2

Rock to a Diamond

A novel by…

Lynn Bruce

3

Rock to a Diamond

Copyright © 2013 by Brown Essence, Inc.

Printed and bound in the United States of America. All

rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or

transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or

mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by an

information storage and retrieval system- except by a reviewer

who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a

magazine, newspaper, or on the web – without permission in

writing from the publisher.

Cover design by André Foster of Niche Creative Studio

Poetry by Toni Hodges – Unspoken, Barely Written

Copyright © 2010 by Brown Essence, Inc.

Harmless by JT Wynn – Facing Faces

Copyright © 2013 by Brown Essence, Inc.

Brown Essence, Inc.

P.O. Box 82462

Conyers, GA 30013

Please visit our website at brownessence.com and let us know

what you think.

4

Dedication

I dedicate this book to every daddy’s girl that

ever struggled to find love, because I love you!

- Lynn Bruce

5

PREFACE

I never thought I would be sleeping with someone else’s

man. Yet here I was all wrapped up; entangled in the sheets,

trapped under this man who wasn’t mine. I held on to Alonso

like he was my very lifeline, but inside I was unhappy, slowly

losing myself and my identity. The reality of who I had

become was unsettling; I was dying internally. I stopped

counting the number of times he came back singing the same

song, “I can’t live without you, Baby” and the many times I

allowed him back in knowing in the back of my mind, I

wasn’t the only one. I conjured in my mind that this time

would be different; he would leave her to be with me. As I lay

there listening to the rhythmic sounds of his breath and

heartbeat, I stared blankly at the ceiling reminiscing…

If I could’ve picked my life, it wouldn’t have been this

one. I can’t say that it was all horrible, but I had to deal with

some heavy issues as a young girl that spilled over into my

adult life; issues that hurt me, over and over again. Pouring

into my heart over time like a running faucet. I often wonder

what is the capacity of the human heart; how much can it

bear before it finally gives up? Not all the moments in my life

were heartbreaking, there were good times, but most of them

were spent in sadness, despair, and depression starting as far

back as I can remember. It seems some people breeze

through life with no problems, no worries, always happy,

always blessed and “highly favored.” Success has been

6

handed to them. They’ve accomplished just about every goal

they set out to.

For me, I wonder if there was something I had done in

another life that was the cause of this hand I have been dealt.

I always say if I could do it all over again, I would change this

or do that differently, but now I wonder if it even would

matter. Maybe this was my fate, whatever the reason I had

been sentenced to live this life down here. There was a lesson

to all of this, the reasons we keep going through the things

we do is to learn from them and grow, the problem with me

was I didn’t have a clue what I was supposed to learn, but I

needed to figure it out fast. I couldn’t let what I had gone

through ripple into the lives of others that God had placed in

my life.

They say the sins of the father are passed down to the

child, and I wondered if a life of misery would become my

children’s fate regardless of what I did. There was definitely a

pattern forming starting with my own mother; she had a

miserable life, too. Her mother died when she was three

forcing her to live with a family that didn’t really accept her

because she didn’t look like them. She went through life

feeling unwanted and out of place. Not being able to imagine

a mommy because she was too young to remember what she

looked like and having a father who didn’t believe she was his

-making sure he reminded her of that every day. She did the

best she could to survive, promising herself at an early age

that her children would never have to know what it felt like

not to be loved.

Although her life was hard, four children and two

divorces later, she was able to fulfill her promise to her

7

children. Despite all the obstacles she faced, having no choice

but to go back to the same family that rejected her, she gave

her children the love she never had, breaking the cycle of hate

that embodied her entire life. Unfortunately, with her

working long hours to make ends meet, there was just

enough to keep food on the table because she didn’t have

support from our fathers. This left me to feel the wrath of my

adopted grandmother, the same woman who didn’t or

couldn’t love my mom who also suffered her own share of

abuse growing up.

For my grandmother, she was not able to turn a negative

situation into something positive, so the same abuse she

endured was the same she dished out to us. While my mother

was hardly home my grandmother was able to enforce her

strict rules and verbal abuse, which proved to be

overwhelming at times; our daily lives were all planned and

precise. Most of my time at home was spent in the cold dark

basement directly under the front porch. I would stare out

the window looking at the feet of the neighborhood kids

running up and down the street.

