When is it My Time to Cry - Softcover

Craig, Dr. Jo Anne M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1463409613 ISBN 13: 9781463409616

Verlag: AuthorHouse Publishing, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

This book begins with the past and ends with the future for Olivia. She has lost two sons within 5yrs and 8months of each other. She has gone through incest and rape as a young child. She lived with an aunt that made her life a living hell, and she goes through a divorce after 32 years of marriage. The walls end up coming down on her and it is at this moment that all she has gone through the deaths of her sons, the hurt, the lost of her parents and the rapes that occurred, it all begins to resurface. All that she thought she had forgiven people for, she finds that deep down inside she never trully forgave them at all.

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When Is It My Time To Cry

By Jo Anne M. Craig

AuthorHouse

Copyright © 2011 Dr. Jo Anne M. Craig
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4634-0961-6

Chapter One

A Strong Black Woman

Olivia's story traces the present, the past and the future. In the past eleven years of her life she has had one tragedy after another starting on June 7, 1998, with the death of her oldest son, Michael, at 24. Eleven years later she found herself sitting and asking herself, "When Is It My Time to Cry?"

The thing that scared her the most during all her tragedies was that one day it would all come crashing down on her and she would not be able to handle it. She never really had the chance to mourn as a mother should upon the death of a child because she was so busy caring for and being supportive of everyone else. Someone had to be strong for they were all feeling a hurt that would never go away. Funeral arrangements had to be made. Gene, her husband, was in his own little world and she was forbidden to enter. He wanted only one thing, and that was his son, who was now gone. He shut everything and everyone out of his life at that point, and later there would be hell to pay for the lost of his son. Gene did not even have the courage to go with her to purchase a burial suit for Mike or to clean out his car. He was lost in his own world and she knew she would not be able to reach him for now, and he would seek solace in the bottle.

Finally her worst fear had come true, and now she sees a therapist twice a month. There is an old saying, "The straw that finally broke the camel's back." She began to feel worthless, and every morning it took an effort to get up. She wanted her sons, and as she began to think about them she wept. Her cry is an uncontrollable sob, a sob that hurts so terribly and so deeply within her that she cannot explain it.

She has a doctorate in education. Through all the tragedies of her life since 1998 she never gave up on her education and continued to strive to complete her program despite the obstacles. Her children have always seen her as a strong black woman, a role model and inspiration in their lives, and would not have wanted her to give up on her education no matter what.

At one point Olivia felt her life was worth nothing. She felt useless and empty. She wanted more, she wanted to do something to make her feel complete and satisfied with her life now that she had no one to care for any longer. She wanted to add to her resume, to prove to herself and others that she was worth something because by now she felt she was a complete failure. With an education and a degree that she felt were completely worthless. She felt an emptiness she had never felt before, and she could not handle it. She thought and thought about what it was she really wanted to do once again to make her feel complete as a woman and a human being.

She thought of going into medicine the field of nephrology and cardiac care to help the sick and comfort them, and perhaps find a cure to help save lives. She took a job at a local hospital to help fulfill that desire. There she got her first taste and experience of racial and age discrimination. Besides everything else she had been through, this made the walls cave in on her. She was afraid that one day she would reach a breaking point where everything would just come down on her and she would just 'lose it' completely. She was still grieving and hurting inside—the job was just a bandage on her grief. She hoped to give back to those who had given so much care to her children. Working at the hospital and becoming a pre-med student would be a way of healing for her. She thought that her way of dealing with everything that had happened to her, was keeping as busy as she could, would help. She would not have an idle mind and would not have to think about or deal with her losses and disappointments.

Discrimination is one of those things that you would think would not exist in 2009. However, Olivia has always said that discrimination was only hiding in the closet for a while and would come out again and expose itself buck naked. She was very grateful not to have been born in the South because she knew she would never have survived racial discrimination. She said, "They would have lynched me for sure, and given lynching a new meaning. I would have been the defiant Negro. Whenever they ordered me to do this or that, I would have told them to do it themselves—I am not your maid. I would probably have gone into establishments that said "Whites only," and I know that they would have looked at me and asked, "Who the hell do you think you are, nigger?" Growing up in the South would definitely have shortened her life because her actions and mouth surely would have gotten her killed. She would have been an advocate, always fighting for the cause of the Blacks, opposing the injustices they were enduring.

She would have marched with Dr. Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership every time they said, "Let's march." She has often envisioned herself as Harriet Tubman, freeing as many slaves as she could. She has always believed that we are all created equal, and no human being should be enslaved by another human being. She would rebel against the inhumanity of it.

Olivia had heard the stories, and had been denied the right to learn the truth about the history of her people. She always knew deep down that there was more to their history than what was taught in the schools. In her high school American History class, she asked the teacher, "Why don't we have Black History?" Of course, that was unheard of when she went to school, and even today we have had to fight to learn our history. Olivia has always yearned to learn more about black history because she always felt she came from a heritage that was beautiful and even felt that she had royalty in her blood. Therefore, it is of utmost importance to her to know where she comes from and who her ancestors were.

As children we all have fantasies about what we want to be when we grow up. Olivia wanted to be a lawyer, one of the best black female lawyers on the East Coast. However, because of situations and circumstances in her life she took a different avenue and became an educator. During her college years she realized that she might have chosen the wrong profession and should have gone into medicine. She entered school as a returning adult in the area of higher education after being out of school for more than sixteen years.

As a student, she had to help her spouse by earning a living to help pay the bills at home and support three children as well. She took a job as a companion and then entered private duty home-care nursing. In 1978 she gave birth to a beautiful bouncing baby boy, ending her child-bearing days. At ten months he became very sick and was rushed to the hospital. At that moment she could never have imagined what lay on the road ahead for her and her family.

Her son Chad was diagnosed with hypogammanimia and would have to be injected with gamma globulin for the rest of his life. He was the eighth child and the second Black child in the United States with this disease. Dr. Maryellen Connelly, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, later the head of the Tennessee Children's Hospital, was responsible for finding the source of Chad's disease and diagnosing it correctly. It was only after her endless testing and her researching of Olivia's family history that she was able to make a correct diagnosis. Olivia spent the next 25 years running back and forth to Children's Hospital of Philadelphia with her son, at the same...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: AuthorHouse Publishing
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1463409613
• ISBN 13: 9781463409616
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 164
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland