Chapter 2
Antoinette Floyd
The Things I Missed
Ihaven’t experienced depression like this since I lost my youngest daughter, Nivea.
Nivea’s death took a toll on me something terrible, and I just remember lying in bed for days at a time, and there wasn’t anything that anyone could do to help get me out of that funk.
My body truly couldn’t function the way that it needed to back then because I was heartbroken.
I was heartbroken because Nivea’s death was one of those things that could have been avoided.
My baby was in perfect health. She was a skinny thing, that loved to run, and work out, just like Dionne.
Her weight was something that she battled with, since a kid.
Nivea was always the smallest one in her age group.
As a kid, she was always underweight whenever I took her to doctor’s appointments because she was a stubborn, and picky eater.
I couldn’t get her to eat full meals like the rest of my daughters.
For dinner, she would want something like a dinner roll, or she would eat pieces of whatever meat that I would make.
With her weight, it caused her to be very insecure.
Mainly because my side of the family, a lot of the women were thick, and very curvaceous.
Freedom, and Tommi took after me with their weight.
Both had the same hourglass frame as me, and once they had children, their hips spread, and their asses grew.
Dionne didn’t take after me in weight, either, but Dionne had curves that Nivea didn’t have, and seeing the women around her, constantly made her insecure, no matter how much we would all tell her ow beautiful she was, and how perfect her shape was for her.
That girl did everything in her power to put added weight on her body.
Nivea was still living with me, so I watched her drink those high- calorie shakes.
It was the kind of shakes that doctors would recommend for kids when they were underweight.
The kind I tried to give her as a kid, but her stubborn ass wouldn’t take it.
She would go through protein bars, and then she got on birth control, thinking that it would fatten her up, but that didn’t work either.
During this, she would go to me, and her sisters, asking if we would pay for her cosmetic surgery.
Nivea wanted to get a BBL. None of us would give her the money because we didn’t support the decision.
It’s never been a hard task for either of my daughters to pull a nigga, so it wasn’t long before Nivea started messing around with someone, who funded the BBL.
I was pissed with that girl, and I was scared.
Scared because I knew how dangerous that specific surgery was.
We all tried to talk her out of it, but again, with that stubbornness that she had in her, she went and did it anyways.
My baby died from complications of the surgery.
Literally died the same day, and I haven’t been right in the head since.
I was never fully whole again after that happened.
Nivea was the child that was still living under my roof when she passed away, so we were very close.
We would come down and have breakfast every morning if she had slept here the night before.
I would still cook dinner for her, and we liked to watch those ghetto reality shows together on VH1 or BET.
I lost a child, and it completely tore me apart.
I asked God to not allow me to ever experience a pain like that again, yet here I was, years later, lying in my bed, in complete darkness, as I’m mourning a secret that my oldest daughter put on me a couple of days ago.
I couldn’t explain this hurt. I couldn’t explain this feeling. I felt like I’d failed as a mother.
I’ll admit that when my kids were younger, I wasn’t the perfect mom.
I started having my children when I was a teenager.
I was a young mom, and by the time I was in my middle twenties, I’d already had four daughters.
Having children so young, it’ll force you to feel like you missed out on something in life.
Back then, I felt like I was missing out on all the parties, hanging out with my girls, and just enjoying life.
With that, my girls spent a lot of their childhood with my mama.
My mom raised them for me. Free would go with her dad on the weekends, Dionne would go with her dad’s family, since Dionte was in prison, and Nivea would go with her father as well.
Tommie’s dad was the one that wasn’t shit, so Tommie was often with my mama.
I didn’t get my shit together until the girls got a little older, and that came from Nivea’s dad trying to take me to court, wanting custody of our daughter.
I got my shit together, and I became the mother for my daughters that they needed.
I worked, kept a roof over my children’s head, food on the table, and clothes on their backs.
If I entertained niggas, my kids wouldn’t be around.
I did my dirt with niggas while my kids were with their daddies or with my mom.
The one man that I brought around my kids, simply because I thought that I had fallen in love, he came around, and he did some nasty shit like this.
This was hurting me. I remember pretty much every phase of my kids life, so for the two days that I’ve been lying in this room, I kept thinking about the phase that Dionne went through when she was eleven years old.
Dionne has always been my child that was very moody, and very sensitive. Since she was a little girl, we would all get on her about how moody her ass was. She could literally be happy one minute, and then flip, and have the biggest attitude in the world with everyone the next minute.
I remember around the time when she was eleven years old, the mood changes had gotten worse.
I summed it up to knowing that she was getting ready to reach that age, puberty was getting ready to start, she was going to get a cycle, so I believed that’s what was happening.
To know now that I’d ignored the signs and didn’t catch up on what was going on with my own daughter is what was causing me so much pain.
I couldn’t get her screams out of my head from the other morning in church.
Again, Dionne was my very sensitive child, so when she initially started crying, I didn’t think much of it because Dionne cries in church just about every Sunday.
When the cries got louder, and they turned into screams, and some of the women at church had to come over, and help me with her, I knew then that it was something deeper.
I knew then that our pastor screaming, and preaching about releasing pain, and trauma is what was troubling her.
This past year, my daughter has allowed herself to live with so much punishment that she’s put on herself because of the part that she played with Garrus, so I thought that those may have been the reason for her cries as well, but again, when I could no longer handle her in church on my own, and people had to come over, and help me with her, I knew it was more.
I’ve been drowning in tears, and regret since.
No matter how many times Dionne has told me that she wasn’t angry at me, and that she didn’t blame me for what happened to her, I felt like she should have.
She had every right to be angry at me, and to blame me because I let that man into my home.
.. into the sacred placed where my daughters laid their heads, and I ultimately failed her.
I don’t see how I would ever get past this, let alone forgive my own self for it happening.
As I lay in my room in bed, the fact that my phone wasn’t vibrating anymore, just let me know that my phone must have died. It had been vibrating since this morning, and I’ve had yet to move, and even attempt like I was going to answer it.
Suddenly, my front door was opening, and because I haven’t left the house in two days, you could hear my alarm system going off. The alarm was still armed, since there hadn’t been any movement on my end to disarm it.
The fact that whoever had let themselves inside my house knew the code to the alarm, I knew that it was probably one of my kids because they each had keys to my house, along with knew the alarm code. I knew that it was only a matter of time before one of them came looking for me.
“Maaaaaa!” it was Tommie screaming for me.
“Girl, where you at? I been calling you all morning. Make me feel like you got a nigga laid up in the bed with you!” Tommie fussed right after the alarm stopped making all that noise because she went ahead and disarmed it.
“Ma. Where you at na?” she screamed again, and I could hear her coming up the stairs now.
It wasn’t long before I heard her out in the hallway, and seconds later, my bedroom doors were pushed open.
“Why you got it so dark in here? Girl, what you got going on?” she asked, and then I heard her tumble, as if she’d just tripped over something. I didn’t hear her hit the floor, so she must have been able to hold onto something, breaking the fall.
“Damn ma,” she cursed.
I felt her moving around the room, and not long after, the curtains in my bedroom were being pulled back, which gave light to the room that hadn’t been in here in days.
Once Tommie turned around, and she saw me in bed, you could tell that she was about to attempt to get on me about not answering the phone for her, plus the way she almost bust her ass in this dark ass room, but she read the room perfectly, saw that something was indeed wrong with me, and that’s when the look on her face softened.
“What’s wrong with you? You sick?” she asked, coming over to the bed, putting her knee in it, so that she could lean over, and like the mom that she was, who at times thought that she was my damn mama, she put her hand on my forehead, just to check if I had a temperature, but I didn’t.