For my seventh or eight birthday … My very trusting, very Ghanaian, very frustrated from my constant nagging, parents bought me my very own Thirteen inch Zenith Color Television… and as you can tell from the picture above I was very, very happy about it.

Television, second only to books, is one of the great loves of my life. I loveddddddd tv and to have my very tv own in my very own room was in my 8-year-old mind… OUTSTANDING.

My way older TV-less brothers were understandably not as thrilled. But they obliged and dragged it up the stairs and propped it up on my dresser right next to Rainbow Brite and my pile of Ramona Quimby novels. It was love at first sight. I loved the way the little numbers illuminated in red on the display. I loved the little circle flash it made when it turned off and on and I LOVED all that could be found, seen, and learned from that little black and brown box.

I never had that fancy cable but my rabbit eared antenna and a few strips of foil were like Tami and Marvin to me… They were all I needed to get by. With that I was able to consistently get channels 5, 7, 11, and 60 (now Channel 50). Channel 5 was for sitcoms. Channel 7 was for the news and Wheel of Fortune. Channel 60 was for my beloved reruns of All in the Family or Archie as I called it. But my favorite and my best was WTTW Chicago.

“Hi, My name is Senam and you’re watching Channel 11, WTTW in Chicago.”

I probably tried to get my name to fit into those man on the street station ID’s every time they flashed on my screen. Shockingly… There never was anyone named Senam sliding down a slide to beam and giggle in the camera as the spoke the Channel 11 Station Id with that sweet wooden bewilderment that was ever present  no matter what member of the rainbow coalition they chose to deliver it. But it didn’t bother me at all.

Cause I was there for my shows… Namely, Reading Rainbow and My Cooking Shows. I know this sounds ridiculous but growing up you would be way more likely to find me perched in front of a PBS cooking show than Jem, She Ra, or Saved by the Bell…

I loved them. Loved them. LOVED THEM…

The Frugal Gourmet with Jeff Smith was my bread butter and JAM.

I remember watching him cook fish and laughing hysterically and talking back to him incessantly as he cooked. Till this very day every single time I make eggs I think about his rules for making the perfect omelet. I can also remember carrying my tail downstairs to breakfast one day to reprimand my mother for not making her eggs according to his rules… She kept the eggs in the Fridge and put MILK in them… For SHAME!! Jeff Smith would have been OUTRAGED… Probably not as outraged as my mama was listening to her snotty nosed 10-year-old child try to school her on the art of egg making… LOL

And YAN… OH YAN… Do you know how loudly I used to holler YAN CAN COOK at the opening of the show?!! I mean seriously, Martin Yan was like an actual factual rockstar to me… He was amazing in the kitchen. He probably cooked for like 10 minutes and talked and joked and showed off his RIDICULOUS knife skills for the other 20 minutes but YAN sure can cook!

So entertaining and so magnificently talented… That dude can debone a whole chicken in like 20 seconds… Need to chop, dice, slice, or Julienne anything…Yan is THE MAN…

And of course there was Julia. Oh how I adored Julia.

The thing about it was every single time she started the show I would think… What the hell is Osso Busco? I wouldn’t eat that mess!  Beef Wellington? No Ma’am. But without FAIL by the time she plated  up whatever I had sworn to never eat, my mouth was watering, and I had committed myself to one day eat these “exotic” delicacies in some fancy restaurant when I was a grown up girl.

Every membership drive, I would harass my parents to become subscribers so we could support public television in Chicago… Mooommmmm what if they can’t afford to keep my shows on… And we get a mug!!! Give them some money… PLEASE! To my dismay they refused every time, they were much more concerned with buying me actual food than making sure I could watch my favorite chefs  cook food I would never eat.

As I grew older, I watched Wild Chicago, fantastic documentaries about people and places I would have never know of otherwise, and became utterly OBSESSED with British comedies like Fawlty Towers, Keeping Up Appearances and Are You Being Served?” Watching Channel 11 was exactly what the WTTW stood for. WTTW was my Window to the World.

So when I tell you that I am completely gobsmacked by the possibility that I would be able to be the host of my favorite show that just happens to air on Channel 11… I get just a wee bit emotional. I’ve been crying and hollering “Go, Jesus, Go Jesus GO” off and on for months now. LOL

Case in point:

In a few hours, my family, my friends,and I will sit in my living room and watch my audition to be the host of Check Please! WTTW on the Check Please! (Almost) Host Special. The fact that I’m there at all is a complete miraculous miracle of magnificent, ginormous, miracle-y proportions. Seriously…I can’t even believe it…. I can’t EVEN. Not EVEN for all THE EVENS in EVENDOM…

This is my absolute dream job. I can not tell you how much of a fantastic life change this would be for me and the kids. This is truly a defining moment in my life… The minute I saw that they were looking for a new host for Check Please! I KNEW they were looking for me. And no I’m not a classically trained chef, or a hugely successful restaurant owner or a longtime media professional. I’m just a big girl from the city of big shoulders, with a big fro, a big personality, and an even bigger abiding love of good food, good people, and great conversations.

