As a single Black woman who has been married and divorced, but already had four children by the time I first wed … I can tell you now that “daddy in the home” is NOT the panacea some people think it is. In MY case, when I did marry their father, it only made things worse.

That doesn’t mean “homedaddy” is not a good thing, but it does mean it’s not always an option – especially with younger folks who likely aren’t thinking in the first place. And in the second place, ‘baby daddy’ probably is at home, a man or a boy that the child might also call “Granddaddy,” “Uncle,” “Brother,” or even “Cousin” if the family wasn’t embarrassed by that little tidbit of information getting out.

Only time tells. There no magic looking glass or crystal ball that says how bad people turn good and good people turn bad or how good stays good and bad stays bad. Nobody really knows how a child will turn out, two parent family or not. There are too many two-parent families with horrid children to even call it, so all beliefs are on the table.

‘DADDY IN THE HOME’ BS

I’ve listened to so much BS about how the ‘poor Black’ children are falling apart and getting in all kinds of trouble because there is no “daddy in the home,” and all of these “stupid Black women on welfare” who keep proliferating while in poverty. Then tell me a story about how there are ZERO double-parent (fully-parented) homes with troubled children in them and we’ll have that talk.

Single Black women have ALWAYS raised their children, though far too many Black women are also bad mothers married or not … and too many of the children of single Black women turned out quite well to make a judgment call on any of it. Furthermore, married Black women don’t have any more guarantees than anyone else does.

Children get grown, hopefully get gone, and make their own decisions regardless.

My own eldest granddaughter, one of the most privileged and spoiled and ‘daddy-loved’ Black females on the planet -whose father went into overdrive protecting his children because of his own daddy-abandonment issues- went bonkers right around 17 all by herself … and NONE of the sacrifices her daddy (my son) made for her made a hillabeans difference about her singular ‘I’m grown and you can’t tell me what to do’ decisions in the end.

I can’t even say that if I had had a daddy LIKE HERS, I would have turned out better. I don’t know that, and neither does anyone else.

NO…I DON’T ADVOCATE FOR SINGLE BLACK PARENTHOOD…

But it is what it is. There ARE no guarantees. ZIP. None. Either way, children don’t come with a personalized manual or guidebook for how to raise them right.

It’s as if no one has the sense enough to know that Black women also fall in love and things don’t always work out as planned, and they have no intention of being left alone, but ‘ish’ happens. They may not BE Cinderella-esque, or wake up like some little ‘Snow White’ fiction creature with little bluebirds singing and whistling and chirping over their heads in the mornings, but they dream like her — about home and family and love in their lives, and it simply don’t go the way they planned. Yeah, I said “don’t” in that sentence: Slurry intentional.

It doesn’t even always go that way for WHITE women, and plenty of them end up single-parenting as well … including the mothers of Lance Armstrong, Pierce Brosnan, and Tom Cruise, whose father abused him, as well as Don Knotts — who had bona fide daddy abuse issues that wore him out to the day he died. [ withoutafather.com ]

OF COURSE, IT WOULD BE BETTER IF ‘BLACK WARD CLEAVER’ WAS SOMEWHERE NEARBY…BUT DON’T BE COLOR-CODING SINGLE PARENTS

It’s as if these single-mom-bashers have no clue that that stated 70-something percent single Black women with no daddy in the home, blah blah blah … I’d be almost willing to be MORE THAN HALF OF THEM DO HAVE DADDIES IN THE HOME … ALSO KNOWN AS — the man who also happens to be the granddaddy, or maybe the the uncle, the cousin, or even the brother of ‘baby mama’, which is probably why she done lost her ever-loving mind anyway. In-home child molestation is not only allowed, but the women of the family often help to keep it quiet and hidden and act like the little girl is ‘just crazy.’

One particular female I know told me of a story where her grandfather was a known child molester and when he tried to molest her, she was told to shush it and refused to do so. He ended up in prison because of it, and that is exactly where he belonged.

Don’t even bother pretending it doesn’t happen to white women, either — Danielle Steel wrote BOOKS about it men with big time community standing raping their own daughters and female relatives. Daddy just might BE in the home and nobody wants to talk about it … AND the daughter is getting blamed for it, at that.

