Read an Excerpt
Chapter 1
Look to the Light
On December 22, 2006, I gave birth to a healthy five-pound, ten-ounce baby boy. Swizz and I decided to name our son Kasseem Daoud Dean, which is Swizz's given name. The path to the moment of his birth was an eight-year journey filled with moments of joy, pain, celebration, and challenge. An obstacle course that no young woman would ever envision for herself.
The question I was pressed to answer was this: how do I begin to become the person I need to be for this soul I brought into the world? I thought I knew the answer, but life showed me an entirely different way.
In the Very Beginning
Every blended family begins with two people coming together and sharing the cosmic experience of becoming parents. The connection might stem from love, a single desire to have a child, or a casual intimate connection. Whatever it was at the beginning, for many people the connection eventually expires. But in that original experience lies the foundation of the feelings you will need to successfully blend your future family.
When Swizz and I met in early 1998, I was twenty years old and he was nineteen. Swizz was sleeping on his father's couch at the time, and I lived with my grandmother only ten New York City blocks away. A mutual friend of ours ran a recording studio in Harlem. There was a picture of me hanging on the wall that caught Swizz's eye. He asked the owner to call me and make an introduction. We spoke on the phone for two months before actually meeting, but when we finally did, we became inseparable. Within months, Swizz was bunking with me in my small bedroom.
Together, we laid out a plan for our lives. Music was going to be our way out of the hood. We worked hard, with many sleepless nights spent at the studio. By the time winter rolled in, Swizz and I had moved into a two-bedroom apartment in Palisades Park, New Jersey. We hadn't been together for a year and still really didn't know each other, but everything we did together felt right.
Soon our hard work started to pay off. Everything around us changed. Our money was different, the people around us were different, and we started to see the beginning of what would become a music empire.
By the time we were twenty-seven, we were making a great deal of money. The previous year, I had a successful Japanese tour after releasing an international solo album. I was signed to a major publishing deal with Warner/Chappell Music, singing and writing for various artists while Swizz was pulling top fees producing records for every major hip-hop performer you could name. A few years earlier, Swizz had closed a label deal with J Records and signed me on as his artist. We were at the point where money didn't feel like an issue to us. We naively believed that our financial stability was all that was needed to start a family.
We began planning meticulously for the baby. We followed an ovulation calendar, did our best to avoid stress, even detoxed our bodies through diet before we began the process of conceiving. Two months later, we were pregnant, and we were both so excited. This new life was our only focus, and Swizz was an amazing source of support during our pregnancy.
Be of Good Courage
I had imagined a sweet baby bump, with loads of pregnancy photo shoots, lots of shopping for cute little outfits, and an over-the-top baby'shower celebration. The universe had a different plan for me. I experienced early contractions numerous times during my second trimester, and by the twenty-week mark, my obstetrician ordered a cerclage to hold the fetus in place. My cervix would be stitched closed in hopes of preventing a premature delivery.
I was terrified. Six years earlier, Swizz and I had become pregnant and I'd undergone the same procedure. But I'd suffered the worst possible outcome. I pushed my stillborn, with the cord wrapped around his neck, into the world he would never have the opportunity to know. This was our firstborn son. We named him Angel, and holding his lifeless, fragile body in the hospital room shortly after he died made me feel as empty as a smile that never knew love.
Now I lay still a second time for the same procedure, with a new doctor in a different hospital, pregnant with another life I wanted so desperately to bring forth. I steadied my focus on the young nurse's face in the frigid operating room. Her eyes were full of empathy as she warned me not to move as the needle was placed. The thought of a needle so close to my spinal cord immediately brought me to tears. I cried even more after the memory of my first son set in, but a voice within me told me to be still. So I was. I lay there, numb from the waist down, and allowed the work to be done.
Nearly thirty minutes into surgery, the clanking of metal tools quieted, and the doctor made his announcement: "Mrs. Dean, we're all done, and it looks beautiful," he said. I finally felt safe. The most important step to keeping my pregnancy intact was a success.
The security, however, was fleeting. Two months later, I had a series of aggressive contractions. I was admitted to Lenox Hill Hospital and told I couldn't leave until I gave birth. I was only six months pregnant. For two months, I lay there, day after day, unable to walk, shower, or even sit upright to eat. All I could really do was pray for a healthy baby.
Like the pregnancy before him, Kasseem was breached with the umbilical cord around his neck. The doctor told me I would need a cesarean in order to safely deliver our baby. Immobile on the operating table, I heard a slight cry, and soon after the nurse handed Swizz the baby wrapped in a blue blanket. Swizz placed him in front of my face; our noses touched. Our baby was warm and gave new meaning to the word "soft." He had arrived, and it felt like a miracle.
Every blended family begins with two people coming together and sharing the cosmic experience of becoming parents.
Because Kasseem was born three days before Christmas, I declared him to be my best-ever Christmas gift. Little did I know that he would unwrap parts of me that I never knew existed.
The Shift
Because Kasseem was born three days before Christmas, I declared him to be my best-ever Christmas gift. Little did I know that he would unwrap parts of me that I never knew existed.
My son came to teach me a multitude of things about myself-things like patience and introspection. He would stare into my eyes, and it felt as though he knew his purpose in my life before I did. He knew I needed him in order to evolve as a human being. We hardly ever recognize our own character flaws by looking in the mirror, and often those closest to us have a hard time expressing what they see we need to work on. But something happens when you have a child. The physical changes are obvious to the eye, but what transpires spiritually is more difficult to define.
