“Why do I have to go to work” Viviva whined as she made a slow exit from her bed. Her morning prayer and devotion sessions were done a long time ago. As the days went by, her bitterness over her job situation grew stronger. Who would want to wake up every morning and go to a job they couldn’t stand? Well, at first glance it looked like Vivica Phelps did. She hated her Customer Service Manager position. She worked for a large, but privately owned insurance company and hated every moment of it. Even more than she loathed her bothersome customers, she loathed her quick-tempered, worrisome, and unappreciative micromanager of a boss. She couldn’t stand the forty minute drive it took to get from her home in Northeast, DC to her boring office in the small Maryland town of Edgewater. But it wasn’t like she had a choice. She needed to work. She had a home to pay for. She had a brand new Jeep Cherokee to foot the bill for. And she had a twelve year old daughter who was constantly begging for cash.
Vivica was a CSM by day, but she was an aspiring thespian by night. She loved theatre and back in high school, there wasn’t a school play she didn’t star in. If she was going to wake up every morning to do anything, acting is what she wished it could be. If not acting, then writing, because drama was her life. But trying to launch an acting or writing career was no easy task. It took much time, much patience and a whole lot of prayer and faith. Meanwhile, her recurring nightmare of being a customer service manager forever was beginning to come true. At thirty two years of age, she desperately wished for a way out.
“Laelani! Wake up!” Vivica yelled, as she walked down the hall to her daughter’s bedroom. She turned the knob to her door, but as usual, it was locked.
“Mom, I’m awake!” Laelani said. But the sleepiness in her voice convinced Vivica that she hadn’t been awake for long.
“Yeah, right” Vivica said. “What did I tell you about locking this door, Laelani? If something happens and I need to get in, well, you’re going to be out of luck. The next time this door is locked, I’m taking it off the hinges.” But even as she said that she knew it wasn’t true. Vivica was full of empty promises. Promises made to others, and definitely, promises made to herself.
“Okay, mom,” Laelani said, and Vivica could tell she was tired of the ‘don’t lock your door at night’ speech. Laelani didn’t believe for a second that Vivica would do anything to punish her.
“Don’t just tell me okay, Laelani. I don’t want you locking this door at night anymore. Nothing is going to come after you! Now get showered and dressed. Get some breakfast and hurry so we can head out. You cannot be late for school, and I cannot be late for work!”
“Okay mom,” Laelani said.
“By the time I head downstairs you’d better be right behind me.”
“Okay mom, I get it,” Laelani said.
Vivica sighed as she headed back to her own bedroom, and into her bathroom. She ran the water in the shower. It would take a while for the water to reach the temperature she desired, so as usual, she first brushed her teeth, washed her face and let her hair down.
Having a Hawaiin mother and an African-American father had given her the most beautiful long, curly hair, which she opted to wash every single day and wear in its natural curly state. She never did anything different to her hair, and the revelation of that irked her. She was tired of being so predictable. It was all her life had become; from the menial tasks like getting ready in the morning to the redundancy of her career. Despite her dream of becoming a writer and actress, she continuously found herself in jobs that had nothing to do with those goals. She continuously found herself doing the same thing over and over again, yet wishing somehow that things would, out of the blue, turn out differently. Well, she was insane, and she knew it.
“Mom!” Laelani said, bursting into the bathroom uninvited.
“What?” Vivica said, startled and annoyed.
“Can I borrow your blow dryer?”
“Okay, I just bought you your own blow dryer, Laelani.”
“Okay, first of all, you bought me a cheap blow dryer that makes my hair frizzier than anything. Second of all, because it’s cheap, it doesn’t even get that hot! And all the teeth on the comb are broken. I cannot use that thing.”
“Well, my dryer cost me over one hundred dollars. You think I’m going to lend it to a seventh grader?”
“It would be nice, especially since I’m the one who knows what to do with it. I don’t even know why you bought that dryer because you never do anything to your hair anyway. People are always talking about how pretty our hair is. But I’m the only one who cares to do something with it every once in a while.”
“Okay, Laelani. Insulting me will never get you want you want.”
“It’s not an insult, mom. It’s called constructive criticism. We learned about it in our English class yesterday.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. We’re doing creative writing right now and we had to exchange papers and do critiques on each other’s work. It’s really fun. Everyone loved my story.”
