Monday, January 25, 2010

Yeah I said it...

I need my child's father in our lives.

I was over at MsL's spot reading her latest post (if you ain't been you need to be here) and her topic was about feminism and sort of led into how the roles of men and women are created. In my comment to her post, I talked about how men and women information and conversations were restricted to that sex. My parents never dipped their noses in the opposite sexes powwow with their peers and that is something that I've honored, even into adulthood.

But, after I had my child and started to see how her father wasn't going to be in her life, I made it up in my mind that I didn't need him in our lives and I didn't need him to help me in any way. My mother even cosigned that statement by saying we'd be the father in her life. Several months after those revelations, I remembered that fat meat is greasy and realized that I do need him in our lives.


Being a single parent is hard.real.talk. I don't think that there is any other way to describe it. I work eight to ten hours a day, sometimes on the weekend, clean up my home, cook dinner, take care of my daughter (and my mom; another day, another post), do laundry, run errands, pay bills (with money I really ain't got), schedule appointments, deal with shitty diapers, and some more stuff that I can't even remember right now (because guess what? I'm at work right now!). My mother helps me out a lot, and I cannot say how grateful I am for her but MIB's father needs to be around helping out.

I am not able to teach her things that a man is supposed to teach her. My daddy told me about men and how they really operate. He showed me what a father was supposed to do for their family. He taught me about life from a man's point of view so that my point of view of life would be balanced and not so judgmental. He raised me as much as my mother did; he used to come home for lunch and feed me while we watched Another World (he named me after one of the main characters on the show). He helped as evenly as he could financially to make sure that I had all that I wanted (and most of what I needed) in my life for school, work, and play.

These are the things I need MIB to have and I can't do that without her father.

I am an independent woman, but there are only so many things that I can do. I am already spreading myself way too thinly as it is. I've always told him that all I ever needed him to do was to just come and see her, but I need him to do more than that. I need child support. I need him to change her diapers. I need him to feed her. I need him to play with her. I need him to talk to her. I need him to be her father. And I'm not going to apologize for saying that I do need him in our lives.

African American women who are single mothers (not all) have a bad habit of saying "I don't need him, I can do this by myself." In my opinion, this statement is what keeps African American men away from helping their children's mothers. I understand that some of our men ain't shit. But there are many that are worth more than their weight in titanium and women (including myself) saying that we don't need them to help us do anything isn't helping them stick around and isn't helping our children.

I have issues with MCF; I will not deny that. But I will not sit here and let those issues get in the way of realizing that I need him in her life and SHE needs him in her life. More than likely he and I will not be the happily ever after couple that I wished we could have been. I do hope however that he will be the Daddy that she needs in her life as she grows and the father I need him to be in her life.

1 comment:

  1. Oooh I want her to have a father in her life - just not her ACTUAL father - ooh yeah I wrote it.

    I keep telling you to gets to dating & get married pronto!

    ReplyDelete

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