Category: Uncategorized Page 12 of 14

The kids had me for the weekend. They worked me like a pizza oven at Domino’s. My legs feel like they’ve been holding up the Brooklyn Bridge. After I scooped them up from school Friday, the program ran like so:

The kids’ sensai hosted a social at a local trampoline park…and I participated. I had the nerve to ride a mechanical bull! I flung myself around with the kids and watched in awe as some jumpers somersaulted and back-flipped like circus performers. Then, we hosted sensai for dinner, which took 45 minutes to prepare and another half-hour to eat. No one saw a bed that night before 10:30 PM.

Saturday morning, we dragged ourselves out of bed and hit the community center so I could squeeze in a work out before their karate class at 10:45 AM. After class, the kids made themselves brunch before we hit the road for IKEA. The store closest to us is in Elizabeth, New Jersey, which is definitely an “are we there yet?” type ride. It’s a good thing somebody built an airport over there; it served as a handy distraction for bored kids who vowed to eschew electronic devices for that day.

Once inside IKEA, the kids expressed more interest in the furniture than I anticipated. This was troubling because I am a purposeful, rather impatient shopper uninterested in the most dazzling displays. The kids demanded we walk through multiple room mock-ups. Amid many oohs and aahs, they played with the props, read all the signs and collected brochures while I attempted transcendental meditation to maintain my composure. Of course, there were also the requisite restroom stop and earnest appeals for snacks left half-eaten.

Three hours and ten miles later, we exited the store to cooler weather and a setting sun. We all figured the sun had the right idea. I hit the interstate like I left a roast in the oven and, once home, I didn’t need to sing them any lullabies.

Sunday started out at a slower pace. After breakfast, my daughter and I napped while my son constructed his Minecraft village on Xbox. Soon enough, though, he declared himself ready for a round of miniature golf. My whistful dream of a lazy afternoon evaporated like morning dew. And after miniature golf and a picnic, we came back to the neighborhood to discover a group of their pals running around. What could I do? I rolled my eyes, threw up my hands and accepted my fate.

Tonight, I’m shrugging my shoulders before I lapse into a coma. Given the chance, I’d do twice those activities on half the energy. Best of all, I wrote today — I didn’t break my discipline.

The American retail and service industries are, together, a yawning Maw operating on a timer. The engineering geniuses at Dyson can’t design a machine more effective than the Maw at sucking money from the pockets of dads, particularly those of African-American or Euro-Christian backgrounds. Not even the IRS can rival the Maw at keeping tabs on the contents of our wallets and extracting its cut.

The Maw has reduced us to a bunch of hamsters running around wheels in a colossal cage of resignation. Hamsters are genetically predisposed to run. Humans, however, are creatures of habit, and it is this characteristic that keeps our feet moving. If we divide our hamster wheels into twelve sections that correspond to the months of a year, we can observe the annual cycle of the Maw:

• January. Barring random birthdays or anniversaries, this may be the single month of the year a dad can get a break. We’ve already been turned upside down and the loose change shaken from our pockets for Christmas, but the Maw is programmed to give us recovery time for…
• February. Does divorce breed cynicism about what qualifies as a genuine expression of love? Who can say, but one would have to spend the three weeks before Valentine’s Day in a fallout shelter to avoid the pressure exerted from all angles to feed the Maw in the name of love.
• March. One would never know that, as few as 100 years ago, the Irish were slandered by many “patriotic” Americans as shiftless drunkards. Today, the Maw annually opens wide on Saint Patrick’s Day for its “holiday”-sanctioned excess of green beer.
• April. I could never work out the connection between bunnies, colored eggs, new clothing and the resurrection of the Savior, nor why everything Easter seems to cost so much.
• May. Double-whammy. Mother’s Day, that long-established perennial purse plague AND Memorial Day — the unofficial start of summer. Lots of get-aways, barbecues, open beaches and, by the first week of June, empty wallets.
• June. School’s out…and so is your checkbook to cover summer day care.
• July. Independence Day — kind of a twin to Memorial Day only, with the fireworks, more dangerous and expensive.
• August. Summer camp typically ends a couple weeks before school begins. This leaves us with restless kids who need new clothes and school supplies and want to do stuff.
• September. Labor Day — summer’s last gasp. Another round of weekend get-aways, barbecues and money NOT well spent…and then they close the pools and beaches.
• October. Halloween — a biggie. The Maw has you pegged so square, the temporary costume stores pop up in the strip malls right after Labor Day. The operators of these places get them up and running like the crew at Madison Square Garden converts its playing surface from basketball court to hockey rink.
• November. Thanksgiving — Thursday’s feast…before Black Friday’s famine.
• December. O, the granddaddy of ’em all. Get Christmas right, dad, else you got a whole year of making up to do. The Maw is never as wide open as now so jump in the backhoe and get to shoveling.