“Really? What did you write about?”
“Well…I wrote about a woman who wakes up every single morning and asks herself the same question.”
“And what is this question?” Vivica asked, folding her arms. Her daughter was far too grown for her age.
“Well…she asks herself, at the top of her lungs, in the most annoying whiney voice ever, ‘Whyyy do I have to go to wooork?”
Laelani busted out laughing, and even though Vivica laughed along, she was so embarrassed. “Tell me you didn’t write about that for real,” she told Laelani.
“Yup. And everyone loved it. It’s the beginning of a short story,” Laelani said.
Vivica was silent a few seconds, and then she asked, “So what will happen to this woman in the end?”
“Well…I’m thinking she’ll have a dream. A dream of what life will be like if she never went to work again. She and her daughter will go broke, eventually. They’ll get kicked out of their nice city home. They’ll be living in the park with the rest of the homeless people. They’ll be eating out of trashcans and begging people for spare change. It’ll be a really ugly scene. In the end, the woman will wake up and be thankful that she even has a job to go to, because so many people don’t. She’ll never ask that question again. The story will end with the woman saying, ‘I can’t wait to go to work’!”
Vivica was frozen. She knew her daughter was writing a story about her life. But she didn’t like how it ended. She was thankful for her job, yes, and the end of Laelani’s story was fine for what it was. Fiction. But in real life, Vivica needed to make some moves.
“Laelani. What if the woman had a dream to fulfill?”
“A dream? What dream?” Laelani asked.
“Say she wanted to be an actress, or a writer. Say she had a dream of what it would be like to fulfill her dream, and in the end she decides to stop being afraid…and go for it.”
“Mom, please,” Laelani said, laughing. “My story can only be one page. That’s like…a whole novel. Plus, what are the odds of that ever happening? If that’s the woman’s dream, then she needs to wake up fast.”
“Okay, fine. Shoot down my idea then,” Vivica said, chuckling. Bit deep inside, she was a bit hurt. Right there, without even knowing it, her daughter shot down her dreams.
“Well, can I borrow the blow dryer or not?” Laelani asked.
No, Vivica thought. I have to make some moves. And fast, she thought. And she figured she may as well start on her hair.
“Mom what are you doing?” Laelani asked, as Vivica pulled her blow dryer out from under the sink and plugged it in the outlet.
“I’m going to blow dry my hair. For the first time in…well for the first time in a long time.”
“But what about me?”
“Your hair looks fine Laelani. It’s like you said. I need to start caring about what I do with my hair every once in a while.”
“Okay…” Laelani said, looking confused. “But what about your shower? You do know the water is running, right? If you do your hair now it’s just going to frizz back up.”
“How about you stop worrying about me and take your own shower, in your own bathroom? Get dressed, eat your breakfast and wait for me to take you to school.”
“Okay, mom. Fine. What is your problem? Are you mad I didn’t like your story idea?”
“Laelani, leave. Now.”
“Boy are you crazy,” Laelani said, rolling her eyes.
Yeah, I am crazy, Vivica thought. She was crazy enough to believe that she could actually make it successfully as an actress in theatre, let alone a writer of theatre. Who would perform in her plays? Where would she find the money to fund a production? Who would even come out to see these creative works of arts?
She made good money as a Customer Service Manager. Sixty thousand dollars a year was good enough to keep her bills paid, keep food on her table, and keep Laelani in that fancy Anne Arundel County private school. But she wasn’t happy, that was the problem. And the bigger problem was that the one thing that could make her happy seemed too far out of her reach to achieve.
This is why she stayed in her current situation; because no sooner than she’d muster up the courage to hope for the better, reality set in and she ended up right back where she started. She knew of people who’d dreamed big and achieved bigger, but could she ever be one of those people? Would she ever have enough faith in herself to believe she could be one of those people? Her disbelief in herself annoyed her. She couldn’t stand herself. She knew everything she had to do to get where she needed to be but she was too afraid of failure. Maybe she was waiting for something to tick. Maybe she was waiting for that argument between her and a customer. The last disagreement between her and Ray, her boss. When would she come to terms with the fact that her dreams could be achievable if she only worked hard to achieve them? How fed up with her current situation did she have to be before she decided to make some moves?
