Me, Thing One, Maria and Coach Bill$

I read an article in the Wall Street Journal called This Is Your Brain Without Dad. Scientists studied rodents called degus whose brains react similarly to humans’ brains to environmental stimuli. These scientists attempted to observe what happens when fathers are taken out of the picture. And the verdict was:

1. When deprived of their father, the degu pups exhibit both short- and long-term changes in nerve-cell growth in different regions of the brain.
2. Their preliminary analysis indicates that fatherless degu pups exhibit more aggressive and impulsive behavior than pups raised by two parents.

In other words when degus where deprived of their fathers care (licking, preening, snuggling) the degus suffered brain damage. The study also showed short absences of fathers away from pups was less damaging than long or permanent absences. The study also goes on to say that the pups continued this brain damaged state into adulthood. I will let you read the article to get the explanation as to the science-y reasons any of this happens.

It got me to thinking, am I causing my kids brain damage? I’ve tried my best to form my schedule where I can spend as much time with the babies as possible. To a degree, I’m successful but not without a lot of sacrafice in other areas of my life. But even with that effort my non-parenting obligations simply don’t neatly conform to a court ordered 50/50 custody schedule.

Inevitably, I’m spending guilt-filled time away from the babies. Although the babies are much better off than most children of split marriages/relationships in that they see both of their parents consistently and frequently, it’s still not ideal. The article was a swift reminder I need to be diligent in carving out time with the girls, both quality and quantity. There are a few things I try to do and would suggest for any parent, especially parents who do not live with the children 100% of the time:

Choose your companion well.  Eddie Murphy once joked the secret to relationship happiness is finding someone as f’d up as you and settling down. There’s certainly a lot of truth there. Opposites may attract in physics (it’s physics right?) but not necessarily in relationships. If he likes coffee she should probably like coffee too. If she likes dining out at a new restaurant every third Friday of the month, it’s probably good if he likes to as well.

What does this have to do with the subject matter at hand? Well, as a single parent, I’ve realized your dating relationship has to be in harmony with your parenting. Having coffee in common or liking to work out together is an indicator that someone will have a deeper understanding of you and your situation. If you plan on spending a lot of time with your children, and you should, having an understanding companion is essential. It’s likely you’ll find yourself having child-related schedule conflicts with date night. Trust me, you want a companion who will roll with those punches and sometimes invite the extra company. What you don’t want is someone telling you he or she is not fond of your kids or acting like it. A companion on the same page as you will undoubtedly allow you to spend more time with your children.

Treat everyday as bring your daughter (or son) to work (or play) day. Some of my most fond memories of my childhood involved hanging out with my father at the local bar. Now if he had taken me there in this day and age someone would definitely be calling child services. But I have to say it was some of the better times I had with him. Hey, it was the ’70s. I got to drink ginger ale with a little umbrella in the glass, eat all the chips and peanuts I wanted and I played billiards to my heart’s content. And I got to see my father pal around and be jovial. It was a cool experience.

I try to do the same with my girls, only I’ve replaced Starbucks for the local pub. C-Thunda has even gotten to the point where she asks daily if we can go “coffee shoppin’ “. I bring the girls on errands, to work and to the gym when I can. Mostly I want them to see me in my daily element. And I don’t want to miss stuff they might say or do when they’d otherwise be with a baby sitter.  Some of that stuff is priceless. And this goes both ways. Sometimes I let them choose the activity. Typically it’s the bookstore or the park, and I’m cool with either.

Communicate often. Vary the method. If you want to stay bonded with your kids, you need to consider both the quality, as well as the quantity, of your communications with them. Again my parenting situation separates the babies and me a few days at a time. Since I’m only seeing them every couple of days (for some kids and parents maybe it’s every couple of weeks or months) I want to make sure we have the volume of connections we need to maintain the ideal relationship. The only way to do that is to use technology.