The Maw is real. For single dads, it is the Bogey Man, Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, Chupacabra, the Abominable Snowman and a bad divorce lawyer rolled into one. When battling it, our only options are to double down on planning and budgeting, score a lifetime subscription for Xanax or to simply throw ourselves in with the money.

My father and I are close…today. Considering that I spent a grand total of one year under his roof, at 15 years old at that, we could just as easily be estranged. In our case, however, genetics seem to have trumped distance and the inevitable friction that develops between fathers and their offspring. We think and behave so similarly, he comes off more like my older brother than anything else. For the gift of this bond, we are grateful and well aware of our good fortune. From both our experiences as black Americans having grown up poor or darned close to it, we know what we have is rare, especially once I came to understand the intricacies of raising kids.

Over the years, unconsciously and before I even cared to entertain the idea of fatherhood, I got the impression that black American fathers are seldom held in high regard outside of our communities. Having spent much of my life trying to burst free of institutional and occupational pigeon holes of all manner and design, it made sense: It is the uncommon non-black American who expects much of us outside the realms of sports and music.

It took a while, but I got the message that nobody wants to work with Angry Urban Black Guy, so of occupational necessity, I stopped taking offense to the preconceived notions of others, real or imagined. The bad thing is I acquired some preconceived notions of my own, a set of ideas I took for granted that most non-blacks would have about me. Interesting dichotomy, but the philosophy that it’s pointless to worry about things I can’t control has served me well. But nearly ten years into fatherhood, to my surprise — and horror — I find that now, I do worry about the negative perception of black American fathers, not only from outside our communities, but from within! For your consideration:

• While I was growing up, just about all my friends, black AND Hispanic, lived with single moms, some of whom, subsequent to giving birth, married or cohabitated with men other than their children’s fathers;
• The high incidence of estrangement I see between my peers and their children;
• The difficulties of inter-generational communication between men in many black families due to the absence of dominant males in the households of the younger men;
• For my generation (I’m 48), the disturbing lack of positive role models I had on which to base my behavior as a father; and
• The sheer number of black women and Latinas I know, family, friends, acquaintances and coworkers, who acted as mother AND father for kids all but abandoned by fathers who started new families, wound up incarcerated or dead or just didn’t want the responsibility of fatherhood.

Outside the black community, the media paints an even worse portrait of black fathers based on the behavior of scores of clueless celebrity dads, to name a few:

• Terrell Owens
• Travis Henry
• Antonio Cromartie
• Latrell Sprewell
• Old Dirty Bastard (AKA Russell Jones)
• Eazy-E (AKA Eric Wright)
• DMX (AKA Xavier Simmons)!

Granted, I know precious few men who knew from their teens they wanted to be fathers. In many cases, mine included, guys have to grow into the role. But whether a man knows by the age of ten that fatherhood is his future or gets surprise news from his girlfriend at the age of 36, the growth into the role must happen. Generations of black American kids have grown up in crisis. No politician, social worker, teacher or cop can do the job we must do ourselves. And if we don’t know how to do that job because we’ve so seldom seen it done well, it’s up to us to put our heads together and figure it out!

Granted, perception does not always reflect reality, but without an orchestrated effort by those judged on the basis of long-held and false notions to inform the ignorant, perception can eventually become entrenched misconception.

I don’t like what I wrote today. I don’t like the implications it holds for my daughter or son and the families they might raise. But I embrace my power to belie the myth that black men are not cut out to be good fathers. I encourage the black men I know to be handling their business to do the same.