Marrow Women is a collection of  anonymous interviews with black women. It is a necessary, vital labor of love. Because one day we will be gone. Because our ancestors are spoken for in numbers but vanished as individuals. Because we can speak for ourselves and seal it up, to be released when the time is right, to be released when our daughters need us and want us, when the ponytails turn to wedding veils and questions arise like a flood. They will need us then- our voices, our vices, our juices and our truths, our hell nawls and me too’s. They will need to hear our giggles and sighs, see our stretch marks and c-section scars, hear the clink of ice in our sweaty glasses, smell the exhale of our smoke, see the flash of our thighs as we dance, taste the glitter of our tears, understand that we are not etched in stone, that we are not figments of fixed memory, but real flesh and blood women, who pray and laugh and doubt and live.

So that women everywhere can know for sure they are not alone. Not ever. We are all surviving out here. We all have stories. Read and be encouraged. May you find the words you came for.

Interviews
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These are snippets.
​For the full interviews, join the 
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"​"He molested me from the age of 6 until… I don’t really know when it ended because my entire childhood is blocked out."

 "So my stepdad continued doing it - I believe he continued doing it because I remember being in class and going to my teacher and telling her I was being molested or whatever and I remember a social worker coming to my house, and my mom being in the room and me not saying anything. And so the social worker was like, maybe you should leave. I didn’t tell the social worker anything, I just stayed quiet the entire time. Because in my head I'm thinking, I would rather deal with this shit than be in foster care. And what 7 year old thinks that way? Like, c’mon. And so, I just didn’t say anything. And so they put me in therapy and then my mom pulled me out of that. I don’t remember why, I just remember her being loud at the doctor’s office and some commotion happened, I don’t know. So that stopped. 

​But it just kept on. I remember when I was hitting puberty- I remember one event specifically - we lived in a basement apartment. I go to take a shower but I have to leave back out of the bathroom because I forgot something and when I leave, I remember him coming into the apartment, but I don’t pay any attention..."

"I’m not going to say it wasn’t hard. But it was harder to be pregnant. So I looked at it more like saving myself than killing a baby."

"Well, like I said, it happened right before school, right? So I came inside and saw my best friend standing by her locker. So I told her. I was like, I did it. And she was like, did what? And I was like, it. And she was like oh….well I have to get to class. (laughs) I don’t know what I was expecting. For her to say, congratulations, or how do you feel? or something. But her reaction was so low key that it made me feel ashamed. Like I’d given up my right to feel special. And now that I say that out loud, I realize that moment has trickled into many other moments in my life. Because it’s like, if I’m the type of woman who gives it up in the backseat of her own car for the first time - in the school parking lot, no less - then who am I to expect a guy to open doors for me? Who am I to expect men to pay for dinner, or take me to nice places? Who am I to expect a proposal before shacking up and having babies? Who am I to ask my boss for the money I deserve? So I’ve spent a lot of years living up to my lowest moment..."

I knew when I was a kid that I didn’t want kids. I never got that feeling, ever. I personally don’t know any women in this generation who have children on purpose. I didn’t ever want to be one of those women."

"I was young, I was like 12. And I knew that my mom had fibroids but my mom is so laid back about everything in life so it wasn’t a big deal. But it got to the point where my back was in pain, my front was in pain, I couldn’t sit for long periods, the constant heavy bleeding, it was just too much. I talked to my doctor. I was like, I gotta do something. And just to give you an idea about how bad it had gotten -- it was in such a short period of time because you think, you know, from the time I found out until the time I had surgery was only 6 or 7 years.
​
I wanted to weigh my options. And if I could give anybody advice or a takeaway from my experience, it’s to listen to your doctors about the prognosis but the ultimate decision is yours. Having a hysterectomy was not my first choice but after all was said and done that was the best choice. My first choice was, I wanted to have a uterine fibroid embolisation. That’s a procedure where they insert into your uterus these little particles that stop the blood flow to the fibroids and then they shrink on their own..."

"Marriage is not equal. There is a Mexican proverb that says, 'The home does not rest on the ground, it rests on a woman.'"

"Because… women… I don’t know if it society, meaning male dominated, or by virtue of our nature, but marriage has never seemed like a partnership to me. Especially now – like, I have to go to work and I come home and I work. I do the cooking, the cleaning. I take care of the bills. I schedule for the cars to get fixed. I take care of the taxes. And he just goes to work. (laughs) And I appreciate him going to work and bringing his money home. And I appreciate the fact that if I ask him to do something around the house… there’s so much that he can do. He’s a very capable man. But in regards to…he believes, I’m the man, I go to work, I come home. Everything else is the wife’s responsibility. So, if it’s a partnership, then women are 70 and men are 30. But I don’t ever think it's 50/50. Even in the best of relationships, once the child comes in, the man is like….. (throws hands up). They say, you had the baby. How do I bathe it? How  do I feed it? Women just say, I had the baby – I have to feed it, I have to clean it, I have to drop it off at the daycare. It’s almost automatic for us to do all of this stuff. And they might do it when you ask, or something drastic has to happen and they see themselves in a bad light. And then they change..."

