Cody
Williams
My Views
Fatherhood: Against all odds
Often,
to keep in shape I run ten, maybe fifteen miles a week with my toddler son
riding along comfortably strapped in a three-wheel runner.
He’s three now and we have been jogging together since he was six
months old. Almost daily, people stop to comment on how good it is to see
a black man enjoying life with his child.
While running we get the thumbs up from young people, old people,
men and women, black, white and Hispanic. I always thought this odd seeing
that there was nothing more I’d rather do than enjoying an activity I
like with my child, someone I love more than life itself. With their
acknowledgments these folks see a need to encourage me to continue to,
“do the right thing,” be an active father. It’s not often you see a black man hanging with his
children some even say. “You
go, boy,” I hear, kicking it out, stride by sweaty stride as my progeny
snoozes in his chariot with a sunny breeze caressing his face.
I was truly baffled. Surely there are hundreds, thousands, if not millions of black men out each day, strolling, shopping, riding, and running with their infant and toddler children. My own friends come to mind. Since becoming a father the focus of my social life shifted from spending time with the childless to play dates, birthday celebrations, trips to zoos and playgrounds with parents of children the same age as ours. Our universe is replete with fathers who spend quality time with their children.
Now comes a divorce: . .
Like 56% of marriages in America ours is abbreviating prematurely. This split happened before kindergarten, before little league, algebra homework, puberty’s rites of passage, the first crush, the chat about the birds and the bees, a high school letter sweater, driving lessons, the prom, college admission tests, true love, a bridge loan and grand-parenthood. Estranged: before all these things and more, of which I dreamed of being there for my children, being an active participant in a father-child relationship, being the father whom all of those strangers admired; a role divorce severely limits. Over 60% of all divorced fathers do not have a continued presence in their children’s lives. Over 60% of black children live in a single parent household headed by a female.
Upon accepting her Oscar, the actress Halley Berry thanked her Jewish agent for being the only father she had known. Rapper Eminem succeeded in life, he says, in spite of an absent father. Hundreds of thousands of black men sit shackled in prisons today, blaming “the system” partly, but mostly placing blame for their plight on a father who was not there for them.
Nobel laureate, Toni Morrison in her eloquently written book Jazz, likens a fatherless boy to an amputee having lost an arm. She writes:
“ He sat down on the rough mattress near the
trouser cuffs, and when dark spots formed on the cloth he saw that he was
crying.
“Only now, he thought, now that I know I have a father, do I feel his absence: the place where he should have been and was not. Before, I thought everybody was one-armed, like me… This part of me that does not know me, has never touched me or lingered at my side. This gone-away hand that never helped me over the stile, or guided me past the dragons, pulled me up from the ditch into which I stumbled. Stroked my hair, fed me food; took the far end of the load to make it easier for me to carry. This arm that never held itself out, extended from my body, to give me balance as I walked thin rails or logs, round and slippery with danger... I will locate it so the severed part can remember the snatch, the slice of its disfigurement. Perhaps then the arm will no longer be a phantom, but will take its own shape, grow its own muscle and bone… Amen.”
David Askew, a black actor living in Hollywood, related to that passage so intensely he says after reading it as a young man he cried long and hard, granting that Morrison had so aptly articulated the pain he felt growing up fatherless.
I’ve heard many people, both male and female talk of this pain they feel and anger they direct at absentee fathers. Yet, few men speak aloud of the pain and heartache that comes with being separated from their children. In America, separating black men from our children is a cultural norm honed during slavery -- forced to be just breeders, like studding horses -- and perpetuated by social injustices since. While many overcome, for some it’s tough being a father in a society that hinders your becoming a man. US courts favor women in child custody cases. (In many African cultures children go with the male in the dissolution of a marriage.) After divorce, economics can and often lead fathers seeking career opportunities and their children in different directions. Bad blood between two parents can be difficult to overcome. Many men don’t choose to abandon their children, just the woman attached to them. And young children, by nature, almost seem to prefer a mother who nurtures them over a father who may do what fathers are taught to do, provide for, protect, discipline and encourage. Few men talk of the heartache of being loved a distant second by the children they love so much.
Men too are human. Men, like the children and women they leave have broken hearts and broken dreams. If the pain of being fatherless is as severe as having an arm snatched away, living without our children is like being an arm without its body. Men hurt too. If I can speak for the fathers of Haley and Marshall and David, and many of the fathers of the fatherless, walking away is often difficult, but it can be far less a sustained hurt than the suffering of staying -- the suffering for everyone, depending on the circumstances. The New Testament says it pained the Almighty greatly to be separated from His son. Why would anyone assume it pains us mere mortals any less. Masking that pain is at the core of many drug addictions, alcoholism and destructive lifestyles men lead.
So now, my challenge is to work, fight against the odds in our society that create so much pain on all sides. I’m forced to redefine for my children and me a fatherhood far unlike that I envisioned even before they were born. I had gathered strength needed to get me through each day each night when I stood in the jam of their bedroom door and watched, just watched as they slept. When I tiptoed over to each bed and held my face close to their breath, inhaling a child’s innocence that sustained me through the battles and wars I fought during the day. Having children in our life can soften us, take the edge off. In my life, each breath I take I take for them. Since they were born my life has been theirs, as was the dream of many fathers. Our children may never know, are seldom told, how much their living gives us life.
Now, instead of seven nights a week we can have as little as only two weekends a month together. That’s about 60 days each year instead of 365. By the time I die that adds up to another 18 years, another child raised, another lifetime, a lot of little leagues games, camping under a tent in the back yard, basketball shots, Sunday school lessons, PTA meetings and recitals.
Recognizing that divorce diminishes fatherhood, how can I still be an effective dad? How can an every-other-weekend father, showering his children with gifts and candy to make up for weekdays absent, discipline, nurture and train children and honor their mother in ways that will help them be productive; psychologically, emotionally and spiritually whole adults. There is an entire prison population, a drug culture, a street life that says I’m needed. And I ache at the thought of my children being a part of either because of my not being there for them.
My challenge, my prayer, my dedication is to make the rest of my children’s lives as carefree as my son’s early chariot rides through the park. I’m hoping society, the courts, their mother and family will also give us thumbs up, and support, as we go.
(c) copyright 2003 Cody Williams
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