Today is June 17, 2009 and while daughters and mothers frantically overcrowd their local Best Buy, Walmart, or Dillard's for the perfect fathers day gift my grandma,mother, sister and I will be continuing business as usual. We all have what you call an absent father. A man who hung around long enough to make us, but not long enough to shape us. It is for this reason why I write this. My aim is let go of the hate, resentment, anger, and sadness that comes with having an absent father. It is for the years of lessons I had to teach my self about love, intimacy, sex, relationships and men. I write for all of us " for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf".I am third generation absent father child. My life was shaped by hands of woman who suffered deeply from a lifetime of bad decisions made on account that she had no real father figure in her life. With no love shown to her by her mother and no male remodel to build a foundation she stepped out into adult hood ambitious and determined to make the world her oyster. She very well could have had it not been for the emptiness all of us feel as we search for a father replacement. After having me I believe my parents broke up.
To not be a complete dead beat dad I suppose my parents arranged the weekend visits. They exchange were always in places like a parking lot, Miami subs, gas stations or my grandmothers and the worst part was that he was always late. I never arrived to this drop off with a father standing out side the car with open arms and excitement, it was always around 8 or 9 o'clock and my mother and I would be sitting in the car eating snacks talking listening to music or me sleeping and waiting to make my way out of the passenger seat of her car into the passenger seat of his. From that point, before I had a stepmother to babysit me I was taken to various women's houses and I stayed there on the weekend or on Saturdays watching movies, eating junk food or if I am lucky playing with their kids if they had some.
Over the course of the next 14 years this is how I balanced my time between my mother and father. As I became older his new wife began to have children, beautiful mixed girls that he adored. I was subjected to see my father be a father to his new children while taking steps further in the Shadow.
I share this story with you not to Villainize my father or my mother but to show you a cycle. A vivacious chain that connects families of women through the umbilical cord. It is unfortunate and an epidemic that continues to destroy very foundation of the black community. Until black men realize their significance in the lives of their daughters we will continue to give birth to young women that are lost and confused, unable to sustain a healthy relationships with men and will inevitable continue the cycle.
The future of black women
Studies have shown that when children grow up with a healthy family structure, meaning a family where love and respect are shown to both partners, the child will be seek relationship mirror the one they grew up with, I believe this to be true among all species. The same is true when a child is brought into this world without knowing how to develop and maintain meaningful and healthy relationships. This is a critical because black women it seems are the manifestation of what happens when fathers are missing and families are broken. They spend their whole lives searching for the love of a father. It matters not that what they are seeking will never be found and I truly believe in the depths of their souls they know this, but every time a man says I love you, holds them tighter than the last one did, kisses them on the forehead and maybe even holds their hand a little voice inside says " your getting closer".
The consequences of black women seeking and settling for a "daddy replacement" is another generation of fatherless girls why? because the men they decide to father children with never intended to stay long in the first place. To add insult to injury once the fairy tale is over they realize they never knew how to develop and maintain a healthy relationship in the first place. They never spent the time to know themselves to be to themselves what a father was supposed to be and teach themselves by any means necessary what a father is supposed to teach his daughter. Those lessons being
1) Your value comes from within not a man
2) Love your self first because men will always be around
3) Know you are worth more than a kiss on a check, a meal and movie, but that you deserve the world
4) Your man ought to always be there for you just as I have always been
etc ( I do not know what else because I was not taught these lesson but I digress)
To often I find prominent black actors, intellectuals, and public officials doing everything they can to save the black boys. Their are countless programs, after school activities, and even role models to teach African American boys how to step up and be better men. But What about the us? It matters not how "saved" these Young boys become because if African American girls do not learn how to value themselves completely and make better choices when choosing a partner the black community will continue to raise our future video vixxan, prostitute, and strippers.
I know this because I've lived it and continue to see my peers, highly educated black women, make the same mistakes when choosing their mate. They unconsciously recreate the only father/daughter relationship they've ever known. If the father was abusive they will date abusive men, if the father was absent they will date men who have a deep rooted issue with commitment, if their father divorced their mother right after birth started a new family they will have deep rooted insecurities of not feel good enough.
The damage is done regardless of how successful the young woman ever becomes. Until she makes the decision to break the generational curse, until she finds the God in her who never left her side she will have "daddy issue's" that will follow her until she pulls that root out of the ground and cast them over to God. The sad part of this entire saga is that it will take a woman who has taken the time to right the wrongs in within herself to truly overcome. It will take more women to take a hard look at themselves and their environment and make a change then teach us how we too can break this generational curse.
How are we to learn the difference between intimacy and sex? Love and lust? Endearment and convenience? How are we to know when a man truly loves us or is playing his best card? How are we to learn that self worth and self esteem do not come from the attention of men but our self? How are we to know that we deserve more than meal and movie? How are we supposed to know that our bodies are to be respected and not given in exchange for a warm embrace we never received from our fathers? These are lesson our fathers were to teach us, weather he loved our mothers enough or not, when they decided to lay down and conceive us they had an obligation to show us what true love is.
Solution
I am not to sure what the magic formula is to get over this mountain because I too still struggle with the loss. I am 22 and only recently started my journey of self discovery through God and he has guided me to the answers of my life. Which may not be the same for every young black girl. What I do know is someone, anyone, needs to do something about the downward spiral of our black girls. There needs to be combination of men and women to guide them because taking girls from single parent home into programs that completely run by women can only do so much. It is still missing the male figure or at least a blueprint.
Black women hold the key to resurrect the black community, the truth lies in our bellies and unless we awaken ourselves to this truth we will forever be lost.
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