Here is the house. It is green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty. Here is the family. Mother, Father, Dick, and Jane live in the green-and-white house. They are very happy. See Jane. She has a red dress. She wants to play. Who will play with Jane? See the cat. It goes meow-meow. Come and play. Come play with Jane. The kitten will not play. See Mother. Mother is very nice. Mother, will you play with Jane? Mother laughs. Laugh, Mother, laugh. See Father. He is big and strong. Father, will you play with Jane? Father is smiling. Smile, Father, smile...
Many black girls/women/womxn can remember reading Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and dissecting the black girl experience through the eyes of Pecola and sometimes Claudia. But for me the true inspection began with the slight sting that came with reading the Dick and Jane reading primer. It was a scene unfamiliar to me as the only child to a single mother. Looking back at my childhood now, I see where the weeds of having a different upbringing from many of my friends had choked the nutrients from my self-worth. Those weeds took over quite a bit of landscape and in turn there wasn’t much room to plant gardens of self-love, core values, or acceptance. Instead for every birthday, holiday, and special moment I harvested self-doubt, depression, and unworthiness.
After speaking with the very few of my friends who grew up with a single mother, I’ve discovered 5 things we could all agree on.
1) The Search
My friends and I sat around one of our living room tables in that awkward space of ‘admitting too much’.
Time and time again we found ourselves settling (but not really settling) and being ‘okay’ (with too much) because we gave too much. We laughed off our “situationships” even though we weren’t really happy. We were laughing because we found it some kind of hysterical that we all found men like our fathers. The same men that Mama subliminally warned us about but never outright said “Don’t marry ya Daddy.”
I knew I wanted to write about this one day so I asked the friend next to me if she knew the kind of man she wanted to be with. She told me “He’s gotta be everything my father isn’t!”
Two other friends vigorously shook their heads and one leaned forward to answer “Girl, he gotta communicate because my Daddy damn sure don’t call!”
I cracked a smile, reminiscent of the cracks I leaped over in sidewalks as a kid. Then I thought about whether I had an answer to my own question. The issue was I knew I didn’t want someone God-awful, but aside from that I was searching for a nameless guy with characteristics that suited a Prince Charming. I didn’t know what I was really looking for because all I knew was how my dad treated me, well, how he didn’t. My mom and dad went separate ways before I could remember what my own name was. The men in my family were real touch and go. Short interactions that I’d only remember at family reunions so that my stories sounded nice when God called them home.
I never bared witness to a real love that I wanted to use as the North Star in my search for Prince Charming. So I had become one of those girls. I smiled in every “friendly” male face when he paid me a compliment, became naive to true intentions when I entered friendships with guys, and was sometimes blind and dumb to foolishness.
When I said that last part aloud to my friends we all became quiet. We were all one of those girls at some point.
2) The Push
“I wanted to be different. Different from my mom.” In the midst of tears, one of my best friends reached for an empty Kleenex box only to toss it to the side.
It probably reminded her too much of her relationship.
She is one of the most successful and intelligent people I have ever known. She’s well- traveled, in a great school, a big part of her sorority and definitely popular. I wondered what her ex-girlfriend had seen in another girl that my friend didn’t possess. But it was a familiar story. Even though she had it all, she was missing that one thing: The seed of knowledge that grew the perfect way not to pick a love just like your Dad.
Both of us as the products of single mother households knew a source of ambition and motivation that we tapped into throughout our academic and personal lives. Our friendship often felt like a competition. Who’s going to get this scholarship or into that college, what country will I get to that the other hasn’t, what awards will we both win, etc. We placed bets on the newest and biggest achievements and supported each other as we pushed the limits of success at our separate schools. But today, we ended up talking about what motivates us.
“I want to show my dad what he missed out on, that I’m a different kind of kid. Wanna show him that I’m the best thing he never knew.” She answered.
I turned my head away from her and looked out the window to her sunny front yard. Her response turned the knob on a shut door that hid away my true feelings about my dad. Made me hurt in that familiar way.
“Yeah, I hear that.” I had said after a moment. But I wasn’t quite sure I agreed. I felt conflicted. When I first answered my own question I had said that everything I did was for my mama. To see her face light up in that special way it does when she sees another A on a report card or hears my name mentioned for another achievement in church. That special light I never saw on my Daddy’s face, but could brighten up my life and make me forget that.
Still her response resonated with me, made me uncomfortable with the way I wanted to say, “Girl, me too!” I felt like saying that I related to her words would take away from the sentiment of making my mama proud. It made me feel like I wasn’t doing anything for her or even myself. It felt like it became too much about him and not enough about the achievement itself. And I never wanted to give his absence the kind of credit that goes to a Dad signing permission slips and tuition checks.
3) The Distance
If there’s anything that my friends and I know too well, it’s the comfortable amount of space we place in our relationships. The kind that leaves enough room to not voice our opinions often nor talk about heavy emotional baggage until we’re ready.
A girl I recently began making good friends with was always casually mentioning her stepfather and not much about her biological one. As one to notice the small things and keep quiet, I never pressed the topic until one day she asked about my dad. I shrugged and said “I’m good on that relationship until I find myself comfortable enough to have an open and honest conversation with him. For now I can settle for what I know about and of him. For now... that’s okay.”
She nodded and I proceeded to say, “I’m guessing you feel the same? I’m sure your relationship with your stepfather makes up for a lot of the absence right?”
We sat quietly and I watched as her face became overcast.
“There’s always this space, some days it feels like a void and others it’s just an empty space. My stepdad can never fill it. It’s too wide.”
And just like that I realized how that same space for her was every bit comfortable for me. I found it easier to keep this space between me and everyone, regardless of the love. The space, no matter how wide, was never the issue. The issue was always the importance I placed on it and the person I wanted to stretch to fit it.
4) The “Too Much” & “The Not Enough”
One thing that girls with weak father-daughter bonds tend to fall for is the guy who cannot handle our baggage, hurdling our suitcases at us in the words “too much.”
We begin to feel the weight of our emotions and try to place them in his hands not realizing that the guy putting them down to tell us about ourselves isn’t telling us that we’re not worthy of him carrying them. He’s trying to tell us he’s not the one to carry them all.
In reality, we failed the moment we packed our baggage into the house that a relationship is in. But we do not know any better until we acknowledge that some issues have everything to do with our daddy and nothing to do with the man we want to be with.
Yet still, we have to fight that nagging feeling that we’re not good enough, some type of damaged because we missed out on the first real love. It’s not true. And searching for those missing pieces and love in another man is what mows over budding relationships. We must recognize that some of the same things we lacked in the relationship with our father can turn up on the list of requirements in relationships with men and friends. We have to find a way to separate the two.
5) The Lesson
As surprising as it may be, the lessons we’ve learned growing up as children of a single mother became some of the pillars of our womanhood. Every piece of our nature is self taught- cultivated and tended to by our careful hands. We lick our wounds until they scar over with cells of self-love and we tell ourselves “It’s okay.”
We become walking “How To” Books in the section of Self-Assurance. When the absence becomes a present factor in our pain we comfort ourselves with our self-taught worth. Our mamas preach to us that no love can be stronger than our own which is why it’s okay to be alone. Then we take that lecture and sew it to our skin so we can see it in our mirrors everyday. We stand in front of the mirror naked and vulnerable to read our reflections, to gain a new understanding of Myself in the context of a fatherless girl. And foremost, The Lesson we learn from our father’s absence is that worthiness is neither quantitative nor qualitative but it is the synonym of our own names.