T-One has had her own cell phone since she was 6-years-old. Although she/we rarely use it, it has put in the babies’ minds they always have access to their parents even if we are not under the same roof. We often send text messages back and forth, with C-Thunda reciting and T-One manipulating the keys. We have a blog where we write and basically keep a scrap book of our daily adventures together. Sometimes T-One writes on it when she’s at their mom’s. Pictures and videos go without saying. I’m not sure what I would do without a camera on my cell phone.

Savor breakfasts and backseats. Most of our talking is done in the car and at breakfast. When I discovered this I instituted two rules. No TV at breakfast and no iPod in the car except on weekends. I find my girls hate silence, so they can’t help but spill the beans about their day or what they’re thinking. It’s a great time to connect.

As I started writing this post (I know it’s long as hell) so many other things came to mind. One in particular I will call “Remove Barriers to Entry“, I’ll write about soon. It’s a subject unto itself.

T-One just texted me. Later.

So this past weekend I’m watching Liam Neeson’s latest flick, Taken. It’s one of those movies where you can tell the plot and the ending just from the trailer. But it’s definitely a movie that caught my attention the first time I saw the trailer run in the theater. What? Some masked men are taking this dude’s daughter? Maaaaaan, that heat started welling up in me immediately. I immediately put myself in Bryan Mills’ (Neeson’s character) place. Maaaaaan! If someone tried to take my babies!! Boooy! Umph! Umph, umph, umph.

Only a father of daughters can really know what that “heat” I referred to earlier feels like. Those cats at 20th Century Fox had sold me a ticket although I hadn’t purchased it yet. After I finally saw this movie, I thought about all the movies that had fathers who definitely earned their “Big Piece of Chicken”. Here are 10 that come to mind:

10. John Quincy (Denzel Washington), John Q

John Q, made the ultimate decision to take his own life, to save his son’s. If not for a misfire of a gun which he pointed at his own head, he would have succeeded. I’m not condoning suicide (before the emails come flowing in). But I’m sure there is some father out there faced with doing the drastic thing to protect his child.

9. Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson), Taken

You don’t mess with a man’s daughter. Mills brings the pain! Overbearing and overworried, his worst nightmares come true when his teenage daughter is kidnapped on a trip to a foreign country. There’s one scene when Mills gets GANGSTA with two nails and an electric current on the main kidnapper and another when he’s not invited for dinner at an old friend’s home who happens to be a conspirator.

This movie made me think about how my daughter tells me (because it is told to her) that I worry too much about her and her sister. I tell her, “Worry is good. It helps me protect you.” I connected to Mills in that regard. Could I go on manhunt and single handedly take out a crime ring based on kidnapping young girls just to save mine? Put it this way, I’d damn sure try. And you know that! You simply don’t mess with a man’s daughter.

8. Cleo McDowell (John Amos), Coming to America

After King Joffer (James Earl Jones) insulted Cleo’s daughter Lisa (Shari Headley) by saying she was beneath him and his son, the Prince (Eddie Murphy), Cleo delivered one of the best lines in movie dad history:

Queen Aoleon (Madge Sinclair): Jaffe, apologize to Mr. McDowell.
King Jaffe Joffer: I will do no such thing. The man is beneath me and so is his daughter.
Cleo McDowell: I don’t care who you are. This is America, Jack! Say another word about Lisa, and I’ll break my foot off in your royal ass!

I’m sure you’ve heard this before but it’s worth repeating. You don’t mess with a man’s daughter!

7. Furious Styles (Laurence Fishburne), Boyz In The Hood

Furious pulled no punches. He treated his son like a man, but a man that still needed to learn lessons. He didn’t hesitate to give fatherly advice to his son’s friends but also knew that his son was his ultimate responsibility. Furious never hesitated to be blunt and to the point. Some good Furious quotes:

Furious Styles: Any fool with a dick can make a baby, but only a real man can raise his children.