That’s all I have to offer and there were times that I wasn’t sure that it would be enough to get me as far I’ve come. And as far as I hope to go. But every step of the way I thought about that little eight year old girl with the world in her TV and the universe in her books. Cause I knew that she knew that world was big and wide and that even though she didn’t know how she would do it she was 100 percent sure that she could do exactly what the Reading Rainbow theme had told her. She could go anywhere. She could do ANYTHING.

So I believed that girl and I fought for her every step of the way. I put myself out there and told the world I want this job and I want it bad.  I dismissed the fears, I dismissed the naysayers who didn’t think I should even be here… I showed up and I did the best I could do. And here I am.

So win or lose I’m so grateful for this whole experience… So grateful for my family and friends who have rallied behind me. So grateful to have heard my mother and brothers scream with sheer joy when they saw me in the paper and going so hard towards my dream. So grateful to the strangers who have shouted, “Hey Check Please! You’re going to WIN” at me from passing cars.  The complete strangers who have emailed and told me how they have voted, and prayed, and told everyone that they want me to win. So grateful to David, Jacqui, AJ, and every person involved with the whole Check Please process that have made me realize that I am on the right track and that this and so much more could be real for me.

But most of all I’m so grateful to see that once again Channel 11 has shown me that the windows to my world are wide open… And from where I sit the view looks pretty damn good. #checksenamplease

I’m so honored to be a top 17 finalist to be the host of Check Please! Wttw!

This is a 52 weeks to Fabulous video that I made on the way to my audition!!! Such an exciting day!

When you are down to nothing God is up to something…

Last week, while driving I had a spontaneous nosebleed. Driving down Western and just as I passed Foster,  I reached up to swipe what I thought was a slight runny nose caused by Chicago’s weather forecast traveling from -23 to 73 degrees in 3 windy hours.

So when I looked down at my fingertips and saw crimson, I almost crashed the car.

Well that’s not true. I didn’t crash from the shock of seeing random blood pouring down my face. Actually, I didn’t swerve or miss a beat. I may have even actually laughed. But in my head, I crashed my mom-mobile right into that Chicago Hot dog stand on the corner of Western and Foster because the gravity of my nose bleeding again was almost too much for me to bear.

I can’t remember how young I was when I first realized that my daddy hit my mommy, my brothers, and I too much. That there was something wrong with the yelling, the negativity and the “everything is perfect outside but all fucked up insided-ness” of my family. At any given moment, we could go from happy, laughing family to punches flying in the car, yelling in the streets, and crying in my bed. Maybe I was 6, Maybe I was 7… But at some point I started to recognize the instability and it stressed me the all the way out.

The worst part was I had absolutely no idea what to do about it. I can not tell you how many nights I lay awake wracking my brain for the solution to this problem. Praying for God to send me an angel, a vision, a message… just something…. The uncertainties of my life made me jumpy and anxious and left me living in paralyzing fear of WHAT would happen next.

Around this time, I started to get sick all the time. Headaches, colds, flus, tummy aches, and general “I don’t feeeeeeeel good”. Because I didn’t.

It is very hard to feel good when you live in constant apprehension of, what is this dude going to do to us next? Eventually, my family began to accuse me of faking or  just being a baby or something to explain away my illnesses. Maybe I was faking sometimes, maybe I was being a baby but more than likely, I was just looking for a way to cope.

Eventually, I stopped feeling so sick. Or maybe I just decided to keep my mouth shut about my tummy and quit making everybody’s lives more difficult. One of my worst fears is that I would be trouble or cause difficulty for anyone else.

Even as an adult as while certain people continue to show me nothing but disrespect and disregard I am still very careful to not worry them with complaints or trouble them with the inconvenience of requiring that they treat me like a human being.

But when you are a small child it does not matter how shut your 8 year-old mouth is, When people see blood pouring from your nostrils… Things get difficult.

I started getting spontaneous, unexplained nosebleeds, ALL. THE. TIME.  Several times a week, just out of the blue. I distinctly remember sitting in class and being terror-stricken as I watched the red drops rain all over my spelling test. I still got a 100% on that test though, cause SistaTV is a BOSS. But bossy or not I was mortified…Walking around with bloody tissues stuffed up your nose was SO humiliating.

But sometimes it was kinda funny.

My mom has an unnatural obsession with buying comforters. Do not ask me what that is all about. But If I go to her house right now I can assure you she has no less twenty different comforters stacked up neatly next to her bed. I don’t know if freaky fort making is some kind of weird fetish thing for her but umm yeah…So weird.

I’m not sure how old I was but she had just raided the housewares section of TJ Maxx, Marshalls, or whatever discount retailer she had insisted on dragging me through.  She had found me a new comforter and she loved it so much… I was Meh about it but whatevs it made her happy so I was happy to be happy about it for her… It was snow-white and sorta looked like this one [http://excitingwindows.com/wp/susandaydesign/wp-content/blogs.dir/55/files/blog-images/bedding-rainbow-zander.jpg] But replace the buttons with rainbow-colored polar bears. Pretty Snazzy.

