Product Of My Environment: The Autobiography of Nicole Newman

by Nicole Newman

How do I begin? How do I journal my purpose? The year 2009 started out with a bang! The seeds of the entrepreneurial forest the Creator planted on my heart in 2006 were beginning to bear fruit! Accomplishing the goal is so close I can feel and touch it. The wealth and abundance is so close, I can taste it. BUT as the remembrance of God is the center of my entire world, and on this journey it is up to Him, and He willed that I STOP. So, how do I begin, how do I begin without breaking down and crying…. How do I open up the book to let you know, my pain is the pain of my children, my parents, my culture, my country and my nation? As the Creator has shown me many times, It is as if it were said to me, “Your pain and sadness was brought on so you could LOVE deeply; see the depth of your pain is the depth of your LOVE. The depth of my pain from being a shy, overweight teenager with very low self-esteem is still there; The depth of my pain from being stabbed in the face, neck and arms (just missing my jugular vein) with a butcher knife on the 15th street platform at 3:30 in the afternoon by my ex-best friend is still there; from having a father who has never said he loved me; from breaking my femur bone in a car accident while on my way back to college and having to sit out a semester is still there… And the depth of my pain from being single; an unmarried woman, who on the clutches of experiencing the phenomenon of birth, gets the cruel blow of an 8-month still born child on what was supposed to be a beautiful day for a baby shower. That pain caused 350 days of depression which shut down my reproductive system. Shawn Aaron Newman, you will forever be in my heart. Now I have to make room to add the depth of my children’s pain from having a father who decides to walk away and torture his three children my mailing them Christmas presents on January 18th, 2009 (without a note or a phone call!) But I am strong. I am a woman; a woman born of another woman who is born of another woman born of another. I hold the strength of my grandmother, Ms. Marion Payne, who at 16 got married and started a family with four children by the age of 23. Her husband strayed from the family path and my grandmother decided to leave. This was unheard of in 1943. She had to survive away from her family with four children in tow, and survive she did. She had hard choices to make. The family was split apart, but it was her through her strength and God’s will that she made it and she never gave up. When she found husband number two, she was taking care of a housebound woman and her family once again reunited. My grandmother and her second husband had five more children together, with my mom being the baby girl. But I refuse to let this be a book about dysfunction in the African American community. I refuse to be another statistic about the dismal cycle of poverty brought on by another broken home, or to be a statistic about the number of highly educated women who are still single because the pool of African–American men who are not incarcerated is increasingly shrinking. I refuse to let my sons grow up in a world where they only have two tracks – the low-paying mail room or incarceration. I have been gifted with the awesome responsibility of loving you. I have been gifted with the awesome responsibility of showing you how to dream again and wake up to the dawn of a new era. Barack Obama is the president! Wake up people this is a new world! It was the pain of having my children’s father walk away that will allow me to live as the QUEEN I know I am. It was the pain of the twenty-something years of low self-esteem that allowed me to have focus and determination and not give a DAMN about what someone thinks about me! See, the depth of my pain is the depth of my LOVE. This book is meant to inspire you to accept you. And only when you accept you and heal yourself will we be able to walk together and seek the blessings of this world.

150 pages, Paperback

Published March 14, 2013