As a married man, few things are more revealing (and annoying) than hearing your wife repeat things that your mother used to tell you at age 16. Now some of these things, of course, you’re already aware of—you eat slow, you’re cranky in the morning, it takes you forever to get dressed…yeah, whatever. Other times, you opt to drown out the waves of nagging maternal proverbs that crash against your ears so frequently. After all, it’s just talk, right? Rarely.
As stubborn, prideful men, we can ignore how hard it can be to get things through to us. Hence, nagging. But we ignore…because? Nagging—and therein lies the dilemma. For me, however, only one other person in my life consistently warned me “everybody you hang out with, ain’t your friend.” That was my mother. Looking back, I couldn’t decide whether she said that because of the increasing array of “friends” that I entertained or that she feared for my safety as a part of a group of young, teenaged boys or because she just didn’t like whom I was hanging out with. It really was neither. She ALWAYS feared for my safety with me being a Black male teenager. But, hearing the same thing ten years later, was a little more than dejavu. It was downright eerie. So much so that I finally had to consider whether these claims bore any truth. So, I asked them both to explain. First, individually, and got pretty much what I expected. Secondly, I made the mistake of bring the subject up in their presence at the same time and proceeded to watch these two women trade shots about my social life like a baseline tennis rally.
Other than questioning whether I should go to the back bedroom while “grown folks were talking,” they brought to my eyes a pattern of my investing in one-way friendships.