One morning, I was jolted awake to my mother screaming like an actual banshee and shouting, “ Father GOD, PLEASE HELP ME! HELP ME!!!”.  I opened my eyes and saw her earrings go flying across my room… I have no idea why but when my Ghanaian mother is really upset or nervous the very first thing she does is whip off her earrings…. She takes off her earrings and ineffectively uses American curse words. I can’t tell you the internal struggles I’ve had trying not to laugh while she was angrily yelling “ You betta put you assfuckers togetha” or flicking the wrong middle finger up or some completely hilarious foolishness like that. Oh #thestruggle

But when I saw her earring go flying across my dresser, I knew that some major ish had gone down and I was NOT waiting around to figure out what hilarious combination of curse words were going to come flying from her lips. So I threw the basted polar bears off me, jumped out of the bed and was halfway down the block before I began to wonder why my face and hair felt so sticky.

Apparently, I had slept through an epic nosebleed in the middle of the night . So when my mom came into wake me up for school all she saw was a river of blood all over me, my nightgown, and the polar bears. This had led her to the completely logical conclusion that somebody had quietly crept into our 2 story house and had silently ax murdered her only baby girl while she had been sleeping peacefully  a mere 10 feet away. Waking up to your daughter sleeping in a bloody crime scene was  understandably her last straw.

“I can not fuck this, Senam. We are taking our assholes to the doctor.”

So we went. And we went. And we went. But there was no explanation. There was no medical diagnosis for the nosebleeds.

My sinuses. Fine.

Sickle cell anemia? No.  

Did I have a TUMAAH Like Kindergarten Cop? No.  

Aids. Come on, Son.  

Was it the nosebleed cancer, I was certain it was. Nope!  

I was fine.

It was just one of those unexplained things that kept happening to me with less and less frequency until I was about 18 and then they completely stopped. I hadn’t thought about it much since then. It never happened to me when I went away to college and I’ve gotten one or two when I had had bad colds or runny noses but that was not an abnormality.

I hadn’t given much thought to why I’d gotten all those nosebleeds when I was little or what had caused them at all. But on Tuesday… I knew. I finally figured out why I had gotten all those nosebleed back then. And why I was in the middle of one right then.

It was stress.

Because although the circumstances are very different, but I have been feeling exactly like that trapped little girl with blood on her spelling test and fear of the unknowns in her heart… So though I was shocked, I knew it made perfect sense for 33-year-old me to be watching blood rain down on my steering wheel…

I can’t tell you what is going on. Mostly, cause I have no idea what is going to be happening from one moment to the next. So I can’t tell you why I feel like my life is crumbling but I can tell you that my current stress level is so off the charts that it is an actual wonder that I am able to get up, breathe, care for my children, or write these words.

A few months ago just as everything started hitting the fan, I was crying my way through yet another episode my heart’s Mama, Oprah’s LifeClass [http://www.oprah.com/oprahs-lifeclass/oprahs-lifeclass.html] when my Aunty-in-my-head Iyanla Vanzant [http://www.oprah.com/oprahs-lifeclass/Iyanla-Vanzant-How-to-Heal-the-Wounds-of-Your-Past] said something that made me sit up straight in my bed.

Until you heal the wounds of your past, you will continue to bleed into your future.

                                – Aunty Iyanla

So for me, that nosebleed was like an actual text message from God telling me it was time to heal. I am not going to be that scared, confused, nose bleeding little girl, anymore. And I will take my asshole to the ends of this life and the next to ensure that my sons or my daughter will never, ever be her, either.

So, the very next day I finally signed the contract to become a writer for XOJane, started putting some action into all these dreams, and made the decision to do what I tell all of you all to do at the end of every SistaTV video… I’m going to love myself. No more fears. No more Stress. No more bleeding. I’m healing and comforted by the indisputable knowledge that this time I already know what happens next. This time going to be fine… This time I’m going to shine.

Senam SistaTV Amegashie spends most of her time waiting for someone to give her a TV show, already! While waiting for that to happen you can find her @sistatv Tweeting (http://www.twitter.com/sistatv

),  @sistaTV Facebooking,( http://www.facebook.com/sistatv), and making hilarious but wonkily edited SistaTV Youtube videos (http://www.youtube.com/sistatv).  And remember SistaTV ( LINK:http://www.sistatv.com) Loves you!

Barack Obama is only one man… and while he may have been elected to (arguably) the most powerful position in the world. You and I are still as in charge of our lives as we were yesterday.

I didn’t vote for Obama to receive some magical handout for my family and I. And I can undoubtedly say, that the overwhelming majority that voted for him didn’t do it for a handout either. I voted for him because his beliefs and desires for the country most mirrored mine. Just like I’m sure the majority who voted for Mitt voted the same way. And while I understand your disappointment in your candidate’s loss, I am deeply disheartened by the doomsday foreboding in the few posts I have scrolled thru this morning.