Why Does H.T. Have Zero Confidence?

By: H.T., H.T.’s Blog

To understand why I’m like this, we have to look at all the obvious relevant points about the world around me. While my mother could be considered a single mother, I can’t say I’ve been longing of my father for most of my life. However, it must be noted that my father also grew up in a very predominantly female household, so his outlook on things aren’t far off from what I saw in ways, but I’ll get back to that.

For me, I think if there was ever an accurate explanation for why I’m so broken at my core like this, I hate to say it but it does on some level tie to my mother, as cliche as it sounds. See, I think as I’ve tried to explain to therapists, teachers and other grown men who turned on me because they were trying to fuck my mom, I think the reason I struggle now is because my mom uses a lot of the logic we now see in women like Paris Milan and Cynthia G in that the belief is that my entire idea of what I should become as far as dating-wise should be in the image of many single women that have shown they have bad dating choices themselves. See, my confidence has always been sapped because, and it’s not a huge leap to say this, I was raised to be the guy that my mom wished she could have turned my father into or just into the type of ideal man that she thinks the world needs. In short, whether she’ll admit it or not, my deep need to rebel and reject all that she taught me is because she has never understood what such a fate looks like to ME, nor does she care how it affects me. For her, I would be so much happier if I just went back and became what she tried to raise me to be, but what she’s never understood is what such a fate looks like for me. In my own words, every black man I’ve ever known that became the kind of man I find myself lost in walking away from has been the epitome of every broken spiritually yet financially stable man we’ve all ever known, every man my age that walked away from being the kind of man that my mother wishes I’d be is happy, and every man that I know that caved and did it were seemed to always have a look in their eyes that screamed for help and a spirit that says “…well at least they’re proud of me!”

The reason despite being smart enough to run that I still feel very unconfident is that I don’t know how to move in a society not built like the one I was raised to live in my whole childhood. For me, my 20s has been me unlearning years of logic that frankly would have made me an unabashed educated lame. The reason I still have very little confidence is because deep in my heart of hearts, I fear there will come a day where I’ll have no choice but to go back and be what my mother wanted. Even now as I study for my IT certification, there’s still a part of me that fears I’ll still become what she wished I’d be. But then I realize I can’t because even when I get said certification, even when I get a better job there’s still going to be a part of me that on some level will disappoint my mother and that gives me some semblance of comfort and potentially confidence. I do not take my issues with my mother on all black women, not anymore anyways as I’ve lived long enough to know that plenty of black women are similar to her in some ways but do not share her negative traits. Honestly, if there was ever a single emotion to sum up how I feel towards my mother, it’s simply frustration. Frustration because deep down this woman wants me to be miserable as long as the end result LOOKS better but doesn’t FEEL better. Keep in mind, this is a woman that still gets upset that I have premarital sex, smoke weed, drink, and that I don’t have a job that makes more money or that I don’t have a degree. In short, she has very classist views that I can’t jive with any further.

To understand my mother, you must understand you’re dealing with a woman with a bit of an ego due to the fact she graduated from college with a degree in chemical engineering and is very accomplished in other aspects of her life. And, unlike all the women that Gil pointed out that are very educated but offer little relationship wise, my mother is by no means a slouch. She’s a good cook, men love her, she’s stylish, she can sing, and is objectively a good mother. But here’s the thing, and I know even if they won’t say it the same way I’ll say it, they’ll agree with me on some level: my mom is an asshole. I love her, I always will, but the thing that drives men away and drive me to the point where I’ve had psychotic breaks and almost killed her is that frankly the woman has no fucking line and it’s why I prefer to be more around the rest of my family because we all can agree that we love the woman but she doesn’t know when to stop, which is likely why she’s been single, or at least unmarried, my whole life (she often brings up that she was engaged 4 times, one of those men being my father).