Every day, five minutes before my mother came home

from work, our grandmother made us come upstairs and sit

in the dining room with our books open so that my mother

had no idea what we were going through. We were told if we

said anything, we would never see our mother again. We

didn’t know any better so we did what she told us. I had to be

home from school no later than 3:15pm or I would get a

whipping. Saturday mornings she would send my mom to the

market and make me clean the kitchen floor with a brillo pad

while she stood over me calling me names, telling me I was

8

lazy and no man would ever want me. On her good days,

which weren’t many, I could go outside on the front porch

and sit on the top step. I couldn’t play in the streets with the

other kids, but I could laugh and talk to them while they ran

past. But most of the time I lived as a slave from sun up to

sundown.

Night time was the worse. I had to spend an hour in her

room watching television before I was allowed to go to bed.

Her room was dreadful; it reflected her soul. The two chairs

in her room were not inviting, in fact it made her room look

like how it felt, a funeral home. There were blood red drapes,

bedspread and carpet. The walls had wood panels that had

turned from white to a yellowish brown from all the

cigarettes she and my mother consumed. Sometimes I would

think they were in a contest to see who could smoke the

most, but now I know my mother was stressed and it was her

way of relief. The chairs were a pastel pink, the only color in

her room; she would sit in the right chair, while my mother

would sit in the left. The look on my mother’s face spoke to

me silently saying, “I’m sorry.” I would turn my head and stare

at the T.V. feeling much anger inside just waiting for my time

to go to bed. I was probably the only child in the world that

looked forward to that. My room was on the back side of the

house with a porch. I would open the door and lay in bed

looking out at the night sky, daydreaming of ways to run

away. Of course I was too scared, so I resolved that as soon

as I turned eighteen, I would leave. When that day came,

without any money, I had no choice but to stay. I knew I

couldn’t just go live with someone, they were against that.

One day the door to my prison was opened when the man

9

who would become my husband eight months later showed

up at my door. It was my only way out! Unfortunately, for

me, I spent the next three years miserable with a man I barely

knew. We never talked because he spent his days and nights

getting high.

I married Ralph because he was the first man to say he

loved me since my father. I was happy because what my

grandmother said wasn’t true, a man did love me. I can’t say

I loved him; but over the years I grew to love him. Ralph had

a good heart, he was, quiet and worshipped the ground I

walked on but he also had a terrible dark secret that changed

him from the person I grew to love into a monster at times.

Shortly after we married, we had a beautiful baby girl, each of

us hoping that the love we had for her would somehow

strengthen our marriage, mend our problems, but in all that

we had, it wasn’t enough to keep us together. Eventually we

decided to split.

I had experienced a taste of love, of what it could be, so

I started searching for it, hard! It became an empty,

unfulfilling quest. When I was a little girl I knew what it was

like to have a man love me, because my daddy did, for a while

at least. I sought it with a passion so strong that sometimes it

felt like knots would form in my stomach until I satisfied that

yearning. Even if it meant having sex with someone who

didn’t love me, closing my eyes pretending it was real. Some

people can find love to last forever right away, while others

look for it their entire life, settling with someone they regret

having ever met. I didn’t know if true love would find me or

if I would end up with someone I didn’t love or worse, who

10

didn’t love me. The many times I thought I found it always

came to a dead end street.

I tried so much, became so desperate in my obsession

that I would do anything, changing me, my looks, the way I

talked even down to what I ate! All to be who I thought they

wanted. It was a fulltime job, from the rising of the sun,

losing my soul in an attempt to gain the love of a man; men

who didn’t love me because they loved someone else. In the

end, I was stuck with a man I couldn’t stop loving even

though I knew I wasn’t the only one he was giving love to. I

wanted my heart back! I passed it around, hoping that it

would land in the hands of someone who would take care of

it, but it didn’t.

Four years ago, the devil walked into my life and as

much as I tried to shake him, he always found a way to worm

himself back. Each time, he was with another woman or what

he’d like to call a “situation.” And each time neither she nor I

knew that we were in competition, fighting hard to gain the

love of this man who was never going to love us the way we

deserved.