(ThySistas.com) There is a certain freedom that arrives with age, and a good portion of it comes from finally understanding that you do not owe the world a narration of your days. Kerry Washington figured this out a long time ago, and without lecturing anybody, she has been showing the rest of us something worth sitting with.
So here is what actually happened. On September 10, the actress and her husband, former NFL cornerback Nnamdi Asomugha, turned up together at Jay-Z’s concert at the Stade de France in Saint-Denis, just outside Paris. A quick clip surfaced on her Instagram Stories and that was the extent of it. Nothing staged, nothing captioned half to death. Just the two of them bopping along while Hov ran his catalog and Justin Timberlake popped out for a surprise performance of “Holy Grail.” Scroll a touch too fast and you would have missed it. Then it was gone, tucked back into a life she does not hand over to strangers.
And that, Sistas, is exactly the lesson.
Somewhere along the line we got it into our heads that whatever a wife keeps offline must be something she is hiding. Skip a few anniversary tributes, quit posting the matching outfits and the captions about your king, and here come the whispers. She must be going through it. Trouble at home, surely. We let the algorithm start grading our devotion, and plenty of us handed over the red pen without a fight. Love, apparently, is not real anymore until it has been documented.
Kerry never signed that contract.
She married Asomugha back in 2013, and for more than 13 years now she has guarded the life they built with a steadiness most of Hollywood cannot fathom. Her babies are rarely seen. If she and Nnamdi fight, and show me the couple that does not, we never hear a word of it. On any given week she will do a red carpet, talk up a project, get real about the acting, and then she is gone, back to a corner of her life that belongs to nobody but the folks living inside it. Call it cold if you want to. I read it as somebody who simply knows where her own fence line sits.
And here is where a lot of us fumble it. We have started treating discretion and concealment like twins, and they are nothing of the sort.
Concealment is fear. It hides because it believes exposure would bring ruin. Discretion is another animal entirely. It is a woman deciding that some parts of her existence are simply not up for public consumption, not because they are shameful, but because they are sacred. One posture grows out of anxiety. The other grows out of dignity. That second lane is where she has always lived, and she does it without a hint of apology.
Black women, in particular, have been handed a strange and exhausting assignment. We are expected to perform our wellness. Show the world the flawless household. Post the smiling little ones. Prove, again and again, that we are thriving, that our men adore us, that our families are intact. And should we choose to keep quiet, the assumption is rarely that we are content. The assumption is that we are covering for something.
Sistas, we do not owe anybody that receipt.
Nobody is owed a parade of your husband across the timeline to confirm he treats you right. Your kids are not a photo exhibit for strangers to rate against their own. And you can absolutely sit on every rough patch, every argument, every three in the morning worry, without turning it into content for an audience that forgets you by lunchtime. What happens under your roof is yours. Full stop.
Now, people will twist this, so hear me clearly. Choosing privacy does not mean the woman has retreated from view. Far from it. If anything, her calendar right now is fuller than it has been in years.
Look at the run she is on. There is the starring turn on Apple’s series Imperfect Women, which she produced as well. There was that daring reimagining of Whoopi Goldberg’s classic solo piece at Lincoln Center, the one that took a show built for one and handed it to five performers, and Washington took her final bow on August 2 after a run that drew plenty of attention from critics. She is also set to star in and executive produce An Innocent Girl, a new Netflix thriller. Back in the winter she turned up as a presenter at the BAFTAs in London. On top of all that, the industry continues handing her major honors, the Spotlight Tribute at the Gotham TV Awards, a Lifetime Achievement nod from Essence at the Black Women in Hollywood gathering.
None of that is the behavior of somebody in hiding. It is the behavior of a grown woman who worked out, the hard way like most of us do, that you can be everywhere in your craft and still refuse to put your marriage on display. All of her fuel goes into the work, the producing, the causes she believes in. And when the day is done, she heads home, closes it all off, and keeps what is left for the handful of people who have actually earned a place in it.
That split is worth saying plainly, especially for the younger sisters watching us. Everything does not require an audience. Some joys shrink the instant you announce them. And a struggle only gets heavier once you invite a crowd to referee it. A union has plenty to manage without a comment section rendering verdicts on it.
I have known too many Black women who poured years into a good relationship, only to watch it come apart under the strain of performing it for everybody else. You get couples so busy polishing the appearance of happiness that they never get around to the dull, unglamorous work a partnership actually runs on. Patience does not come with a filter. Forgiveness has never once trended. And no clip going viral will ever stand in for two people picking each other on a plain old Tuesday, when the cameras are off and there is nothing to win.
Kerry understands this in her bones. Whatever she and Nnamdi have going, they grew it well away from the flashbulbs, and it held precisely because neither of them ever fed it to the beast.
So next time that itch hits, the one that says prove your happiness to folks who are not paying a single one of your bills, stop and ask what it is really about. Who exactly are you performing this for? Ask whether all that documentation is deepening your bond or slowly hollowing it out.
Black women are allowed a private self that is nobody’s business but our own. Your kitchen table, the bedroom, a lazy Sunday, none of it has to land on a grid for strangers to grade. You can be crazy about your husband and never once say his name online, and that quiet takes nothing away from what the two of you have.
That is the steady sermon Kerry Washington has been preaching for a whole career, one guarded, graceful choice at a time. My prayer for every last one of us Sistas is that we finally believe it. Protect your peace. Guard your home. And let the world go right on wondering.
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.