Meet JournHE to the AltHER Participant Jasmaine!

Jasmaine is a mother of three and a woman shaped by both difficult experiences and resilience.

“I’m a warrior,” Jasmaine told The Weight She Carries. “Life just feels like a battle. You have your ups, you have your downs, you have your victories, you have your losses. But I view a warrior as somebody who doesn’t give up, regardless of what’s going on.”

This determination has carried her through experiences many people would never guess she has faced.

That, and a deep faith Jasmaine’s grandmother instilled in her as a child.

“I was born into the faith,” she said. “My grandma, she was a Christian, and she introduced us to prayer. She read the Bible to us. She taught us the Lord’s Prayer in the Bible.”

Her grandmother made faith more than something to know. She taught Jasmaine that it was her foundation.

“She made it important. She expressed the importance of how you should really lean on your faith and the power of the Heavenly Father when things get tough,” Jasmaine said.

Jasmaine grew up as one of four siblings. She was the middle child, a position she jokingly said comes with its own particular experience.

“As a middle child, you can feel like you are looked past, and you’re the black sheep of the family,” she said.

Her mother worked to make ends meet, while her grandparents also played an important role in helping raise the children.

“My mom played an amazing role in my life. She worked all while taking care of the four of us. With the help of my grandparents. She did everything she could to get us what we needed. I wouldn’t trade her for the world,” she said.

That sense of family and community would become particularly meaningful later in her own life. Today, Jasmaine is raising three children of her own.

Searching for Something Different

Jasmaine has been in relationships before, but she has never been married. One of those relationships was abusive, she said.

“I personally felt like I’m a good woman,” she said. “I’m very loyal, and I just always wonder, ‘Why don’t they marry me? What am I attracting?’”

She didn’t want to continue repeating the same patterns and also wanted to understand something she had never really been taught: what a healthy marriage actually looked like.

“I’m also very curious about what the characteristics of married women are. How do they get married? What is something that they’ve seen or that they have that helped them? What are some things that they do in practice that lets the guy know, ‘I’m viable, and if you’re going to be with me, you’re going to have to marry me’?”

It was that desire for understanding that eventually led her to JournHE to the AltHER. Jasmaine learned about the program through a woman she met at work, Ayana.

The two women had talked about the need for a space where women could learn about relationships, marriage, and preparation.

“She’s the one who actually brought up the idea of Sister Cindel coming up with a program or some sort of group or community that teaches women how to be prepared for marriage,” Jasmaine said.

The idea immediately appealed to her.

She wanted to learn from women who had already walked the road she hoped to travel.

“Sister Cindel has so much wisdom,” Jasmaine said. “One, she has experience with being married, and two, even before marriage, she has so much wisdom to share about her own journey to the altar.”

She wanted to understand marriage before entering it, not learn everything through trial and error afterward.

“I was at that point in my life where I wanted to make sure I didn’t keep making the same mistakes and having the same judgments that I had in the past.”

The Lesson That Changed How She Saw Herself

One of the most significant lessons Jasmaine has taken from the program is learning how to treat herself.

“I’ve learned that it’s extremely important to have that foundation of love for yourself,” she said. “To know yourself is so important because if you know yourself, you know how to treat yourself. And I think it’s important that you treat yourself out loud.”

By that, she doesn’t mean broadcasting everything she does on social media. She means allowing the way she treats herself to communicate something about her value, which gives people the foundation of how they should treat you.

Looking back, she recognizes that she once placed herself at the bottom of her own priority list.

“I found myself not really treating myself the best, allowing people to be put before me, allowing everything to be put before me.”

She had interpreted selflessness in a way that left little room for herself.

“There is this scripture… ‘the first will be last, and the last will be first [Matthew 19:30].’ So I thought if I’m last, at least I’ll be first in God’s eyes.”

But she discovered that constantly putting herself last had consequences.

“That caused me to be treated as such, which is last,” she said. “And it doesn’t feel good. But if I put me first, I’m happy, and my cup can overflow into their cups,” she said.

Seeing Healthy Love

One of the highlights of JournHE to the AltHER for Jasmaine was an evening spent with married couples.

On February 14, married couples were invited to share a meal with the women and talk about their relationships.

The women heard how the couples met, what they did to maintain their relationships, and how they showed thoughtfulness toward one another.

“I liked just hearing about healthy love,” she said.

For Jasmaine, that was significant because personal experiences can sometimes distort what a person believes is possible.

“You get these personal examples in life that are not so healthy,” she said. “But then you hear other people’s perspectives and how they’re going about life. It proves that it is possible!”