I apologize for two Bravo essays back to back, but like the one I shared yesterday, this isn’t really about Bravo either.
I know that reality television isn’t exactly a paragon of Christian entertainment. It’s degenerate, it’s vulgar, and it rewards the worst of human behavior.
I started watching Real Housewives for the first time in my late 20s, and the more of it I watched, I remember realizing that as a general rule of thumb, the more successful you think someone would be on reality television, the less you could trust their character.
I’m sure there are plenty of famous Bravolebrities that are delightful, loyal, honest, genuine and selfless in their personal lives. But I assume they’re the exception, and I’m comfortable with that assumption.
In all fairness, I also realize that plenty of them are intentionally playing roles and trying to engineer entertainment.
I thought of Kenya Moore that way as I watched her on Real Housewives of Atlanta.
She was chaotic, dramatic, and a little delusional, but she was a lot of fun to watch.
In her first season, she flirted a lot with a castmate’s husband. No one wanted to admit it, but there was plenty of precedent set on that show for that dynamic with no real harm intended or executed.
What differentiated Kenya’s “advances” from what had happened in previous seasons was that she was a gorgeous pageant queen, and the man she was toying with was not only attracted to her, but married to someone that she physically overshadowed without trying to.
The prior flirtations felt harmless because the wife was a conventionally beautiful super model while the woman flirting never registered on the husband’s radar as even a hypothetical conquest.
People hated her early on for that storyline, and a lot of them held that grudge against her for years.
One of the few things that softened her in viewers’ eyes was her traumatic upbringing.
For most of my 20s, I was weary of the phenomenon of encouraging adults to scapegoat their childhoods or their families for their problems decades later, because it felt like a cop out that delayed the acceptance of responsibility for the course of one’s life.
And on some level, we all have a sob story. But the victimization of self, in my mind, was a choice – and one that too many people were making.
As I’ve grown older though, I admit that my heart has softened. I think the way we were treated before our brains fully formed affects us much more than we’d like to admit, even if I doubt the merits of rehashing it with a therapist for $150 an hour.
That said, there are situations and circumstances that you can objectively recognize as uniquely damaging, with a lifelong impact. And Kenya Moore’s was one of them.
Unfortunately, a lot of us know what it’s like to be abandoned by a father. A lot of us know what it’s like not to get along with our mothers. And of course, some examples are much more extreme than others.
But Kenya’s was far outside the norm, as she was rejected by her mother at just 3 days old.
Her mother was 16 when she gave birth, so even if people think it’s cruel or strange, a lot of them could rationalize it if they put themselves in the shoes of a teenager that never wanted to be pregnant in the first place.
But even after Kenya became an adult, her mother wanted nothing to do with her.
Even after she won Miss USA, even after roles in some of the most popular media at the time, even after all she’d achieved, her mother would not acknowledge her.
It’s not like Kenya wanted anything from her. She had accomplished and accumulated more on her own than her mother could have ever given her.
She described being at family functions, trying to start conversations with her mother, only to be completely ignored, while her mother pretended she didn’t exist.
I can’t imagine anything like that.
I can’t imagine my mother willfully and voluntarily screening a call not because she was in the middle of something, but because she had no desire to talk to me. I can’t imagine my mother hearing me knock at her door, and never answering me.
I think we all know to some extent that being deserted by a father hurts. But being discarded by a mother defies everything we know about biology, about love and about life itself. As much as we might want to convince ourselves that it’s equally awful no matter which parent is guilty, I think most of us know instinctually that there’s something much more shocking and unnerving about a woman with no palpable affection for her child than a man with none. When men do it, it feels unfortunate, but when women do it, it feels unnatural.
Kenya longed for marriage and children in the way that most women do, but if you were paying attention, you could tell there was always another layer to it for her, and that the stakes were always higher.
You could tell that she was desperate to heal something that had been fundamentally broken since before she could remember.
At one point, she was adamant about never wanting a daughter, because she thought it would be too painful for her based on her history.
But that’s exactly what God gave her.
And watching this woman become not only a mother, but a mother to a daughter confirmed to me that God understands us, and what we need better than we ever will.
God gave her exactly what she said she never wanted, and it transformed her.
The way she looks at her daughter, the way she dotes on her daughter, the way her face lit up on camera with her daughter…it was so obvious that what she was afraid of was actually critical to her recovery.
The most joyful and fulfilled she’s ever looked in over 10 years of filming was after she had the daughter she thought she couldn’t handle.
And I don’t think that’s a coincidence.
It’s so easy to feel like God watched you endure the hardest parts of your life without lifting a finger because He’s either apathetic or antagonizing you.
When you’re in pain, you might struggle to believe that none of it is wasted in the economy of God. But the older I get, the harder it is for me to doubt.
It may not make sense as it’s happening, and it may not make sense for years.
It may not feel like anyone’s listening. But God is.
He always has, and He never stopped.
If you feel like God is neglecting you, I won’t try to convince you that whatever you’re enduring is somehow better than it is. But I will remind you that God sees every tear, hears every sigh, and knows every heartbreak – and He restores, He renews and He redeems – even (and especially) when it doesn’t look the way you thought it should.
And when you least suspect it, He may give you what you thought you never wanted and everything you ever needed.
christianityfaithkenya mooremotherhoodreal housewivesreal housewives of atlanta
what do you think?