Do you remember where you were and what you were doing on Nov. 29, 1994? It was Tuesday. Boyz II Men’s “On Bended Knee” was #1 on the Billboard charts but there was no such romance in the mix for me.
I was fresh off a 9 and a half-month pregnancy, nursing a 27-day-old baby boy, who didn’t latch onto my breast properly. He bit, chewed and sucked ferociously at my cracked nipples. Feeding time was painful and had me on the verge of tears. Breastfeeding my newborn wasn’t the only thing that had me in my feelings. It was also the defeat that came with foolish decisions, and the sadness that I connected to on My Life, Mary J. Blige’s highly-anticipated second album that played in the background, as I cradled my baby in my bosom. I was a young single mother with a drug-dealing baby daddy who was sitting in jail juggling me and his other baby mama, who had also given birth to his baby 28 days ago. Yes, you read that right—her baby was born one day before my baby.
This wasn’t a secret. Our relationship was a toxic fling that began the summer of 1992 when What’s The 411? dropped. It was all fun and fucking until it wasn’t. The next two years involved a tug-of-war and love for his attention and validation among other things. The competition of it all did wonders for masking the hurt but Mary belting out her pain on My Life brought it to head:
Life can be only what you make it
When you’re feeling down
You should never fake it
Losing at love hadn’t fractured my heart but Mary’s throaty vocals, singing her shattered heart out, over a remixed instrumental of Roy Ayers’ “Sunshine” was enough to break a young girl’s heart and leave it forever broken. She too had lost love and experienced public embarrassment in her relationship with K-Ci from Jodeci. I was gutted by her rendition of Rolls Royce’s 1970s classic hit “Going Down.” It was hard not to identify in “Be With You”:
I can’t deal with the fact that you don’t want me around / Why you wanna see me down? / It’s so unusual that you don’t love me no more / Why you wanna close the door?
When she sang “Don’t Go” it was hard to ignore the despair I felt becoming a statistic for a nigga who was doing time, had gaslighted me, consumed me and disposed of me.
Don’t leave me, leave me, leave me / Don’t go, don’t go
Sad song after sad song, it was hard not to sing along and drag that heartache across 17 tracks for 64 minutes and 59 seconds. It was necessary. Spending time with My Life was cathartic. Contrary to popular belief, the heavy ballads carried messages of hope:
Take your time, baby, don’t you rush a thing/
Don’t you know I know we all are struggling/
I know it is hard, but we will get by/
And if you don’t believe in me, just believe in He, yeah/
‘Cause He’ll give you peace of mind (yes, He would)/
And you will see the sunshine (for real, yes, you would)/
And you’ll get to free your mind/
And things will turn out fine/
Oh, I know that things will turn out fine/
Yes, they would, yes they would, ayy (my life, my life, my life)/
(My life, in the sunshine)/
These lyrics pushed listeners to the brighter side of the album, urging broken spirits to look inward, to trust themselves, to be “Happy”:
How can I love somebody else/ If I can’t love myself enough to know / When it’s time / Time to let go
Sampled from Curtis Mayfield’s “You’re So Good To Me,” Mary created a Black girl affirmation to use as a mantra to pull herself up from the lowly depths of loving a nigga, to dust herself off and polish herself up—I did that. I stopped pining for that man to love me enough to not hurt me.
My Life was a departure from What’s The 411? in that Mary had not only helped us process pain but also move past it. Her vulnerability proved that she was human and she was one of us. She dropped the soundtrack to our young lives 30 years ago and 30 years later that memory still resonates well into our AUNTIE era.
Happy Birthday My Life.
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