(ThySistas.com) My mentor Miss Everlyn kept a set of china wrapped in tissue paper for thirty years. Rosebuds along the rim, gold trim that caught the light just so. She fed me off chipped everyday plates in her kitchen while those pretty things sat behind glass in the dining room, waiting on a moment grand enough to deserve them. Death came before that moment ever did. Her niece got the set after she passed and does the same thing with it to this day. That is how these habits move through a family. Nobody sits you down and teaches them. You just watch and absorb and end up doing it yourself before you notice. I think about her whenever my hand skips over the good perfume and grabs the cheap body spray instead. Old reflex. Hard to shake.
There is a particular grief in helping clean out a loved one’s home and finding the finest belongings untouched. Tags still hanging off the blouse she bought for a trip she kept postponing. Candles burned down maybe half an inch, then set aside for some rainy day that never actually came. A scarf folded up so many years the creases would not fall out anymore. You stand there holding evidence of a woman who believed the reward was always somewhere up ahead, never here, never now, never on a plain Tuesday when nothing in particular was happening.
Somewhere along the way we absorbed a strange arithmetic. Beauty gets rationed. Pleasure has to be earned through suffering first, then doled out in tiny approved portions. The soft robe stays in the drawer until company comes. That lipstick that makes you feel like yourself waits for an event worthy of it. And the event, being imaginary, tends not to show up.
Sistas, I want to talk plainly about who taught us this.
A whole lot of us grew up watching women hold everything together with two hands and no applause. They gave and gave and rarely kept a single lovely thing for themselves without feeling guilty about it. So we learned that our own comfort was optional, that pleasure was frivolous, that a woman who lavishes nice things on herself might be vain or selfish or getting above her station. That lesson sank into the bone. Now here we are, grown, financially able to buy the perfume, and still spritzing it once a season like it might run out before the apocalypse.
It will not run out. And if it does, they make more.
The dishes are the part that undoes me most. Consider how many family dinners passed on ordinary stoneware because the beautiful ones were saved for a company that stopped visiting years ago. Consider the birthdays, the plain Sunday suppers, the random weeknight your child said something so funny you nearly choked on your food. Those were the occasions. Those were the whole point of the thing. There was never going to be a fancier version of your one wild life waiting in the wings.
My friend Denise lost her husband young. After the funeral she told me she kept opening cabinets and finding items the two of them had been saving. A bottle of fine bourbon waited for an anniversary that never got old enough. Wine glasses sat boxed in their cardboard. She poured herself a drink in one of those glasses that night and cried, not only from missing him but from the sheer waste of it, all that postponed sweetness gathering dust while they ate off paper towels on the couch and told themselves the real living started later.
Later is a con. It has been picking our pockets our whole lives.
I made a decision a while back that shifted something in me, small but real. I started using the beautiful stuff. Wore the good earrings to the grocery store. Lit the pricey candle while doing nothing more remarkable than folding laundry and watching a rerun. Ate breakfast off the rosebud plate on a random Wednesday, just me, just coffee, just the pleasure of a morning that belonged to nobody else. Nothing terrible happened. The plate did not shatter under the weight of an unearned meal. The wax did not judge me. I simply felt, for a moment, like a person worth the nice version of things.
For generations, many Black women have lived under expectations to be strong, self-reliant, nurturing, and willing to put everybody else’s needs ahead of their own. We are told to hold on, to make a way, to sacrifice now for a payoff that may or may not materialize down the road. Endurance like that keeps families standing and communities alive, and I would never wave it off. But somewhere in all that holding on, we quietly agreed to postpone our own joy, as though joy were a luxury tax we could not yet afford. That agreement is overdue for revisiting.
Joy is not the prize at the finish line. It is the fuel. Think of it as the thing that keeps a body upright through the long haul, and hoarding it does not preserve it. Hoarding it just leaves you tired and unadorned in a house full of pretty untouched objects.
So burn the candle. Wear the dress out even if the reason is merely Thursday. Break out the china for the grandbabies and let them eat their macaroni off the plates edged in gold, and if one gets chipped, so be it. A chip is proof the thing got loved instead of entombed. Spray the perfume on a walk to your mailbox. Put on the silk. Drink the fine bourbon while the person you cherish is still across the table to clink glasses with you.
Sistas, the someday you keep waiting for is a mirage that recedes as you approach it. It always will. The good moment is not en route. It is the one you are standing in, unnoticed, plain and quietly perfect, right this second with the light coming through the kitchen window and the coffee going cold in your hand.
Miss Everlyn stays on my mind, her and that locked cabinet both. This was the woman who showed me how to season a pot and stand up straight and talk back to people who tried to make me small. She gave me plenty. But she could not manage to eat one regular dinner off her own nice china, and that has stuck with me more than most of what she meant to teach. So I went and bought my own set. I actually use mine. Those dishes have held more birthday cake and weeknight spaghetti in two years than hers held in thirty behind that cabinet glass. Setting the table, I feel her close by. Part of me hopes she approves. Part of me wishes somebody had told her all this back when she still had time to do something about it.
Stop saving your best self for a stranger called Someday. He never shows. And if he somehow did, you would just cook up one more excuse to keep him standing at the door.
Live now. Pour the wine. Wear the good coat. You are the special occasion you have been dressing up for all along.
Staff Writer: Brenda Poole
BP writes about entertainment, relationships, faith, and life in general… She enjoys speaking on things Black women can relate to and hopefully giving a sista something useful along the way…
Feel free to email her at BrendaP@ThySistas.com.