Songfacts®:

• Mary J Blige told Rolling Stone magazine about this song, which features her alter ego, Brook Lynn: "It's not a Mary J Blige story. It's a story I've seen women live over and over and over again. In a relationship for a while, after a while a guy starts looking for somebody younger, meanwhile you've got children by me, you've wasted half of my life. You can go and do that, you can go and play the part of sugar daddy if you want, but you have to take care of these children, you're not going anywhere. Mary J Blige wouldn't come from a place like that. If you want to go, then fine go, but Brook Lynn is like 'no, you're not going anywhere' and she's speaking for those women that are going through that."
• This was not included on the standard edition of the album, but was added as a bonus track to the iTunes edition.
• Blige wrote this with R&B tunesmiths Terius "The-Dream" Nash, Christopher "Tricky" Stewart, and Phalon Alexander - the trio who co-wrote the album's lead single, "Just Fine."
• Blige told Blues & Soul that she chose Stewart and Nash as collaborators on the album based on the strength of the "Umbrella" hit they wrote for Rihanna (Blige actually says it was originally written for her, but she was too busy to record it).
• Growing Pains was Blige's eighth #1 album on the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart. It also went to #1 on the genre-spanning Billboard 200.
• Blige on her alter ego, Brook Lynn: "She's a rapper, and she represents a part of Mary that a lot people don't wanna see! So we use her to say what Mary can't say! You know, being a woman in the hip-hop world you can pretty much say what you WANT! But that's basically all she is - I'm not intending to give Brook Lynn a deal, or make Brook Lynn album!"
  
  Brook Lynn was also featured in "Enough Cryin'," from her previous album, The Breakthrough.