After cutting Tre’s (Cuba Gooding, Jr.) hair and listening to Tre trying to impress Furious with a story of one of his female conquests:

Furious Styles: What did you use?
Tre Styles: I used the number she gave me. Why you sweating me, Pops? I didn’t have to use nothing. She told me she was on the pill.
Furious Styles: How many times do I have to tell you even if she’s on the pill, use something anyway? Pill ain’t gon’ keep your dick from falling off. I don’t know why you insist on learning things the hard way, but you gon’ learn. Oh, yeah, you gon’ learn. Pick up that hair.

I’ll through in a few more movie dad’s tomorrow (maybe the next day).

So daughter number one (Thing One or T-One) complained to me the other day that she had to do yet another paper on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. She then went on to explain how she’ll have to do a paper a year all the way up through middle school. Still being of single digit age, I doubt my daughter has any real understanding of King’s significance, especially in the Obama era.

I asked her what was wrong with writing a paper a year on King. She responded that she was running out of things to say. Mind you, each paper so far has been a one paragraph essay. She went on to explain, “All he did was help end segregation!” (As if that’s some small feat.)

My mother (The Duchess), who was in earshot, gasped. “All he did?” My mother grew up in the segregated south, participated in sit-ins and marched on Washington in ’63. So to her saying that s all King did was, well, a little disappointing. But my mom wasn’t so disappointed in my daughter. She was disappointed in me. Somehow I had dropped the ball in making my daughter aware of her history. Where we had been as people of color in this country and how far we had come.

“That little girl needs to know!” 

Immediately I began to cull together some things on the internet about and by King. The goal was to gather and compile material to convey to my daughter the greater significance of King’s life beyond what he did in fighting segregation. My first stop was his “Letter From A Birmingham Jail” in which King wrote to his fellow clergyman after being jailed for civil discord. The letter is famous for explaining why we could not wait for justice. In it he explained the difference between just and unjust laws.

A couple of weeks ago I had had a conversation with T-One about rules and why some should be followed, some can be bent and others should be broken. King was basically having the same conversation with the clergymen. I felt in good company. As I was reading the letter for my daughter (and re-reading for myself) I was struck by King’s examples.

“Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, ‘Wait’. But… when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality… when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of ‘nobodiness’ then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.”

King was talking about the immediate effects of a terrible institution. But I wonder if he anticipated or could even fathom the long term effects. My parents always told me I could be anything. But if I am to be completely honest, something deep in me did not allow me to believe them fully. Although I have never lived during the time of segregation, the “history” I had been taught told me my parents weren’t quite telling me the truth, unintentionally or not. America was against me I thought. Self-doubt was in me.

This isn’t a unique feeling. Doubts run rampant. No matter how confident each of us as dark brown people (we are all some shade of brown) in America feel there is a nagging doubt that we can have it all. One of the most asked questions of prominent dark brown people the days leading to Obama’s inauguration was, “Did you think you’d ever see?” To a person they all said no. That includes Oprah, Jesse Jackson, Colin Powell, Whoopi Goldberg, John Lewis and Mya Angelou and anyone else you could name. Although most of these people lived during the segregation era, many others including Will Smith, did not. But Smith felt the same doubt. On Oprah’s show Smith exclaimed that he always believed in the American ideal that anyone can do anything in this country. But, he didn’t really believe it until Obama was elected president. This cat makes $80 million a year! And he had doubts!?

So here I am wondering how much my daughter should be told about her, our “history”. I would not want the simple knowledge of where we’ve been as a country and how she would have been treated because she’s a little too brown to become ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky. Or for her to feel even on a microscopic level the need to fight a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”. I’m thinking her ignorance is a blessing. At least for now, and hopefully forever, there is nothing in her mind that would tell her a dark brown person (thanks Barack!) or a woman (thanks Hillary!) can’t be the thing she wants. I don’t want to put those thoughts in her mind by trying to teach “history”.

Does that little girl need to know? Maybe. But maybe some things are better left unsaid.