I’ve heard all I can stand about Baby Mama Drama. And Baby Daddy Drama. All of it.

Single Black women are nobody’s “baby mama.” Never have been, never will be. We are single mothers, just like any white single mother raising her children alone.

Let’s start with my youngest son, a 35-year old now-incarcerated Black man … incarcerated for making some bad choices and also for taking the ‘hit’ for some bad choices made by others just BECAUSE he made some bad choices of his own. None of those choices had anything to do with me, or even with his father — whom has been married at least three or four times but never to me. I didn’t raise him that way, that is just what he decided to do for reasons I don’t even care to know about.

His father and I were not married when I became pregnant; and I had no intention of marrying him. Vice-versa.

It was “one of those things” that happen when you aren’t especially careful and have had an allergic reaction to birth control pills that nearly killed you dead.

Yeah, I know … there aren’t many children out here who like finding out they were “one of those things” that happened, rather than the product of love and marriage, horse and carriage, all of that yadda yadda. But my parents were married when I was conceived and born, and I was not a product of love my danged self.

There are a lot of “one of those things” running around on this planet. He wasn’t the first, and most assuredly was not the last. But then, in June of 1981, there he was.
Another “bundle of joy,” the fourth and last one. I’d had a tubal ligation after that last C-section and four sons later, I was done.

True enough, I’d wanted a daughter … but this son had a head full of long curly Black Samson-like locks, and he was the closest I was ever going to get.

He was a spoiled child, really, for someone whose mom and dad were “co-parenting”.

His father was crazy about him. He’d been there throughout the pregnancy, was there the day his son was born, made sure he signed the birth certificate, and from the moment my child took his first breath, his father tried to walk off with him. “Give him to me,” was all he said.

Of course, this was MY baby…and MY baby wasn’t going to be too far away from his mother at so young an age. Around six months old, I started letting him spend more time
at his paternal grandmother’s house. By the time he was born, my own mother had already been deceased nearly two years.

I was a church-going single young mother. I got an opportunity to “hit up a club” every three months or so when my sons would spend the weekend with their paternal grandmothers, but for the most part, we spent our weeks going to school, me working, cooking, cleaning, and going to school trying to set a good example for them…our Saturdays cleaning, doing laundry and going to the library or the park, and Sundays … suffice it to say, I’d beat the Preacher to church, we’d eat at Shoney’s after church, and spend the rest of the evening at the Riverfront or getting ready for another week of the same. School, work, church, school, work, church, school, work, church … .

My usual routine was to awaken at 5:30 am, bow down next to each and every one of their little places in their beds and anoint them with olive oil and pray over them. I would go outside, even in the dead cold of winter, and make my petitions known before God … see them off to school about 7:15 and be at work myself by 8:30 or 8:45. There were times when I went without a job and had to rely on social services, but I minimized it as much as I could.

All in all, my youngest son had it very well … unmarried mother and all. All the baddest clothes, the latest toys and video games, a doting but very cussing paternal grandmother, an aunt who attempted to give him a chance at life that he would never have gotten with me … I never had it to offer. Chance after chance after chance, between me, his father, his aunt, and a few other “let’s try this” relatives on his father’s side of the family.

But he made his choices and then tried to blame me for giving him life. True, if I had not given him life, I would have had one of my own — and no telling what would have happened either. Maybe I would have been Oprah-esque if I had not had children. But now I have no clue what it’s like not to have four children, all boys … and I would not exchange it for anything.

I have seen him come to life with his peculiar offbeat sense of humor which reminded me of my own mother who could make people laugh on the drop of a hat; I have watched him cry and shed multitudes of tears at his lowest point in life; cussed him out when it was well-deserved; told him life had something better in store than what he decided to become-just another “nigger in the streets.” He had skills, he was multi-talented, super smart, and he was extremely good-looking. So good-looking that friends of mine used to ask me if his daddy had a brother they could get with. They weren’t joking.

Raising single and living single — off of what amounted to some serious minimum wage jobs that were paying less than $5 an hour at the time was not easy; but I wasn’t alone. There were many young ladies like myself doing the same thing — oftentimes better off on welfare than with a job.

No, they weren’t having babies just to get a check.

