(ThySistas.com) Sunday mornings get quiet in a certain way, especially when the coffee is good and the phone is already in your hand. Last week I was sitting there scrolling and a woman I went to college with popped up. She had on white linen, standing at the edge of one of those bungalows built out over the water, someplace I will never afford, lit like she brought her own photographer. Gratitude, the caption said. Blessed. And there it was, that mean little pinch under the ribs, right on time. Fifty-three years old and it still gets me. Old enough to know better, clearly not old enough to quit.
Most of my adult years have been spent listening to music for a living, writing about it, arguing about it, loving it past all reason. So let me tell you what that pinch called to mind. Years back a young singer walked me through how a record really gets made. You hear three minutes that sound like they came out of her that easy. What you never hear is the forty takes it took, the tuning software running quietly in the back, the engineer gluing the best word from one pass onto the best breath from another. The song feels true. Making it is a whole different business. Anybody who has spent real time in a studio knows how wide the gap runs between the mix and the moment.
That gap is the thing nobody warns us about online. What scrolls past all day is the mix. Mastered, compressed, sweetened, released. And too many of us, sisters worth loving and admiring, are out here trying to compete with the master when we are still living in the raw session, coffee breath and unpaid bills and a child who woke up cranky. We measure our behind the scenes against everybody else’s highlight reel, then wonder why the spirit sits low.
Beauty is where the trap gets set earliest and tightest for us. Black women have always carried a complicated inheritance around our faces and our hair, and the internet took that old wound and monetized it. Now the standard is not simply a pretty woman. It is a woman with a ring light, a surgeon on retainer, a colorist, a lace front that costs more than a starter car, and an app that quietly shaves an inch off her waist before the picture ever reaches you. Teenage girls and grown women alike stare into that filtered mirror and decide their actual face has failed some exam nobody agreed to sit for. The cruelty is that the face being compared against does not exist. It is a composite. Nobody can lose a race against a woman who was assembled in software.
Then there is the travel. Lord, the travel. The timeline these days runs like a passport stamp parade, one sister in Santorini, another draped across a yacht off some coast the rest of us cannot pronounce correctly, a third posing barefoot in Bali with a caption about healing her feminine energy. A good trip is nothing to begrudge anybody. But there is a difference between going somewhere and performing having gone. Some of what shows up is packaged, comped, or financed on a card that will haunt somebody come March. The whole point of the post is to make an ordinary Tuesday feel like a kind of failure. And it works. A woman who owns her home and raised three decent children can end up feeling small because she has never seen the Amalfi coast. That hunger is manufactured. Somebody sold it to her.
Marriage is where it gets genuinely dangerous. The soft focus proposal videos, the anniversary trips, the man who surprises her with a car and a speech, the caption that reads he is my best friend and my king. Enough wine shared with enough women teaches you the arithmetic here. Some of the couples posting hardest may be struggling in ways the camera never shows. That is not cynicism. It is a reminder that a performance of devotion is not necessarily devotion. Some of those kings are barely home. Some of those queens are crying in the guest bathroom before they wipe their face and shoot the anniversary reel. When a wife starts comparing her quiet, decent, unglamorous husband to a stranger’s edited fairytale, a good marriage can start to feel like a disappointment. That is theft of the highest order, and it happens without a sound.
The gifts are their own small theater. A shoebox full of red bottoms, a birthday table buried under designer bags, jewelry photographed on a hand with a fresh set. It gets presented as love made visible, and maybe sometimes it is. But enough years of watching people teach you something. The loudest displays are rarely the deepest ones. My own mother stayed married forty years to a man who never once bought her a luxury handbag and loved her so thoroughly she still talks to his photograph. Nobody filmed that. It would not have gone viral. It was simply the actual thing, unmixed and unmastered, and it was worth more than every red sole ever manufactured.
Now they have come for motherhood, which grieves the heart most of all. The polished child is a strange new creature. Matching outfits, immaculate nurseries in dusty pink and cream, the toddler who eats organic and never throws his plate, the caption about how motherhood completed her. Meanwhile a true mother somewhere is watching this at two in the morning with spit up on her shoulder, convinced she is failing at the one thing everybody promised would come naturally. There is nothing natural about a photo shoot. Raising a child is exhausting and unphotogenic and holy, and it does not resemble a catalog. Letting the catalog become the measuring stick robs young mothers of the plain truth that struggling is not the same as failing.
My mind keeps going back to Nina, to Anita, to Sade and Jill and Erykah, the women whose voices raised a whole generation of us. What made them undeniable was never being flawless. It was the crack in the note, the hurt you could hear sitting right under all that control. We loved the flaw, we did not just tolerate it. That is the lie the feed keeps selling, that being polished is the point. The best music Black women ever made hit us hard for one plain reason. It never once tried to hide the ache.
So here is what I am learning, slow as it comes at my age. When that pinch shows up, call it what it is. What you see on the screen is a mix, not somebody’s whole life. Put the phone down and go play a record instead, something with a little grit on it. And remember your own days, bills and gray hairs and all, are happening live right now while everybody else is handing you a recording. No shame lives in the raw take. It is the only honest thing any of us has got.
Staff Writer; Raven Jones
Raven writes about music, relationships, and the everyday ups and downs of Black women… She keeps it honest, encourages other sistas, and can be reached at RavenJ@ThySistas.com.