Wait and See

I was born in East St. Louis Illinois, the first child of my fifteen-year-old mother and father. My maternal grandmother had passed away about five months before me being born, so I was raised in the home with my paternal grandmother and her eight children. My mother’s father had passed away while my grandmother was still pregnant with my mom. Although my mother had seven siblings, they were all pretty much in the same situation as she was, they were left to make a way for themselves, by themselves.

When I was around age two, my mom became pregnant a second time. Although my parents were not together anymore, my brother would be my father’s third child. By the time my brother was born, my mother, the baby, and I were moving into our first place and my father was moving to Chicago to start college. His goal was to become an I.T professional. My mother never finished school past the ninth grade. After having us, she worked what odd jobs she could to make ends meet.

It was hard on my mom after she separated from my paternal grandmother and decided to live life on her own. Our first place was a garage that a landlord had converted into a studio apartment. My mom and I lived there until my brother was born. After struggling year after year trying to make it on her own with two children, my mother was invited by an elder cousin, to move to Michigan where she lived. At that time, we were living with a friend of my mother’s, an elderly woman who lived in a senior apartment complex and allowed us to stay with her in exchange for my mom helping to care for her. My mother, brother and I shared this apartment with the elderly woman until she saved enough money for us to move to Michigan to hopefully start a better life.

I will never forget the day when my grandmother came to pick up my mother, my brother, and me to drive us to the Greyhound bus station. We were moving to Grand Rapids, MI. Before kissing my brother and me, through tears, my grandmother began telling us to be good for my mother and that she would call us once she thought we’d arrived there after the nearly twelve-hour-long ride. I cried and I cried because I was leaving behind everything and everyone I had known and was about to enter a life of the unknown.

We lived in Michigan for about two years before we had to travel back to East St. Louis to attend my father’s funeral. I was devastated because my brother and I were supposed to go to spend the summer with my father and the rest of the family. The plan was that once school was out, he would travel to pick up my brother and me to take us back with him so that we could also spend the fourth of July holiday with them. The day after the holiday we got the call that my father was drowned while at the beach with the family, for the fourth of July. I was devastated. This was a major changing point in my life.

We returned to Michigan and life progressed. As a teen, I enjoyed spending time alone trying to figure out ways to make money. At this time, I didn’t enjoy school, although I had to go, I’d much rather be home trying to figure out how to make money of my own. The goal was to become a success at something, so that my life, the one that I’d create for myself, would be much different than the one I had growing up. I would buy and re-sell candy to my friends at school. I would bake cakes and make rice crispy treats to sell. I babysat and I would get paid to braid hair.

Besides all that, I loved writing and depicting stories of that life I dreamed of. I have always been very fond of writing stories. I kept a diary and a journal, and I wrote a lot. Not long after becoming a teen, I realized that my mother could not read or write very well, it made me extremely hungry to become great at these subjects especially. I would read everything I could just to prove to myself that I knew how to do it. I loved reading the dictionary, the thesaurus, and any kind of fiction novel, black history novels and biographies. I also was a member of the monthly Highlights book club. I used to could not wait to get my subscription once a month so that I could figure out all the puzzles, mazes, and activities. I loved inviting my friends over to spend the night with me on the weekends. My favorite activity to play with my friends was always school and I always had to be the teacher. I would have assignments written on notebook paper based on what I had read in my collection of books. To keep them motivated, I would have cupcakes and things that I liked to cook for snacks. In my opinion, we always had fun.

Since I had been doing hair for years to earn money on the side, I figured I’d go to school to receive my Cosmetology license. So, after graduating high school, I attended cosmetology school. At this point, I knew that cosmetology would not be my career for life, but I needed to do something positive to avoid doing the wrong thing. I figured I would do hair until I figured out what I wanted to go to college for. At this point, I felt like I wanted to be on television. I didn’t know what capacity that would be, but I felt like I needed to be famous. I felt like that is what I was born to do.

In 1997, I moved to Georgia. I decided to go to film school but still didn’t know where I fit in in this profession. Upon graduating, I knew that I wanted to write for a career because I had always enjoyed writing. The only thing was my degree was in Film Production and not anything specific in writing. After graduating college, I got married to my sweetheart whom I’d met in college, a computer animation graduate.

Immediately after our wedding, we became parents of an eleven- and twelve-year-old. We decided to raise the two children of my aunt, my mother’s baby sister, who was suffering from cognitive disabilities and was no longer able to care for her children. The children moved with my husband and me shortly after our wedding and we immediately took on a GREAT BIG responsibility.

In 2001 I started my own publishing company, Tongue Untied Publishing and I self-published two fiction novels. The first one, It Just Gets Better with Time in 2002 and Only Time Will Tell, is the sequel, in 2009. By this time, my mother moved to Georgia to be near me. She was battling stage 4 lung cancer. Taking care of my mother, the children, and a husband began to take a toll on me mentally, so I put a pause on my writing career because I just couldn’t focus. My mother battled with lung cancer the ups and downs until the year 2014 when she passed away. I felt like half of what makes me, was now gone.

