PREFACE

For some time now, I have wanted to write a story about my life—I’m still living, so this is my capture of my first half. I hope the stories will help you know we all have a story worth telling. The reality is this book is not about glamour, my persona, or me covering up for my messes. My truth is learning to love me regardless of what people think. People pleasing has influenced many of the bad, questionable, and ill-advised choices in my life. I want to be open about my own charade and help people learn to feel and live unguardedly. Sounds easy, but it certainly is not!

The title of this book, A Leap of Faith: A Life Filled with Questionable Choices, is relatable to many. This is how I settled on it. As I watched a young boy learning to swim, I saw his little body bent over, his toes gripping the side of the pool and moving to strangle his instructor’s neck. He jumped! Whether it was the instructor who pulled or the child who relented, I will never know.

The boy dragged his waterlogged frame up the cement steps to his Dad’s embrace. After all of it, his face exploded with joy that was quickly replaced with a burst of tears. His tears expressed that was too much! What kind of people love me?

Seeing that moment play out and asking myself what kind of people love me was how I got my book title. We all take leaps one at a time. I understood that boy. I understood that confusion. I understood about the things we do for the people we love. I could relate to that lad’s leap. The writing of my stories began with questions from my daughters, Albani and Faith. As part of a Christmas gift, they sent me questions about my life. In answering their questions, I realized they wanted more than personal anecdotes. They wanted to understand what the future held for them in so many areas. What was the makeup, the journey, and the constitution, of my womanhood? What made my womanhood work or fail? What were its phases?

They had so many questions. I could see those two young women wanting to understand their mother’s rite of passage, her journey to womanhood. Their questions sought to have me, their Mom, unravel mysteries that college and their experience hadn’t taught them. If I couldn’t help their uncertainty, who could?

As I crafted my words early on, I knew I wanted to share beyond my own children. Many of us, whether men or women, hit upon uncertainty during our own rites of passage. We seldom have a ceremony to say, “Hey, you arrived.” There aren’t manuals to tell us who we are and what we are sent here to do. I have shared the intimate collection of my many personal leaps and what answers about my life have come from them. I want to inspire persistence, hope, and resilience in my readers. All of us are on a quest in life, and in life no one size fits all.

Going into the deep with me, you should know starting out that my leaps of faith didn’t all end badly. Some leaps landed squarely on beds of pillows, but a heck of a lot of them splashed down face-first on the pavement! Regardless, I lived to tell the tale. God got me through the dismounts and the brokenness. My leaps have been terrifying and thrilling. I can’t remove any one of them because, collectively, they make me, Anita, who I am. You have your leaps and I have mine. Whatever you decide to do, remember we all leap off the side of life’s pool without knowing how we will land. Keep hope during the fall.

LAUNCH PAD I: THE GIRL WITH THE BRIGHT SMILE

My Mom’s name is Rosetta Bush. Rose Bush. Her maiden name was Thornton. Thorny Rose Bush. How cool a name for her. I asked about the origin of my name, and she said she picked Anita from the first page of a baby book. How’s that for not being original? Thanks, Mom. As a child, I didn’t have a cool name, or much else. The name Anita wasn’t cool, so I got the nickname Nita.

I have had a lot of sweet moments in my life and others that would make me say “Sugar Tang” in place of “F U” (I’m not a big curser). I’m the baby of a blended family of four, and the other three are colorful in their own lanes. Their names are Yvonne, Clara, and Aaron. I call my older brother, Bush.

Since childhood, I have been everyone else’s cheerleader and not always my own. My early start was fostered from the dust of a dirt road. I start you off with insignificant things to prepare you that from my entry into life, I didn’t feel significant.

Because of crushing experiences in childhood, I looked at life as though the glass was half empty. You wouldn’t know it to look at me. Back then I was a little chubby, round-cheeked girl who didn’t have much to say. But when I said something, I was bossy and in charge. That much hasn’t changed. For the most part, I seemed positive.

Behind the outward façade, something else was brewing. The Anita of my early years was darker and terrified. If God had not interrupted my life, I doubt I would be the positive force I am today. I just know I would have been different.

Like most kids, I coped with emotions using food and TV. I have always loved to talk, teach, and laugh. Those have been my outlets. I longed for something in my life—I just didn’t know what. It constantly nagged at me.

I was born to an unlikely pairing of two opposites. My Dad, William “Bill” Bush, was an old man, born in 1910. My Mom, Rosie, was born in 1929. That’s a nineteen-year age gap. Dad was high yellow from the West Indies and Mom was dark ebony from Northern Virginia. Back then, color codes would have called him cream to her coffee. Neither of them was well educated, but both were smart. What a peculiar time and space God used for the mystery of me.

My surprise 1967 arrival was as remarkable as it was unpredictable. My Dad was kissing fifty-seven, in remission from lung cancer, a drinker, and an average Joe when I came. Bill Bush was ahead of his time. He was a thinker and strategist before such terms were associated with colored men of his era. What my Dad lacked in education, privilege, and good health, he made up for in making his small life bigger.

He put energy toward his ambitions. He saw opportunities and took them. He started his own concrete patio business with only a primary education. He was a survivor and made up his rules as he went along. He and his beer-guzzling friends were laborers—that is, they were reliable for a good patio before the bottles were opened. They all had hearts of gold and doted on Bill’s baby girl, Nita. I was an old man’s princess.

I don’t know a lot about my Dad. Even the fact that he came from the West Indies I know only by word of mouth. What I reflect on now is mixed with truth and projections from my childhood memories. Mom would yell at him that he was spoiling me. I remember eating bad snacks, and that after one scream of “Daddy,” he would rescue me from every situation.

We had potato-chip-eating adventures in his old beat-up station wagon. My Dad was fun. His station wagon was always loaded down with concrete bags, buckets, shovels, levels, and junk. My Mom never allowed any of that stuff into her nicely cleaned house. The tools found themselves under our house in a dark and creepy crawl space. I hated that crawl space! If Dad was too tired, he would ask me to walk the levels and shovels under there. The place was scary, and I was afraid snakes would eat me. I dragged that stuff in and ran out fast!

In my childlike honesty, I often messed up Dad’s schemes. My mouth would possibly sabotage his pulling a fast one over on a vendor. Here is a memory of a TV return. Our new color TV blew out during a lightning storm. Dad and I went to town to take the TV back. As Dad was explaining that the TV didn’t work, he omitted an important part of the story.

I grabbed his trousers. “Daddy, tell ’em ’bout the lightning.”

He pushed me off and kept talking.

“Daddy, don’t forget about the lightning!”

He brushed me off for the final time. The guy didn’t know what I was going on about. As the story ended, we walked out of the store with a new color TV. Turns out the lightning was not significant after all.

My Dad was a man of charm, cunning, and great charisma. He was half bald and stood 6’1” with a bright smile. For the most part, he wore sweat-stained T-shirts, spackle-spotted khaki pants, and his beaming smile for everyone he met. Working hard was his swagger. When he and my Mom shined up, they looked like movie stars. He built our home with his own hands before big machines and gadgets. Any excess lumber or supplies from his construction jobs found their way into our home. Taking care of his family was his life.

To this day I wish I grew up in the age of having a camera to take pictures clearer than my foggy memories. His videos would have been priceless. My kids could have seen their grandaddy in action.