“They gave him 34 years. He was 40 years old, and he got 34 years in prison. To me, that said life."

"To sum it up, my husband was a police officer. He grew up in the projects. His grandmother raised him. He saw early that the life that he had wasn’t going to get him anywhere so he lied about his address and went to a good high school outside of his neighborhood, worked hard there, went away to a HBCU, graduated, came back home, got a job with a large law firm, and was pursuing a law degree. He came home one day and said that going back and forth to court he realized that being a lawyer wasn’t really what he wanted to do. He wanted to be more hands on. He came from a family of police officers and he was always seeing them. He asked, would you mind if I became a police officer? I said, no, everybody else is so why not?  And he went about it. He did really well – he got pulled from the academy to be on a special operations team, where like if dignitaries or presidents or the Pope came to town, he was part of the security team. He was also on the tactical team, and they brought some new members in.
​
What  I had grown up seeing was, my uncles and their wives each entertained their husband’s partners and other members of their teams. When you see them across the family table, it’s good that they know us because they won’t let anything happen to our men. They can’t come back and look at us and say they let something happen to them. So I started doing that. I’d invite his team over for dinner and we started doings together because I figured if the men knew the wives and the children, they would do anything to make sure they return home at the end of the night. That’s what I thought. But he got a new team member who, the very first day that I met him, I did not like him. It was something that raised the hairs on the back of my neck. He disrupted my soul. And I told my husband, I don’t trust him, I don’t like him. And my husband said yeah, he’s a strange guy, and he kind of blew it off.  About a year later, I told him again, it’s something about him that I really don’t like. My husband’s partner kind of liked the guy. He said, you really don’t know him, and yeah he’s a little strange, and he blew it off. My husband’s partner told my husband that I was just jealous, and my husband believed him..."

"I think I robbed myself of finding a nice fellow. I think he might be out there somewhere, but I think I missed it. I waited too late."

 "I went into this relationship knowing his feelings about being with other women. His whole thing was that one day he wanted what he referred to as “two wives.” He was going to have this three flat building. He was going to live in the middle or on the bottom floor, or wherever, and his wives and their children would live in the other apartments. So I knew from early on in our relationship that that’s what he wanted to do. One time we went to this picnic and one of the guy friends he grew up with was at the picnic with both of his women. They were like one big happy family. One knew about the other and that’s how they dealt with the situation. And he wanted a life like that. And I told him that I had heard about stuff like that back in Africa, but I also understood that you could have as many wives as you can afford. Not to just be having wives without any concept of what you’re supposed to or what they’re supposed to do. You’re supposed to be able to take care of both of these families. And I can’t even say it’s something that I may not have done if he had been a different kind of person. But he was too mean for me to let him have his way in a situation like that. I felt like, you don’t get to have your way.

​I told him, I will not be a family with this other person. Because ultimately, that’s what he wanted. He wanted us to be all one big happy family. And I said no, absolutely not. (laughs) And it’s not that I don’t think I could have dealt with it, it’s just that he was mean. He didn’t deserve to have his way in a situation like that. And I kept thinking too, I can say yes and agree with it, but he ain’t gon’ find no other woman to agree with it. That was always in the back of my mind – who’s he going to find that’s willing to go along with that? Regardless of whether I say I’m going along with it or not..."

"I think sometimes having an affair makes it easier for men not to leave. If he gets his emotional and physical satisfaction in another place, he’s not as stressed out or frustrated in his marriage."

 "I don’t know if I gave myself the leeway to think about his home situation. I thought about the relationship that I was having with him. So there was no need to fight. I was very frustrated about us not being able to build a life together, but it was not the kind of relationship where I would have kept asking him that. Frankly, I never wanted to break up anybody’s marriage. I never believed that you could break up a marriage between a man and a woman and then you could go off happily ever after and have that man. I don’t believe that that’s really true. If his relationship was going to end with his wife – which it eventually did by the way – then it would have to be they’re ending their relationship and not me injecting myself into their relationship to make them break up. So I didn’t think about it that much. But what I did think about down the line was the fact that there were times where I was missing things. You know, you’re very aware when you’re not with someone on a holiday. Or you’re not able to just freely go somewhere and say, this is my man, this is my boyfriend or whatever..."

"One day he finally told me flat out, he said if you keep hitting me, I’m leaving you."