The moment I gave birth to Kasseem, I felt as though a new part of me had opened up to the world. The life I had been living for the previous twenty-eight years was now a memory. Before my son was born, I was a single entity. After that December day, another part of me, outside of myself, now existed. I would forever be connected to this new, tiny extension of myself, grown by my own cells, living and thriving outside my body.
My perception of life shifted. The only thing that mattered was protecting Kasseem. I spent that first year working toward being the best mother I knew how to be. I was completely focused on learning the nuances of this tiny human who depended on me for his life. I took being a mother very seriously. I felt a special obligation to honor him and his growth. I had made promises to God while lying in the hospital bed week after week, promises that I had to keep. So in the early months of his life, I started researching enrichment programs for Kasseem. By the sweet age of eight months old, he was already sitting in on music and baby yoga classes.
Once my miracle baby arrived, another part of me, outside of myself, now existed. My perception of life shifted. The only thing that mattered was protecting Kasseem.
Most new mothers worry about their child's diet and daily schedule. They wonder if the house will ever be clean again, if they will ever sleep through the night, or if they will lose the baby weight. There are also more intangible worries. Am I good mom? Am I doing everything I can do? We develop a picture-perfect vision for who our children will become and what our lives together will be. But that picture isn't real. It's sadly just the pressure society puts on mothers.
I had developed my own false image long before Kasseem was born. My parents had a messy separation and an even messier divorce, and though I was raised primarily by my grandmother, the time I spent with my parents was tumultuous, marred by instability and conflict. I never wanted Kasseem to experience the stress I felt. I was pretty clueless when it came to a traditional family upbringing with a mother and a father under the same roof, but still I wanted that picture for my son more than anything.
When I peeked out of the cocoon I'd built around Kasseem, I realized that things weren't the same in my marriage. It had fallen apart. First by small pebbles, then by larger rocks, and finally crashing down boulder by boulder.
Like a body in quicksand, my marriage and friendship with Swizz sank right beneath my feet. We had underlying issues of distrust and a lack of communication, and at that point, we were no longer moving as one. The heaviness pushing us under was stronger than our will to fight, and our ten-year foundation faltered. In only a couple of months we became enemies, unable to even look at each other. And just like that, one day we woke up and there was no relationship between us at all. We were only the parents of the same child.
When Holding on Hurts
I panicked. I wasn't ready to face this reality. I reached out to family and friends for help and advice. No one had the answer. No one really wanted to get involved. It got to the point where we were arguing constantly, and soon after, Swizz moved out. As I watched him load his belongings into a moving van, I could do nothing about him going. Now that we weren't together, there was a massive void. He had been the closest person in the world to me, and then he was gone.
Today I understand that we had to part. If we didn't, neither of us would have been able to evolve into fuller human beings. When God removes people and circ*mstances from your life, you may not be able to identify the reason for it in that moment, but the transition is always intertwined with a lesson, with growth. The more you resist the reality of this, the more you torture yourself.
Here is what I now know: no one ever belongs to anyone else no matter how connected people may seem. We all must live out our lives individually in order to fully experience our journey's purpose.
However, I didn't know this truth back then. I found the most comfort in being a wanderer, shelled up in my own skin of pain and confusion. I felt there was no one I could talk to; no one knew what to say to make me feel better. My grandmother lacked words for the first time in my life. She was deeply hurt for me, and I believe watching me go through this was a painful reminder of her own past disappointments with men. As a child I was her "baby girl," and as an adult woman I was her "dear daughter." She always wanted me to be happy, and for the first time in all the years she had spent raising me, I was completely lost in depression.
Too Many Seats at My Table
Meanwhile, there was a relatively new phenomenon on the internet evolving months before the beginning of my separation-the gossip blog. This virtual reality of illusion mixed with human input happened to come along just when my marriage fell apart, and various celebrity-obsessed websites were working overtime at building their audiences based on new, hot topics. I clearly remember the first time I heard of social media. I was a bit in shock that people were actually communicating and sharing their lives with complete strangers through a computer screen that sent signals through the air. I resisted joining at first, but after Swizz created an account on MySpace, I felt I should do the same. We posted a few pictures of ourselves as a family with our new baby and shot an at-home piece with Essence magazine to celebrate our son's birth. At that time I never realized that the future demise of our marriage would also hit the covers on nearly every urban publication, blog, and website. There was even a mention on the New York Post's infamous Page Six. Immediately I understood that society was more attracted to people's downfalls than their triumphs. Our separation became every trashy blog reader's daily cup of tea, and my life was sensationalized by the masses as juicy gossip to many.
I despised being called the estranged wife. Almost every single article I read about my life (and I read far too many) labeled me as the "bitter ex," the "baby momma," and, of course, the "estranged one." I've always wondered if all this would've been less painful if I wasn't divorcing a top producer. Would I have been able to move through the emotions of separation more easily if it had been done in private? Perhaps.
But I never had that privacy. It wasn't my reality. I had to deal with what I was served the only way I knew how at the time. Some women in the emotional state I was in bust in car windows or scrape their keys across car doors. I wanted to be heard. I wanted everyone to know that I felt awful, so I did interviews.