Dealing with now, my health issues as well as grieving the loss of my mother was a lot. I was extremely depressed. I began to pursue writing again but trying to find a position in the writing arena was very difficult. Although I kept writing and submitting work to various entities, I kept getting rejection after rejection. I then decided that I didn’t have it in me to keep this up. I decided then to begin to work on pursuing other goals that I was passionate about. I wanted to do something where my income would be based on my hustle and my drive and not based on who approved of my work, who I knew or didn’t know, or what circles I did or did not run in, you know, the Hollywood Stuff. I decided that at this time, I would put writing on the back burner and pursue something that was much more financially rewarding. I had so many ideas for other things that I wanted to do but being so focused and dedicated to writing, resulted in me putting all those things on the back burner. Now would be the time that I began to do that. I started by enrolling in school to study Psychology.

For years I suffered from Uterine Fibroids and in 2004 I was diagnosed with a condition called Endometriosis. I had to undergo two separate surgeries to have the fibroids removed. Following the surgery, my hormones were all out of control. I struggled with mood swings, hot flashes, and excessive sweating in the private area. It got so bad that I would have to take a change of underwear everywhere that I went. I would have to go to the bathroom to wash up and change often, just to stay fresh and dry. I tried everything that was on the market to stay fresh down there, the powders, the sprays, and the creams. None of them worked for me. This led to me suffering from U.T.I.’s due to the constant washing with strong irritating soaps. I had different doctors offering me different medications that surely would contain some form of steroid or other drug, and I didn’t want that. So, I started experimenting myself. I wanted something natural, that would work. I tried different concoctions until I came up with the P-Check Deodorant idea.

The name for the brand came to me. P-Check Personal Care Products. I knew that I needed to create a product that would work to conquer private area sweat and odor, but it had to be safe on sensitive areas. I also wanted to create a product that could help those suffering from Urinary Tract Issues. So, I researched a manufacturer who helped me to formulate P-Check Private Area Deodorant and P-Cleanse Urinary Tract Health Vitamins. Now, since I use my own products, I no longer suffer with private area sweat and embarrassing odor. Now, I can walk with confidence knowing that once I exit a bathroom stall, that embarrassing odor of private area sweat will no longer linger behind me. I no longer suffer with UTI infections because I use my own bath bars to bathe, and I take my daily dose of P-Cleanse so that I won’t suffer from a urinary tract infection.

In 2017, I became the owner of P-Check Personal Care Products and the creator of P-Check Private Area Deodorant and P-Cleanse Urinary Tract Health Vitamins. P-Check is an all-natural private area deodorant that contains no aluminum, it’s paraben and talc-free and its ingredients won’t disrupt your PH levels. It can also be used on other areas of the body where you sweat. So, say bye, bye to coochie funk with P-Check. Fresh Care for Down There.

P-Cleanse Powerful-Strength is a Urinary Tract vitamin that has the strength to fight the pain and discomfort of UTI quickly and naturally. It can be taken daily for urinary tract health or can be taken at the sign of urinary tract infection. P-Cleanse is an all-natural, (no need for anti-biotics) infection reliever that can rid you of the symptoms of a UTI in 24hrs.

I currently live in Georgia with my husband and two dogs, Missy and Prince. I serve as CEO of Scorpion Tiger the brand, LLC, which is the company that manufactures P-Check Personal Care Products. Besides our feature products we also sell natural body butter, personal massagers and natural bar soap. In the future, we plan to grow by adding more fragrances and sizes to our current products. I am also still actively pursuing writing goals. I plan to grow Scorpion Tiger the brand, LLC., to be a multi-million-dollar business that will be able to fund any movie projects I desire to produce.

Starting my company has not been an easy ride. The BIGGEST struggle/obstacle for me has been a lack of finances and lack of a team. When I had the idea to start this new business venture, I knew that it would cost at least 20k to get everything that I needed. Not being able to get a business loan, not having anyone to borrow from in the family, and not having those funds sitting in a saving account almost made my dream seem impossible. But because I am the type of person who doesn’t give up easily, I constructed a plan as to how I would pursue my goals. I applied and got a part-time job serving tables. I worked the job and used my tips to purchase what I needed to start my company, and I purchased one thing at a time. By the time I had everything I needed, three years later and had started to build somewhat of a fan base, I quit the job and began to pursue building my company full time still only with myself running everything.

I am a wife, creator, writer, stylist, inventor, and I am twenty-five credits away from becoming a Bachelor of Science in Psychology recipient. I oversee all things P-Check Personal Care Products. I fulfill orders, work in marketing, I oversee creatives and social media marketing. I am the Social Networker and a shipment fulfiller. In other words, I do it all. My company is still in the grassroots stage. December will be our first full productive year actively selling products. I am most proud of all my accomplishments from graduating high school and college to publishing novels, to creating my private area deodorant. I am also proud of the fact that despite all that I have been through, I still have not given up. Even though I didn’t grow up being encouraged towards future or career goals and didn’t have a whole lot of positive role models around me, for some strange reason, I still believe. I believe that I can grow this company from the ground/grassroots phase into becoming a multi-million-dollar company.

What sets me apart from everyone else is that I am me. Four- feet, eleven inches of fierce. I am unstoppable, I won’t give up and I am destined for success. Someone once told me that my name, Maseyree was such a unique and uncommon name that it was intended to set me apart from everyone else. That person said that my name was destined to someday be featured on a lighted billboard somewhere. I believe that person. That day is coming. You will see my name in lights.