Stop Bitching and Do Something

While these folks are busy yapping about it, they need to take the time out to go COVER these children before something bad does happen. If they can’t do that, then they need to shut up. Period.

It’s like telling someone to “go get a job,” and YOU ain’t hiring.

If you are not resolving the problem, then you are part of it. Period.

SEEMS LIKE “BEAT UP A BLACK WOMAN DAY“ NEVER ENDS IN AMERICA

… And maybe we’re tired of it … from EVERYBODY and “all y’all”.

It isn’t like Black women don’t get beat up enough without Black men helping it along and doing nothing but yapping it up like a gay guy on a celebrity ‘news’ column who has nothing to do all day but look at Oprah’s toes and Beyonce’s ass.

Single Black women having babies is not anything new, it goes back to the BEGINNING OF TIME, or the “Book of Genesis” for those who believe. Black women are responsible for the Earth’s population, so this new Roman theology about marriage and timelines and all of that hoorah is all about European white male control theories, not about God’s timing.

“By the time you’re this age, you should have accomplished that … no.” Not really. It gets done when it gets done, period.

Mary, the Mother of Jesus, was a 14-year old Mother/Madonna without a husband at the time, and no matter how much we deny it, it’s still a fact. The denial of it changes nothing.

Sarah put Hagar and her son, Abraham’s eldest son called Ishmael, out ‘in the streets’ over a tiff between the two brothers. Ishmael and his mother, Hagar, would have died in the wilderness of dehydration and starvation. She was made a single Black mother by Sarah’s sin. But Sarah gave no care of them, even though it was she, and not Hagar, who sinned by her distrust of the Lord God who had made her a promise. But the “elder shall serve the younger,” because Isaac was the Son of the Promise and not the older son of the Bondwoman. Yet, the angel of the Lord came to them in the wilderness and said “He will be a great nation also, because he is yet and still the son of Abraham.”

#BlackMaturityMatters … especially in a nation filled with a majority of white male lawmakers who want to keep a guard over the narrative rules about how young a girl can be before they are legally allowed to molest her and not go to jail. Just because they’re nasty like that.

FILING FLINGY FEELINGS ON THE FIRST AND ORIGINAL BABY DADDIES

And don’t even START with the hundreds of white male “baby daddies” who abandoned their entire Black families from the very beginning, and left them desolate and in dire poverty coming off those plantations more than 150 years ago. Or the ones who are still disowning their Black children to this day.

There were hundreds of white men who were disowned by their own families for even claiming their Black inheritance and descendants. The ruse is real.

It doesn’t end just because someone feels a need to justify their behavior by making Black women the scapegoats for their own sexual lusts. THAT part of reparations has not been rectified to this very day, and it was the WC Bradley family of Columbus, GA who left my Black ancestors in the streets to die back in the 1800s – even after they spent more than 300 years on the plantations of Ft. Mitchell, Alabama making them rich.

Black Female Widowhood is Also A Fact

No woman of any race is required to remarry, no matter what happened to her husband or former husband – even if he died. Jacqueline Kennedy-Onassis single-parented, and so did Coretta Scott King, Betty Shabazz, Myrlie Evers, and Virginia Clinton Kelley. Many children who did quite well in life were single-parented, including the much paranoid Don Knotts (‘Barney Fife’ from The Andy Griffith Show), who is said to have been severely abused by his father before his father finally left home for good.

Do or do not do – in some folks mind, Black women can’t win for losing. Surely, all of us should have had enough of other people controlling the media’s narrative about us.

Black men, this includes YOU – [ withoutafather.com ].

The Choice to Single Parent

There ARE Black women who actually choose to become single mothers because “Mr. Right” simply doesn’t exist. They don’t need to sit around whimpering about never being a Mother just because some man didn’t prove himself worthy.

If you are running your mouths and not gussying up to the table to marry and support these single Black women and their children, you are no better than a white person telling her to “get a job” when they aren’t doing the hiring.

Hell, if you ain’t hiring, don’t talk to anyone about a job THAT YOU CAN’T GIVE THEM. If you ain’t marrying and supporting these ‘fatherless’ babies, don’t talk to anyone about having a daddy THAT YOU CAN’T SUPPLY.

