This Lady Needs No Introduction

As a mother I like to see women challenge the non-traditional roles and go against the status quo to do their own thing. Being a mother is a challenging fete, but try writing a book while bouncing a baby on your knee while simultaneously creating unique hand-made cosmetics and jewelry, promote online and in person and still have time to shower! That sounds like a like, but there is one young lady that continues to impress me by all of the hats that she wears, her name is Pinky Dior.

Hailing from Boston, Massachusetts Pinky Dior is not only the author of  Hazel Eyes, Valentine's Day Massacre,  The Diamond Exchange and collaborator on Almighty Dolla, but she is also the owner of her newly found cosmetic line, Amor Cosmetics  and she also designs her own jewelry line called IiCyCupp Designz. Wait there's more, Pinky also holds one of the most important positions in the world, she is mother to her brand new baby girl Mercedes. Needless to say this is one busy moma, but she did take the time to sit down for an interview with me.

I’m going to ask you what many people ask me all of the time with being an author, an entrepreneur and a mother, where do you find the time to fit it all in?
Well, I mean being a full time mother isn’t hard at all, I do the best I can to try and fit my jobs in with my schedule. My daughter comes first, so when she’s asleep I write, focus on my lipstick line and accessories line. And even when she’s awake sitting in her chair I work but I still give her all my attention. Every one thinks it’s hard because I have a new born baby, but I just do what I can and finish whatever needs to be finished on time.

Let’s start off with your writing career. How long have you been writing and when did you decided to bring your writing to the literary world for others to enjoy?


I’ve been writing since a young girl, but I got serious when I wrote my first novel in the 9th grade.. I completed my first novel less than a month and every one I let read it loved it. So that’s when I got real serious and kept writing  and people said this is good you should get it published. A lot of people motivated me. So I continued to write novels hoping of one day that I get published and I did.

Who or what inspired you to begin writing? 

I loved to when I was in middle school, but also I loved to write.  I told myself that I want to be an author, I wanted to be published. I was inspired by the many urban novels that I'd read as a young girl. When I began to write, my inner circle of friends and family members kept me motivated to keep going. 

What has been an obstacle of your writing career?

Some times I felt like my writing wasn't good enough and I would shut down in self-doubt. But I would push myself by saying that I  have to keep going no matter what, every one is not going to like your work, and there are people who will. 


What has been a surprising factor in your writing career?

Well I was shocked/surprised when I got a 3 book deal with DCBOOKDIVA Publications and I feel like she gave me the opportunity to put my short stories and novels out there. 

Please tell us about your soon to be released title, The Hustlers Daughter? 

I believe The Hustlers Daughter is going to be a classic. I’ve always had that title in my head and I wanted to write a novel based about a hustlers daughter, but I couldn’t come up with a good idea. Until one day my older brother and I was talking about it and I asked him for advice and he gave me some advice, basically planting the seed that I needed to run with. That seed blossomed into a book that I know is my best novel that I’ve written so far. It’s basically about a hustler’s daughter, Mercedes Carter who has everything she wants. Mercedes thinks that everything is all peaches and cream until she notices that the type of lifestyle she lives also has a bad side of it. But I don’t want to say too much, yall will have to cop that when it hits the stores! Coming soon…


Oh, wow now that sounds interesting! Not only an author you are also an entrepreneur who has recently launched your own cosmetic line, Amour Cosmetics what brought this current endeavor about? 


First off I love lipstick and lip gloss, and one day I was just wondering how they are made. I researched for days, keeping late hours researching on how to get started. Once I found out how to make lipstick and lip gloss I just decided to get my own cosmetics line started and I named it after my beautiful daughter Mercedes’ middle name, Amor.

Tell me about some of the products that you offer in your cosmetic line?

As of right now I just have lipstick and lip gloss in my cosmetic line. Some of the colors I have are Cute Pink, Strawberry Pop, Money, October and Sapphire Blue and many other colors. The lipsticks/lip gloss are pretty bold colors that are enriched with Vitamin E and has loads of shine. 

What are some of your best selling products in your line?