These girls had some serious Cinderella pipe-dreams about what kind of life, home, husband, they wanted, and not necessarily in any certain order. They thought they were here to be loved also, until some young ambition-less man/boy showed them otherwise. She would be on a constant search for ‘Mr. Right’, he’d be on a constant search for a free and easy piece of ass. Some of them were that easy a piece of ass, having been taught that that is all they were good for … and having no good man in their life to show them a better way to live.

But as times change, so do people and so do social norms.

It suddenly became “fashionable” to be a single mother on welfare, not a shame. Families stopped hiding their pregnant teens, stopped shipping them off and pretending like a 14-year old’s baby was her “baby sister” or “little cousin.” Stopped making them quit high school … they could go to school with all the other kids, except for the special accommodations.

What some folks never stopped to think about was how we, as Black people, had adapted to white people’s ways when it came to family way-shaming a young Black girl. The Virgin Mary herself was only 14 years of age when she gave birth to our Lord & Savior, so at no time was it ever a blight on the name of God; but Roman belief systems had us on a time clock that didn’t match God’s.

No more was it “things happen when they happen and that’s life,” but you had to be a certain age to do certain things, and certain social expectations became the norm about what happens when you turn 12, 16, 18, 21 … and then after 25, you’re off on your own — college degree securely in place, good job, “rock solid” debutantes always ready for some storied stiff Englishman’s ball.

Long gone were the tribal celebrations of our native Black ancestors – kings, queens, magnificents, potentates, et al — when all babies were welcome babies and parents not only cared about the future, but paved the way for their own children to do better than they had; or they at least prepared to have a “quiver full” of delights with which to be proud. Big families were the “thing” back then, and until we became oriented to birth control and the alleged prosperity that was supposed to come with keeping families as small as possible … a big family was a good thing in anyone’s sector of life.

I didn’t have much by the way of familial support, but my sons had tight tribal paternal families. My three oldest all had the same father, and my youngest … well, truly their paternal families were really all they had. I myself was born into a family that was very hateful toward one another and all busted up and split up all over the country before I was thunk up. And when I entered the picture and became old enough to know how disgusting it was that my family was so torn apart, but I also learned the hard way that there was nothing I could do to fix it and they could have cared less about trying.

At some point along the way, I parted ways with my own children … not because I wanted to, but because life itself had dealt me a pretty crappy hand. It was all I could do to keep them safe and alive, and myself at least partially sane. Losing them pushed me over the edge, but my only option was to become a prostitute to keep us together and all I knew about whoring was that my children were not going to grow up hearing that their mother and the mother of their grandchildren was nothing more than a common whore.

I knew God had heard my prayers for all those years, and that His Word would not return to me void.

Well, needless to say, as parents, we can pray all we want, but children have got to make their own decisions regardless. They must make them and learn to live with their own choices; I did.

But I can say wholeheartedly that I am glad they are here, and I am glad they are who they are in spite of the circumstances under which they were born.

It is hard for me, a single mother, to pinpoint exactly when America fell out of love with large families, with family solidarity, and when it decided to make a “special case” of single Black mothers, as an example of what to beat up on in front of the whole world, but it happened.

I have had enough, heard enough, and I want to say something real ugly to people who disparage single Black mothers the way they do, as if they are any different from single white mothers; but I won’t say what I think of anyone who puts down a child’s mother regardless of how that child got here.

I know now that I have lived a life perfected in Christ, and there is nothing now that anyone can speak bad of me. They can only speak ill of the circumstances, but not of me. I never did a wrong thing in my entire life; but I did make some bad decisions that I can’t take back.

True enough, there are some treacherous women out here who have no business with children. And it isn’t the child who is the bastard, it is the father who abandons them. And if we want to take it back a little farther, Black folks didn’t know much about child abandonment until they became subjected to slavemasters who could so quickly and easily impregnate a young Black girl and leave the mother and child/ren to fend for themselves. White males are the first “baby daddies” Black America ever knew, truth told.

They are the ones who taught Black men straight out of Africa that a Black woman is nothing more or less than a bleeding vagina, or as Donald Trump said “a grabbed pussy”; and many of these European bastardized attitudes were forwarded on to Black women by Black males, far too often Black men will belittle their own daughters behind white trash passed on to them.

But we were supposed to be better than that. God created us better than that. My son’s own father -a Black man nevertheless- was even a better man than that.

Part II Coming Soon…