‘Shouldn’tahad‘ is beside the point…they’re here now and there is no putting them back where they came from. Get a clue about how reproduction and child-BIRTH actually works, not the way you think it should work by white people’s Americanized timelines about something they can’t control. Then…

Put your superb ‘Papa’ skills on the table and help raise these children ‘properly’, or just shut up.

Period.

SINGLE BLACK MOTHERS IN AMERICA

-30-

WITHOUT A GUARANTEE

Famous people who grew up without a father or without a mother:

*Lance Armstrong never knew his birth father.
*Notorious B.I.G. was abandoned by his father when he was 2.
*Kate Beckinsale lost her father when he died when she was 6.
*Halle Berry was abandoned by her father when she was 4.
*Mary J. Blige was abandoned by her father when she was 4.
*Orlando Bloom lost his father when he died when he was 4.
*Pierce Brosnan was abandoned by his father before his first birthday.
*Mariah Carey had little contact with her father after her parents divorce when she was 3.
*50 Cent never knew his father and lost his mother when he was 8.
*Eric Clapton never knew his real father. He grew up thinking his grandparents were his parents and his mother his sister.
*Bill Clinton lost his father in a car accident 3 month before he was born.
*Stephen Colbert lost his father and two brothers in a plane crash when he was 10.
*Sean Combs was 3 when he lost his father who was murdered.
*Tom Cruise has said that he suffered from abuse as a child by his father.
*Jodie Foster grew up without a father after her parents separated before she was born.
*Jamie Foxx was abandoned by both his parents and raised by his adopted grandparents.
*Cary Grant grew up thinking his mother had abandoned him when she really was in a mental institution.
*Adrian Grenier grew up not knowing who his father was.
*Laird Hamilton was abandoned by his father when he was an infant.
*Enrique Iglesias was raised mainly by his nanny, Elvira Olvarez.
*Samuel L. Jackson only met his father twice during his life.
*Jay-Z was abandoned by his father.
*Alicia Keys grew up without a father.
*Kid Cudi lost his father to cancer when he was 11.
*Martin Lawrence rarely saw his father after his parents divorced when he was 8.
*John Lennon grew up without a father and lost his mother when he was 17.
*Jet Li lost his father when he was 2.
*LL Cool J grew up with an abusive father.
*Lindsay Lohan grew up without a father while he was in prison.
*Shelby Lynne lost her mother and father in a murder suicide when she was 17.
*Madonna lost her mother to cancer when she was 5.
*Paul McCartney lost his mother to cancer when he was 14.
*Sarah McLachlan was adopted and never knew her birth father.
*Eva Mendes was raised by her single mother after her parents divorced.
*Marilyn Monroe grew up without a father.
*Demi Moore was abandoned by her father before she was born.
*Eddie Murphy lost his father when he was killed when he was 8.
*Jack Nicholson never knew his real father.
*Shaquille O’Neal grew up without his birth father.
*Barack Obama met his father only once before he died in a car crash.
*Clive Owen was abandoned by his father when he was 3.
*Al Pacino grew up in his grandparents’ home with his mother.
*Guy Pearce lost his father in a work related accident when he was 8.
*Mekhi Phifer grew up without a father having never met him.
*Sarah Polley lost her mother to cancer when she was 11.
*Ellen Pompeo lost her mother when she was 4.
*Gabrielle Reece lost her father when she was 5.
*Keanu Reeves was abandoned by his father when he was 13.
*Julia Roberts lost her father when she was 10.
*Alex Rodriguez was abandoned by his father when he was 7.
*Ronaldinho lost his father from a heart attack when he was 8.
*Jason Schwartzman lost his father to cancer when he was 13.
*Tupac Shakur grew up not knowing his birth father while his stepfather went to prison when he was 2.
*Anderson Silva was raised by his aunt.
*Gene Simmons was abandoned by his father when he was 3.
*David Spade was abandoned by his father.
*Jon Stewart was raised primarily by his mother.
*Barbra Streisand lost her father when she was 2.
*Charlize Theron grew up with an abusive and alcoholic father.
*Shania Twain was abandoned by her birth father.
*Liv Tyler didn’t know who her birth father was until she was 9.
*Raoul Wallenberg lost his father to cancer 3 months before he was born.
*Orson Welles lost his mother when he was 11 and his father when he was 15.
*Kanye West was abandoned by his father when he was 3…

And that’s not the end of the list. It goes on.