling me "bae", "boo", "wife", and "queen", to his "baby mama".
Round one, fight.
So I'll fight for the life I so aimlessly dreamed of as a little girl. See. Barbie had me believing in Ken, and Disney had me believing in fairy tales. I skipped the part of life that taught me family is important and strong peaceful homes are what's best.
If you think for one minute that women who have children by different men are ashamed, think again. We're not. I'm part of a beautiful tribe of queens on this side of the second or third Baby Daddyville right now.
We give no energy to the nonsense, and contrary to your thoughts, aren't smashable, needy, or looking for a new father for their children. Instead, we are running companies, managing homes, buying trademarks, liberated, happy, and patiently waiting on what's good. Hiding in plain sight.
I'm a mother first, with children who I intentionally teach that our stories aren't for us to keep and that living loudly in our truths shall set us free.
After failures, adding another baby daddy to the team didn't seem so bad. It became the only solution to running and running from what felt like the cheap version of love.
Those chapters must've been practice because I was falling in love, strong-like with more than one "somebody son" before falling deeply in love with myself. I blamed love for the part of me that needed to slow down to see me. I told myself, relax girl, own your story girl, go get your peace girl, and then eventually the shift in my mindset came:
I stopped defending a man's assumptions or anyone's ignorance of a woman with multiple baby daddies and started saying, "The version of us they created in their mind isn't our responsibility."
I stopped thinking, past relationships fucked me up, and started saying, "I could have left at the first sign and been good."
I stopped staying too long in unhappiness out of fear that another woman I didn't know would be near my child and started co-parenting with acceptance, manifestation, and boundaries.
And let's not forget: I accepted sexuality with help from a woman in a payday loan store who told me straight up, "You just a fertile woman. Accept that." So I did. #Transparency.
Life has a funny way of showing you things, and with every crossroad, you have to make the best judgment that you feel and that's OK. This is a reality check for mothers with multiple baby daddies to acknowledge that we are in society's conversation and that, in turn, makes us more ridiculed for our higher standards. That's OK, too.
You'd think by now that the multiple baby daddy stigma placed on women of color would be eliminated because it assumes a woman must have character traits associated with a whore or slut, or even a careless, easy, or unworthy woman. Saying nothing about the men in this same light is weird.
How long does it take until a man removes his own blinders to find out that he experiences some shit called soul ties? Decades, right? Body count in the hundreds, right?
And no, this section is not a bashing moment. It's more like a blasting moment in that chapter that led me to lace up some shoes and walk in soles that lead to the souls tied to my own reality.
There's a deeper story behind each child I've nurtured who calls me mommy. I play no victim here. A mother of three by three, with our different last names sounding like a variety of flavors---my children and I eat this journey up.
Listening to the judgments of men and fake friends---the laughing, family gossip, co-worker scrutiny, the whispers---this decade showed us something. If a person lacks the thinking capacity above their own fairy-tale mentality to see the beauty in you owning your shit---healing and happy as a mom---run fast. People will talk, but silence is the loudest. Soon, they'll realize that their own story is the one that's not OK---while we plan play dates.
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