“But don't wait
to jump in too long”
By Mark Anthony
Neal @NewBlackMan |with thanks to NewBlackMan
(in Exile)
Wednesday, January 17, 2018.
“You never have time for anything” my 15-year-old
daughter chides me with regards to something that has nothing to do with her.
My retort, “I have time for you” is met with a defiant “really?”.
She and I both know that it’s not about the car rides to school in the
morning, or the trips to Barnes & Noble and Five Below; she has always
demanded more than I could give, and more than her older sister was willing to
ask for -- and more than her mother, my wife, knows to ever expect.
A recent Pew
Research survey
suggest that a majority of American Fathers (63%) believe that they spend too
little time with their children. As nearly a quarter of American fathers
are not in residence with their children (under the age of 17), such sentiments
should not be surprising. Yet the data also captures that such concerns are
shared by fathers, who live with their children; I am one of those men.
Among the more disturbing data that is revealed in the
Pew Research poll is that nearly half of all Black fathers did not live with
their children, a rate that is nearly three times that of their White peers.
Of course such data doesn’t reveal the quality of parenting that Black
fathers engage, as there are myriad ways in which fathers, and Black fathers in
particular, co-parent without living in the household of their children’s
mothers. Indeed we are witnessing a generation of Black men so
traumatized by the idea of the absent Black father -- reproduced ad nauseum in
popular culture -- that they are simply better fathers than they will ever be
partners.
I know for myself, the idea of not being available to
my children has produced a constant anxiety. To be sure, my own father
was a regular presence in my life, he was my first intellectual interlocutor,
and I expected to see him return home every night, which he did without fail.
Yet he was also among generations of Black men who understood their
primary duty to be that of a provider, and he did that without fail, often six
days a week.
The Sunday mornings when my father was home, cooking
breakfast, singing along with The Mighty Clouds of Joy, were precious to me,
but in retrospect it didn’t make him any more emotionally or physically
available to me. I’ve learned more about who my father was in the world
listening to his old records a decade now after his death.
As a father, I was hell bent on being as available as
possible to my own children. The bourgeois dreams of a working class kid from
the Bronx perhaps; like my father, I am not sure I have been any more available
to my daughters than he was to me. While I can no longer count the number
of school plays, dance recitals, softball games and swim meets that
I attended in support of my daughters -- as much of the by-product of the
hyper-programmed lives we’ve bequeathed our children -- it doesn’t mean I have
been any more attentive as a father as my dad, who literally never attended my
extracurricular activities -- or my college graduation -- because of the
responsibilities of making a living.
My daughter gives me that look that should be a meme
that says “my dad trying to sing that high-pitched line ‘But don't wait to jump
in too long’ from Miguel’s ‘Sky Walker’”; it has become my way to remind her
that I know what will make her laugh, that I am paying attention to her, often
to break the intensity of our conversations in the car -- a metaphor for our
changing relationship.
NPR, ESPN radio, Sirius XM Radio 49 be damned, I’m
trapped in the car again for 15 minutes to be bombarded by everything she has
been storing to share with me from hours before; it is exhausting, and
she knows it -- it’s how she gets my attention.
Like her older sister, my daughter’s days riding
shotgun in the car will become a thing of the past, and no doubt like her older
sister, I will lament not having spent enough time with her, will regret not
giving enough of my attention to her, because the fact of the matter is there
is never enough time, and there will never be.