"Yeah. I’m not proud of that. I remember telling my mom about it and she was like, but what if he beats your ass? Why are you provoking this man? But I was never scared he would hurt me. My dad used to whoop his wife’s ass. I knew that if my man was going to hurt me, he would have been hurt me. I felt very safe with him, but in the moments when I didn’t feel safe, I liked the drama of that too. I was used to it because that’s what living with my dad was like. Niggas wilding out. So it was scary but it was also familiar and comforting. I don’t think I would have stayed with him if he was the one choking me, but since I was the one doing the hitting, I didn’t mind all the yelling and pushing and wolfing and all that. It was almost like I got to be in the house with my dad, but this time I got to be the one doing the hitting. They always talk about how men who come from abusive homes might wind up being abusers, but what about women? I just had this rage inside me that I had to get out. And he would just do shit that… I mean we would fight about things that would let it out. Looking back I can see what a blessing that was because I got to meet a part of myself that I didn’t know was there. I mean I knew I was crazy but I didn’t know I was that crazy. Being with him made me deal with myself. I had to figure some things out."

"We don’t talk about abortion. We don’t talk about the reasons why abortions are important."

"So I go to the doctor to get the Implanon placed. The day I had the appointment was a school day, so I went and picked up my kids and they were sitting in the lobby. It was supposed to be really quick, twenty minutes. So the nurse comes out and says, well before we can place the Implanon, you have to take a pregnancy test to make sure you’re not pregnant. So I say cool, no problem let's do it, because I’ve only had sex once since getting the IUD removed, and I took the morning after pill, so I’m good. Let’s go ahead and get this show on the road, right? So I go and take the pregnancy test and then go back into the lobby. So after a little while the nurse comes out and her face is completely white. She says, I have to tell you something. So she calls me back into the lab room. Not into a room that's private, but in the lab room. The lab technician is standing there, the nurse practitioner is standing there, people walking past, and she says, we can’t place the Implanon today. So I look at her,why not? So she points to the table. On the table is a positive pregnancy test. So I kind of walk around to the table, I walk around her, and I look at the test. Nothing comes out but I mouth the words, what the fuck..."

"I know you worried about how the bills is gon’ get paid but what that got to do with us having sex? We can have sex if the lights get cut off. The lights need to be off anyway."

"Girl yes! And let’s talk about how it’s different being married to a black man than to a black woman! Yes, let’s get real specific! (laughs) Hell yes it’s different. We women, we are emotional characters. We are heart centered. We are sacral chakra centered. We sit in our seat of creativity. We are loving, we are nurturing. We are ferocious and crazy sometimes. (laughs) And I’m speaking to me. My wife has had to deal with a lot from me, as I have from her. But being with a woman, there’s been more communication. When I was with my ex – like, there’s a secret life of men that women know absolutely nothing about. But being with a woman, I feel like there’s so many levels that her and I connect on. Very woman centered things. Like understanding that we both have a womb and what is needed to take care of that womb. I can go to her and be like, did you do your breast check? That’s caring and nurturing too. Sometimes men don’t want to talk about that stuff. I tried to talk to my ex about caring for himself but… in society, men aren’t given permission for self care. That’s very soft and there’s supposed to be so hardcore...
 
There’s been moments where both us have been breaking down and crying and boo hooing and snotting  and saying, what we gon’ do about the kids? and both of so emotional. And then also, I get to walk with her side by side and be very warrior woman. I’m very warrior woman. And she is very logical, brain, very sweet. So there are times when we play good cop, bad cop. And then there are times where we both fucking annoy the fuck out of each other..."

“My father was good as far as being a father but my dad molested me...No one protected me. I had to protect myself."

Because it got to a point that my dad was in competition with my boyfriends, and he would get jealous. I had a strict curfew. If I was one minute late I would be on punishment for an entire month. I thought that was really ridiculous. So this one day I was late. I had been told that as long as I was honest,  I wouldn’t get in trouble. Well that was bullshit. I was late again this one night – and I had told my boyfriend what I was going through – but when I got there my father wasn’t there. My boyfriend came in with me  to tell my dad why I was late and to tell him don’t put me on punishment. He was going to talk for me. Recently that boyfriend told me, like, yeah that day I had my gun on me and I had the GDs (Gangster Disciples) with me, they was outside. I was like, what?! I didn’t know all that was going on at the time.
​
But yeah, my dad didn’t come home until very late and he was drunk, so by that time, boyfriend had to go home and the GDs had to go too. And so when my dad came home, I told him the truth. Because he wouldn’t have known otherwise if I got there late or not. I should have lied. I could have lied. But I didn’t lie. And he was drunk so he came in there waking me up, wanting to fight, asking, what time you get here? I told him the truth and all I know is he just picked me up by my neck and started dragging me through the hallway. He was like, you is getting out of hand! I’m going to call your mother and tell her you is getting out of hand! Maybe she can talk some sense into you! And I was just thinking in my head, this nigga just dragged me through the hall like I’m his wife or something, and when he calls my mom I’m gonna fucking tell her what the fuck is really going on. So he called my mom and was like, yeah, your daughter, I don’t know what’s wrong with her, you need to talk to her! So he put her on the phone and she was like, what’s wrong with you? I said, ask my sister to tell you what’s wrong with me – because my little sister used to spend nights over with my mom and her husband, so she was over there that day. So I said, ask her. So she asked her, and oh my God, my mama came over to my dad’s house with her gun..."