I’m just getting started but so far a lot of people have been buying different varieties of lip gloss, especially my light pink lip gloss, Bubble Yum.

Where do you come up with the inspiration for the different color combinations?

I just pick basic colors that people would like to wear and add my own spin on it. Right now I’m testing out different colors, mixing them to get more colors that people would love to wear.

Pinky, you recently welcomed a beautiful baby girl, Mercedes Amor, into the world how has motherhood changed you?

It’s changed me completely. I’m truly blessed and thankful that God has blessed me with a beautiful baby girl. My life was good but without Mercedes I don’t believe I would be grinding this hard. I got my cosmetics line, and my accessory line which is also named after my daughter, Amor Accessories. I feel like I have to give her the life that I never had. I want her to grow up and be able to look up to me as a role model, her inspiration, her motivation. I know my daughter is going to be proud of me. Everything I do is for Mercedes and that’s why I go so hard.

Motherhood takes up a lot of your time, how do you prioritize your day?

I tend to my priorities first, which is my daughter, Mercedes. Whenever she is asleep I will do whatever I can in that amount of time. When she’s up and not fussing I would just sit her in the chair, my mother and sister also keep her entertained while I work and being I have become a master at multi-tasking. 

What is your motivation for success? 

My motivation for success…is my daughter. I just look at her and say I got to grind for you and for me. I just feel like its my responsibility to be a role model for my daughter and other people as well. Also the lifestyle that I want to live, I’m not rich but I’m not poor. I’m blessed but I’m not where I want to be at in life and that’s also a motivation of why I’m grinding so hard.

If you could say one thing to girls younger than you who want to follow their dreams what would that be? 

I would tell them to never give up, ever! No matter what, no matter what your going through, anything you put your mind to you can do. You may not get famous or rich in one night or day, you have to keep doing what you’re doing consistently in order to accomplish your goals. I wrote for years and didn’t get a deal until many years later; Why? Because I never gave up on my dreams, even when I sent out query letters and got rejected many times, I still kept going. And that’s what made me the person I am today.

What is next for Pinky Dior?

What’s next for Pinky Dior? Who knows? I may have a clothing line next year. But I’ve always wanted to own my own publishing  company as well. There’s just so much stuff that I want to do in life, that I don’t know what’s next for me. But this isn’t the last time any one will be hearing from me.

You can find Pinky Dior's novels on Amazon and her can link up to Ms. Dior by clicking one of the sites below. 

