one shots

shorty swing my way [23]

august 1999
sunday
2:14 pm

"You didn't bother to tell me first before just running off and marrying this boy?" my mother asked.
My grin had gradually morphed into a frown.
"Mama, I—"
"One of the biggest moments of your life, and I have to try to live it through some damn photos. What happened to that big, grand wedding you always dreamed of? The princess ball gown and the white roses— what happened to that?"

"Mama, I was nine years old when I dreamed of that—"
"Instead you go and get dressed up like you ain't got no home training and have two boys you don't even know be the witnesses of your little common-law marriage," she continued to rant and ramble.

"Mama, one of them is D's brother—"
"And then you go and get a tattoo. Not even a damn ring! It's a tattoo! What— he couldn't afford a ring? But he could afford all that fucking leather he bought you, huh? Got'chu going up to a courthouse like that— like some kind of tramp. I did not raise you to—"

"First of all, Mama, I'm grown. I can dress how I wanna' dress, and I pay for my own things. He did not buy any of that for me. It was my choice to buy it, and I bought it with my own money. Secondly, we mutually decided not to get rings. Third of all, those two boys are my friends, and one of them is DeAndré's brother," I explained.

"So what's the other one's relationship to DeAndré?" she folded her arms.
"He's a frie—"
"So you rather invite DeAndré's homeboy than your own mother?" she raised an eyebrow.
"Ma, it's not like that. We just got married on a spontaneous type of thing. It wasn't my intention to hurt you by not inviting you," I expressed genuinely.

"I just cannot believe—"
"I'm sorry, Mama," guilt began to weigh me down.
"You haven't even known him for more than a year, Renée. . . but you runnin' around getting his name tattooed on you and skipping out on something you've dreamed of all your life," she shook her head in disappointment.

"Mama, we didn't want a wedding, okay? We don't need a wedding. The wedding is for everyone else to see how in love we are. It's a show for everybody else. We don't care what anybody else thinks, including you. We're in love, Mama. Nothing else matters," I couldn't help but feel like I wasn't far from tears.

It was breaking my heart to hear her doubt my relationship and my actions and my choices. Granted, I probably broke her heart by robbing her of the opportunity to see me get married, but I wasn't looking at the situation from her side at the moment.

She scoffed. "Chile, you wouldn't know the first thing about love."
"Why don't you want to see me be happy, Ma? For once in my life, I've found a man that makes me feel special. For once in my life—"
"Just because it's happened once in your life doesn't mean that it won't happen again," my mother reasoned.

"You know what? I don't know what I expected from you, but this is definitely not it. Maybe a little support, maybe a smart comment about how you can see a hickey on my cleavage in one of the pictures, maybe something more than this. I don't know what I was thinking," I began to collect the pictures that Deon took the day that his brother and I got married. He had just picked them up from being developed and I wanted to show them to my mom. That's the reason I was even standing here.

"I don't know what you were thinking by marrying him—"
"You loved him just a couple of months ago, Mama. What were you saying when you first met him? I better hold onto him, right? Well, that's what I'm doing," I nodded.
"Just because a man is married to you doesn't mean that you've got a hold on him. If anything, that man's got a hold on you," she stated.

"I guess you'd know a little something about not having a hold on a man, huh? That's why you ain't never been marri—"

I instantly felt a stinging sensation attack my cheek, and it wasn't until I noticed how my face was turned and my mother was screaming at me that I realized that she had slapped me.