Dear Woman - Michael E. Reid

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      2.You are not alone! While your path to the crown is not ideal, it is most certainly still possible to achieve, and your situation is actually pretty common. The solution is that you may just have to give yourself your own crown— and teach yourself how to wear it. Hey, look on the bright side, at least you’ll know it fits!

      3.There is a lesson in even the saddest of situations. Nobody else can set a better standard for how you can be treated than you. As much as you can learn by watching a family that did work, you can learn by being a part of one that didn’t.

      Hopefully you feel a little better about yourself, but you’re still not done. Actually, you’re just beginning. So, what is to be done? First, be thankful, thankful for what you do have and who you have it with—whether it’s a mother, father, grandparent, guardian, older sibling, or perhaps at times even a complete stranger. Regardless of how much better you think they could have been to you or how much of a more “comfortable” lifestyle you think you could have had, there are 400,000 children in foster care or up for adoption right now because someone decided that they weren’t even worth trying to raise.

      As a woman, you have to understand that this world is not fair and that no one in it owes you anything, not even your parents. As you grow into womanhood, you’ll learn that the people who have titles in your life are sometimes the ones who hurt you the most. You’ll also learn that not everybody who’s supposed to care does. So, what do you do with that? You can either let it break you or let it make you. The choice is yours.

      Now about that crown…want to know a secret? It’s already there. It’s just waiting for you to put it on. It’s waiting for you to look in the mirror and say, “My home may have been ‘broken,’ but I am whole.” It’s waiting for you to say that you can’t change your past, but you’re ready to take full responsibility for your future. I think we would all love to have witnessed real love at home as children. Of course, it’s a beautiful thing to be brought up in an environment where you get to see people in love firsthand, all day, every day. When it’s done correctly, it’s obvious that it makes you want to duplicate it in your own family in the future. However, sometimes it doesn’t work like that.

      Sometimes you’ll learn how to wear your crown by watching how your mother doesn’t always wear hers. Sometimes you’ll discover how you want to be treated by witnessing how your mother is mistreated. You’ll see how important it is to find somebody who wants a family before you two start doing things that make families, since you’ll have witnessed how hard it was on your mother doing it alone. You might be in a situation where your father is the one giving you your crown and telling you how to wear it. It might be a situation where your mother isn’t even able to give you yours because she’s still waiting for someone to give her hers.

      There might be other things going on within your family that I haven’t mentioned here. Every woman’s situation is different, and no woman’s situation is perfect. So, this is what you do, you work harder. You take it upon yourself to accept what you cannot change and use it as fuel to make it anyway. You take a hard look at what was wrong with your family life and where your parents fell short and use it. Not being able to witness the crown at home is not a handicap unless you make it one. At the end of the day, regardless of where you were raised, who you were raised by, and who stood around watching you and chose not to help, you have the responsibility to yourself, above anyone or anything else, to be the best woman you can possibly be.

      You have a duty to go and get your crown, place it on your own head, and keep moving. It’s the only way. Otherwise, you’re going to sell yourself short. You’re going to start questioning your worth because no ever told you that you were priceless. You’re going to start giving people discounts because part of you will feel like you’ve been alone your entire life. So, the first chance you get, you’ll let someone in, not realizing that some men may not be interested in you because they see your crown, but they will be interested because they see that you don’t have one.

      Go and get your crown.

      The more she found herself, the less she felt the need to find a man that made her feel like she was worthy.

      A man’s job is not to give a woman her crown.

      It is only their job to respect it.

       “Setting the Table…”

      “A woman’s first line of defense is her standards. They are the bar by which she differentiates who is even worth her time. How will you ever know how much work a person is willing to put in if you don’t require any in the first place?”

      Let’s face it, no matter how low you set your standards, no matter how much you’re willing to compromise, there are always going to be people who feel like it is still too much work. It will have you questioning everything about yourself and almost nothing about them. You will start second-guessing everything that you thought you had figured out—from what you require to what you will and will not accept. This is a mistake.

      “Love is an unfiltered ocean. Your standards are like the purifier that you use to weed out the things that can be harmful to you. The smaller the holes, or the more detailed you are about the standards you have, the more contaminants you remove and the more people you can eliminate.”

      There are different levels to finding yourself, one of which is finding people that complement you. This is sometimes seen as the hardest of all levels because it usually takes the longest, and sometimes we feel as if this is the level we have the least control over. The key is to not dwell on it so much. Many people look at this level like it’s some sort of competition. It isn’t. Some people feel that if they don’t have a line around the corner of candidates waiting to take a seat at their table, then somehow there must be something wrong with their product or establishment. This is not always true. Sometimes people draw crowds because of popularity, which isn’t always good. Sometimes people draw crowds because they are giving something away. This is even worse.

      It’s not about how many people want to wait in line, or how many people are interested in sitting down at the table with you. It’s about you. It’s about who you open your doors to; it’s about who you feel comfortable enough sitting down at the table with; it’s about who you are willing to feed, with your time, energy, attention, and love. You will make out better in the long run. I promise you. The saying, “Quality over Quantity,” applies so much here. Do you want to be seen as a fast-food chain or a five-star restaurant? Truth be told, it all depends on how you feel about the product you are serving.

      The first thing you must focus on doing is setting the table. Setting your table can be as simple as making it perfectly clear to whomever desires a seat what is on the menu and what is not. The clearer you make this in the beginning, the fewer problems you’ll have in the end. Where a lot of people go wrong is offering people things that aren’t necessarily on their menu. If this happens, you’ll find yourself bending over backwards trying to please people in ways that you aren’t comfortable with. Pretty soon you’ll get tired of doing that. Then who do you blame? Be careful what you offer. Set your table, and make sure the menu is in ink, not pencil.

      Keep in mind that you must be fair and firm. Fair, because when you set the table, the standard of the person you require should be equal to the type of service they receive. You can’t expect a man to wear a suit jacket to a restaurant where the hostess is wearing jeans and a T-shirt, right? So, make sure you embody the same standards you require.

      As far as firm goes, this is where a lot of people go wrong. A lot of times, we meet someone, and they’re close. Other times, we just think they’re close. Know the difference. Remember, it’s one thing to have a bar that bends, but it’s completely different to have one that moves up and down. If you set your table and develop your list of things you won’t tolerate, cool. Then you have to compose another list which allows you to decide

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