Facebook/www.facebook.com/authorpinkydior

Twitter @pinkydior @amorcosmetics

Websites www.pinkydior.com & www.amorbeautycosmetics.com

My Mother's Keeper

Growing up I always thought that my mother was Superwoman, able to defy all odds who possessed the power of Zeus in the tip of her finger. I also thought that my grandmother's one bedroom house was a a mansion and that money did in fact grow on trees, but now that I've grown I now know that I was wrong about so many things.
I was like Tom Sawyer in the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, who saw adventure in every day life.  So when I came home from school one day at the age of six years old to see that my mom had removed all of the pictures off of the walls, sold some of our items and loaded the four of us on a Greyhound bus headed for a new life in Seattle, Washington I thought of it as an adventure. Just like the adventure that we had when she packed us all up to move us to California a few years before. I thought that it was cool that we got to move every two years when most people stayed in one neighborhood their entire lives. I was too young to realize that my mother was dealing with issues that my young mind could not understand.
I am the middle of four children. While my father was a solid entity in my life, he didn't live with us. He came to see us once a week and made sure that he provided for us, but mom was not about to give us up despite the things that she was dealing with.We often spent days and weeks living at my grandmother's house when my mom as sick. I remember asking my grandmother where mom was and she simply told us, "Your mother is resting." With the understanding of a child, I thought that she was in the hospital sleeping because she was tired of cooking and cleaning for us.
It wasn't until I got older did I come to understand that my mother was not resting as my grandmother put it, but she was in a mental hospital because my mother lived with schizophrenia and bi-polar depression. I have always thought of a schizophrenic as the undesirable homeless man living on the street corner begging for spare change who talked to friends that only he could see and hear. In my mind a schizophrenic was a person who was homeless, filthy and who would go crazy if provoked.
My mother was too pretty to be crazy. She was too hip and too clean to be mentally ill. Mom could not have been a schizophrenic. She didn't fit the bill.  She kept a clean house, she cooked fantastic meals for us, she taught as the importance of being a lady at all costs. The doctor made a mistake! My mom was not a schizophrenic! My mom was an ex-model, she was thin with Asian features she had legs that most women would die for and an unmistakable walk that not only turned heads, but broke necks! Her wardrobe was something that could rival any modern day movie stars so there was no way that she was hearing voices.
I hid from it.
I kept it a secret.
I didn't want to face it.
We had too much fun with my mother for her to have been sick. One of my fondest memories of my mother was when she would load us all in our sky blue 1981 station wagon to go for rides while listening to the radio. We had so much fun so there was no way that mom was crazy! She smoked pot on Alki beach with a friend when we lived in Seattle. Mom and other neighbors got together and threw a Halloween party for the children and mom was the most beautiful ghost ever. My uncles called her Disco because she loved to party. I remember sitting on her bed watching wide-eyed as she got dressed up in clothes that I only wished I could fit to get ready for a night out on the town. 
Then there were the times when my mom would shut herself off from everyone and she'd lock her self in her room and just cry. When I asked her what was wrong she'd simply say that she was sad and my next question was why and she'd simply say that she didn't know. Shortly we'd be packed up and shipped off to my grandmother's house because mom needed 'rest' in the nearest mental hospital. Most people don't know how it feels to visit their parent on the psychiatric unit of a hospital and feeling that she didn't belong there.
Times when my little sister and I'd be in the bedroom talking about boys or whatever it was that teenage girls talked about and mom would get angry and say that we were talking about her. She'd say that I thought that she was crazy and her voice would anger me so much that at one point I did the unthinkable, I called her crazy. I have regretted that moment since.

Society puts a negative stigma on people dealing with mental health issues. In the African American community this stigma is even worse. African Americans are suppose to be mentally strong people, and if a person has a known mental illness they basically wear the scarlet letter around their necks. That is why many in the African American community do not address their mental issues live in shame and never get the help that they need. Instead they self-medicate with drugs, alcohol or other risky behaviors. Unlike so many others who actually do suffer from these diseases, my mother got help at the first sign of something not being right. She takes medication to stabilize her condition and she goes to see a psychiatrist one a month for talk therapy. I have been with her on many of her appointments and it helped me to understand the world that she lives in.
Education is the key when it comes to mental illness. If I had not educated myself on my mother;s condition I would not have known that schizophrenia cannot be cured, but it can be treated. I know that schizophrenia is caused by an abnormality in the brain and its brain chemistry. There is evidence of abnormally low activity in the frontal lobe, and some studies even suggest that there are abnormalities int he temporal lobes. Basically people who live with mental illness do not choose the illness no more than someone with cancer chooses to have cancer.
Now that I am in my mid-thirties I now have more of an understanding on what it was that my mother dealt with as well as how it affected me. I no longer live in shame that my mother has a mental illness, in fact I often tell people that my mother has schizophrenia and bi-polar disorder because I am proud of her.

Me and my Mommy

I have come to realize that because of my mother's condition we lived a life that was better than the lives of most of my friends whose parents didn't live with a chronic mental condition. Not only did we get to travel, but we also got to live. My mother never put constraints upon us, she was who she was and she was not ashamed of it. She taught us to be who we are and to love ourselves no matter what society says. She taught us how to dance, how to laugh and how not to sweat the small stuff in life.
Now that my mom is in her sixties, she is still the same vibrant and sassy woman that I know. I asked her why didn't she marry my dad and she said because he wouldn't allow her to be who she was. Something that my naive eight year old mind would not have understood I now understand.
My mom didn't suffer from schizophrenia and bi-polar disorder, but she LIVED with it.

TTYL 

Yes We Can, But Do We Really Want To?

