From the Panama Canal Zone to rooms in three countries
I built a woman the world could not turn away. Then I found out what it cost.
The Canal Zone
I grew up in the Panama Canal Zone. My father wore the police officer's uniform and the boxer's gloves, and to the whole neighborhood he was Uncle Oscar. He was strict. He was beloved. He was dapper. He built a stereo system piece by piece from parts mailed in from the States so he could sit in the living room with his eyes closed and let Caruso and Mario Lanza fill the room.
He never knew his own father. So when he became a man he reached for the most extreme examples of masculinity available to him, and he raised three daughters under a doctrine that had no room for the thing his own father had never given him.
He loved. He loved loud, through calypso and through opera and through the Anglican hymns he sang on the Sundays my Baptist grandmother did not need him at her church.
He loved through everything except the one thing I needed.
Seventeen hours
I was twenty-two, visibly pregnant, standing at the door of our house on my way to a friend's wedding. My father looked at me and said five words. You're going looking like that.
He did not say I love you. He did not say I am proud of you. He did not say come home safe.
I went anyway.
I left my thirteen month old daughter with my parents in Panama and I went to Kansas, to a Baptist college in a town I had never seen, in a country I had never lived in. Baccalaureate at ten in the morning. Graduation at two. Wedding at five. On a plane the next morning to New York for a Monday job interview.
Seventeen hours, baccalaureate to airplane. Then I started to build.
The building
A bachelor's in psychology. A master's in counseling. A second master's in social work. A doctorate in social welfare. A clinical license, two psychoanalytic certificates, a certification in alcoholism counseling. A private practice I ran for forty years with clients in three countries.
I founded the African American Heritage Club and ran it for fifteen years. I adopted a school in Kumasi, Ghana, the John William Montessori School, one classroom when I found it and a multi-level building with dormitories by the time we were done. I built a directory of faith-affirming therapists so that no grieving woman walking into an office would be asked to check her faith at the door.
I brought my daughter back to me. I stayed married to the same man for fifty-six years. I have a grandson.
And every one of those things was a way of saying two words I never said out loud.
Daddy, look.
The cathedral
Years after my father died, I walked into a cathedral in Panama on the one Sunday a year when every Episcopal church in the country meets in one place. And I saw, across the room, the doctor whose negligence had killed my father, walking toward my mother.
I had spent years trying to bring a case against that man and failed. My brother and sister had told me to let it go. I had never let it go.
I stepped between him and my mother, and I said what I had been waiting years to say.
I expected to feel avenged. I did not.
What I felt was my father standing behind me. Not the disciplinarian. Not the boxer. The version of him that had been trapped inside all of that his whole life, waiting for a daughter who would fight for him the way he had never known how to fight for himself.
And I understood, standing there, that everything I had built was not my answer to his silence.
It was my inheritance of his love.
I did not need to earn what was already mine.
What I do now
I am seventy-nine years old. I have been in this body my whole life and I did not always know how to speak on its behalf. I do now.
I spend my time in three places. In private coaching with women who need one room where they do not have to be impressive. On stages, in front of rooms of women who have been fine for a very long time. And in retreats and gatherings, where women stop pretending in front of each other and find out the ceiling does not fall in.
My husband Lee and I divide our time between New York and Panama. Our daughter Nadine has a son named Makani, who is witty and who I am watching very carefully, because I know what it looks like when a child learns to swallow things.
I am grateful for what I was given. I use it to bless other people. That is the whole job.
Doctorate in Social Welfare · Master of Social Work · Master of Arts in Counseling · Bachelor of Arts in Psychology · Licensed Clinical Social Worker · Two postgraduate certificates in psychoanalytic psychotherapy · Certification in alcoholism counseling · Executive Director, coach, speaker and trainer, The John Maxwell Team · Certified DISC Behavior Analysis Trainer and Consultant · Diversity and inclusion trainer and consultant · Board service with multiple nonprofit organizations
You have done enough. You have earned enough. You have loved enough. To put it down.
Whether you are booking a speaker for a conference in New York, looking for private coaching, or looking for one room where you can stop performing, the next step is the same conversation.
Wounded. Not broken.