I blame my mother for my sapped confidence because I just hit the point where I realized I am at the point where there’s really nothing left that requires me to play to what she wants from me, but at the same time, where I and I alone exist in the grand scheme of things is a very…interesting place. I fear having game because I never really seem to get it from people I wouldn’t mind being like in some capacity UNTIL I came to Onyx Truth. When it comes to things like being labeled “free food” and friends fucking my dates, please understand that such things have changed in recent years, but yet there are things I hold on to for good reason. When it comes to women, especially the women I keep in my life as purely platonic figures, I keep them there because when it come to things LIKE women, I do not like to go off instincts because frankly I see a loss with a woman a better fate that what could be a potential shit show trying to wing it with random women who I don’t know. In short, I’m not a very shoot from the hip guy, I’m more a wannabe sniper really. I don’t care about numbers, just results.

I blame my mother and not the other women around her as frankly my mother was the most delusional of all the women that raised me, and that includes my father’s sisters. For my father’s sisters, all of them are mothers, 2 are married, 3 have sons, and for my great aunts and uncles that raised me, honestly the reason I didn’t listen to them wasn’t anger or the like, it was that they were people that had a less authoritarian bent to the lessons they were trying to teach me, unlike my mom. See, my grandmother, my grandmother’s siblings and their children all have a giant difference in their lives between how my mother was raised versus how THEY were raised. My cousins were (for the most part) not what you would qualify as a Pookie or Ray Ray, if anything they were your round the way, hard working, had a kid or two, and they are people that didn’t think of themselves as special or the like. Then there’s my mother.

To understand why my mother frustrates me, it’s simply arrogance, and while she can argue that it’s somewhat earned, the fact that in ways she’s only better superficially because of factors that are very fragile by nature and in many ways are not different than most of her family that she claims to be better than. Sure, I’ll admit I was raised in a family full of single mothers, but what drives me the most nuts about my mother as opposed to the rest of the women in my family is that to this day, maybe because I’m one of the few men born in our family, maybe because like all the other men I exist as one of the older male descendants of my great grandmother, or maybe simply because of my mother just being who she is, I never got the pressure from any other woman in our family to be a certain type of man to right some sort of wrong that some other man in our family had done. Sure, my great aunts to this day still point out that I’m the only adult man in our family with a half functioning life, but there has never been a pressure to FIX something.

So the question remains: why do you have such a broken spirit about women, HT? Because frankly, going back to my father, unlike him, my mother didn’t have life humble her and such unlike him, my mother still wanted to meet an agenda rather than me be happy. My father loved his mother and still does even after losing her to cancer, my grandmother wasn’t an easy woman to deal with always but I can tell you the woman was caring loving and could rationalize just about any of the things her grandchildren faced as we had been raised to not get involved in the potentially worse things out there. For me, I think the reason my spirit is so broken with women is because the first woman I was supposed to learn to love has such an arrogant stick up her ass about how much better she is than every other woman around her age in our family that deep down I take that resentment out on other women and myself in ways.

The other women in my family have multiple kids, some by different men, my cousin has multiple children by almost as many mothers, as does his father. My family is not perfect, never has been, but perfection is far too narrow a margin to constantly try and meet and that is why I have such a deep resentment towards myself and others as far as confidence. My whole life my mother made me feel as though all the people that loved and cared for me were somehow these wretched creatures that failed because they hadn’t reached her heights of success before they had kids too, but she never gets that the reason the world around them is less hostile to them than say, her or me, is because they don’t have HER level of arrogance. For me, I feel so awkward because in the grand scheme of things, I am very much being humbled by the world I live in as my mother very much trained me to be this great scion of black society that would come in and basically become her. The problem is, I don’t want to become her because frankly I’ve seen first hand her pros are pretty surface and can be done without being her, but her cons are clear as day character flaws that on some level I’ve grown up realizing I need to unlearn. Frankly everyone who listened to me talk about my dating life are right in that something is knocked out of place with me and I’ve been trying to get back in place.