Rosie The Riveter is an American cultural icon who was suppose to stand for the countless numbers of women who worked in the factories during Word War II. Rosie also represented feminism and women's economic power. Many women stood proudly behind Rosie in her red and white polka dot scarf and deep blue shirt because she led them to believe that yes they were women, but while their husbands were away at war, they were expected to take on the male dominate trades. The Government 

even targeted ads aimed at women to get them to join the workforce with one ad asking women, "can you use an electric mixer? If you can you can learn to operate a drill."

Yes Rosie the Riveter gave a lot of women the courage to step out and take on the role of the man during the war, but did she do more harm than good?

I see more and more women taking on the role that was not intended on her to take. I see women who are the woman and the man in the household. No, I'm not talking about in the single-woman household, but the household with a husband and a wife. Women are not only expected to work, but they are also expected to take care of the house, the kids, the car, the bills, the yard work and the maintenance around the house. The only thing that their men on the couch are willing to step up is when it is time to have sex and even then half of them want the women to get on top so that they won't have to put in to much effort!

While she may not physically go out and cut the grass, she has to either tell the man countless number of times to mow the lawn or she has to find someone to do it for her. She may not physically go out and change the oil in the minivan, but she has to be the one to take it to the nearest Jiffy Lube. If she has to get him the shoe to kill the spider on the floor why shouldn't she take it one step further and just squash the damn thing her self?

On top of all of that she still has to hold down a full-time job, a side hustle and take care of the kids.

No wonder women are tired and irritated.

Yes ladies we can do it, but do we really want to?

Do we really want to come home from work to a messy house, hungry kids and laundry that needs to be put away all of the while he gets to come home from work and lounge or hit the bar with his boys? Yes we can do it, but do we want to?

In 1939 women didn't have the same burdens as women in 2012 do. Yes they went to work in factories, but as soon as their men returned home they got to quit and many of them went back to their normal housewife routines. The men in the 30s were men who didn't mind taking the reins, they handled all of the finances and the household chores so the women didn't have to. Now I'm not saying that we should go back to the 1930s way of thinking because even though women worked in the factories and held things down while their men were at war they were not treated as an equal. What I am saying that that it is time for men to step up and help women out more.

A lot of women say that they would have their husband do this and that, but they are afraid that he won't do it right or that it won't get done at all. I was one of those women who would come home from work and do laundry and load the dishwasher because I didn't think that my husband could do it right. Until I grew tired and weary of doing everything around the house while he got to relax when he got home. So I stopped doing and start making him help out. So what if he didn't load the dishwasher exactly the way that I did as long as the dishes got cleaned who really cares. So what if he didn't use the white basket for the white clothes and the pink basket for the colors and wash them in the same order as I did as long as they got cleaned.

I

A lot of times men purposefully mess up so that they lose your trust in their ability to handle certain things just so they won't have to do it. That is fine if he messes up or claims that he doesn't know how to do this and that because practice makes perfect.

Ladies, this is about more than just housework or dealing with the children. This is about men stepping up to the plate and helping us out. Yes he brings home the beacon, but what is the point when you bring it home too then have to fry it all? Why can't he at least get the damn pot ready? What is the point if you both bring home the beacon, but while you are frying yours his is sitting on the kitchen table waiting for you to fry it while he is relaxing in front of the television.

I want my husband to be the man and let me be the woman. I want him to step up and start handling more things for the betterment of the family. I have a pretty good husband already, but at the same time it is time for him and all men to snatch the reins from their women and start to steer the stagecoach.
In relationships you have to find your happy medium. If your husband isn't the best with finances don't put him in charge of them and let bills go unpaid and cars get repossessed.  If you are better with money then by all means you handle the money, but let him handle the home and car maintenance. I don't care if he cuts the grass or if he pays little Jimmy from around the corner to cut it as long as it gets done without you getting involved.

Hey look we are all stressed with gas prices causing the prices of everything else to skyrocket more and more families have to become two income households. However, women's bodies carry stress differently than men so we are more prone to certain stress-related diseases than men. It is time for us to hand things over to our men and let them handle it rather than run ourselves into the ground trying to prove a pointless point.

Yes Rosie, we can do it, but I sure as hell don't want to!

TTYL!