Mary J’s Rag To Riches Journey To Being The Queen

It’s good to feel like Mary J Blige is happy. While I don’t know her personally to be sure from the outside looking in I believe she’s happy. I remember when I first saw her video come on BET back in 1992. My sister loved her song she ran to the tv turned it up and started dancing, and I just loved the way she put on a personal show for me in her white suit jacket, lingerie top and white fitted hat to the back. You couldn’t tell me that she wasn’t dancing just for me. She would help develop my love for hip hop w/ classic after classic and years later she would come clean with the details of her troubled life in the industry. 10 years after she debuted on the scene she sat down w/ 60 Minutes for an interview with the late Ed Bradley and told the world her story.

“It hurts a lot when you cannot really comprehend what a person is saying in a meeting or you don’t even understand what you’re reading in your contract,” says Blige, who left school in the 11th grade and reads at only an eighth-grade level.

“I just drop my pride and say, ‘You know what? I don’t understand what you just said. Could you explain it to me?’” says the two-time Grammy Award winner. “I find myself learning more.”

Blige goes on to tell stories of her child growing up with a mother and her abusive boyfriends, and being molested.

“It kind of, like, put us in shock, because we used to just stand there and look at it, like, wow, but then you see your Mom get hit. And then it’s like, ‘waaaaah!’ Like you’d just go, used to start screaming and crying when you see your mother get hit,” says Blige.

“And, you know, men, it seemed like they didn’t have any mercy. They hit you like you were a man. Like, I’ve seen women get their heads punched through walls. As a kid.”

But it wasn’t just violence against her mother. She also sings about things that are very personal, like the time she was molested when she was 5 years old.

“For a long time that’s something that I was hiding. For a long time, that’s something that made me do drugs and drink. And as a artist I had to share it,” says Blige. “You start drawing to you what you are on the inside — insecure, jealous, mad — and you start drawing these men that are like that and they start whipping on you,”

During my past conversations with the women I’ve been involved with I like to really get to know them. So I ask them about their childhood, and how was it for them growing up. I find that a lot of the most sexual intellectual women have been molested and abused as a child. This type of thing really can mess a woman up. Few are strong enough to over come this, many never do, and most over come the horrors of their past when they are much older. In the interview Blige recalls how her personal horrors effected her.

Some of the men she went out with physically abused her, but Blige says she doesn’t blame them for what they did.

“I don’t blame them because I allowed it,” she says. “It’s not my fault, but the only way that I could get out is to stop being the victim. I had to stop saying, ‘You did it. You, you, you, you. It’s because of you, you, you, you.’ I had to sit down and say, ‘You know what? Something is wrong here because every man that I get is doing the exact same thing to me. So maybe it’s something wrong with me.’”

Taking responsibility for yourself is one of Blige’s strongest messages. Self-acceptance is another. And her newfound faith in herself, she says, is part of her renewed faith in God.

“If I don’t accept the scar on my face, the lips that God gave me, the big giant feet, the long legs, whatever it is that I’m deformed with, I got to love it so everybody else can love it. And I started loving it,” she says.

All this is why women love Mary J so much, because they can relate to her so much. In this instant media world we live in, we are force fed news and gossip by publicist of perfect celebrities, eating lunch, buying Chanel and photo shoots air brushed to perfection. The celeb of today has few flaws and any flaws they have will be spun to be used to their advantage. Yet, women in real life can’t spin their mistakes, they can’t hide from their friends if they end up nude on the internet, they can’t spin the black eye they have because their boyfriend hit them, they can’t spin life when they have to struggle to go to work, school and raise a child who can’t learn in a crowded class room. For them Mary J is that escape that hope that they too can be something great in this world. Mary J Blige is the one.

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