Doing the Best I Can. Kathryn Edin
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a Pathmark grocery store buying different foods. So that brought us a lot closer too. And then, watching him born brought us even closer. On her last push he came spinning out like a bullet!” David recounts, beaming at the memory. “Nothing was more beautiful than Julian. The way he came out of his mother, that was amazing. And I held him, I didn’t want to let him go.”
The child has become David’s obsession, despite the fact that he sees his daughters, now in their teens, only once a month or so and has no contact with his sons, who are ten and twelve. And Julian’s birth has further stoked David’s desire to stay with Winnie, whom he now professes to love. Despite the lack of a marital tie, the two have begun to “go for” husband and wife. The way he sees it, his new job description is “being there for her. Um, ah, um, helping her, when things is rough you got to be in her corner, sharing, compassion, closeness, communication. That’s what I’m trying to say: communication.”
There are many things David says he loves about Winnie. Her culinary skills get first mention: “What’s the saying, ‘the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach’? She’s a good cook. That’s the truth.” And besides, he adds, “She’s a good housecleaner—she keeps the house clean. We work our problems out together. Most of the time she’s pretty cool.” But what quality does he treasure even more? “She takes care of the kids—she’s very firm—she’s there for them. That’s what I love about her the most.”28
David is making what he views as a bold attempt to form a family that can withstand the test of time. Yet his background, his current circumstances, and the fragile relational context into which his child is born all dramatically reduce the probability that he will succeed. When we last speak with David he is still together with Winnie—Julian has just turned one—but by the time Julian celebrates his fifth birthday, a father like David has less than a one in three chance of still being together with the mother of his child.29
The experiences of Amin, John, Tim, Byron, Will, and Jack all bear these statistics out. Things between Antoinette and Amin grew impossibly strained when Antoine turned three. Not only had the “retaliation-type situation”—both of them cheating to get back at the other—become unbearable, Amin had also been laid off from his job. Due to his felony convictions, he had had a hard time finding another. Now, a year later, the two still haven’t spoken; though he sees his son at Antoinette’s mother’s home, Amin doesn’t even know his son’s address.
John’s girlfriend left him during the pregnancy, infected by her mother’s downright hatred of John. And Tim’s relationship blew up when Mazie found him on the couch having sex with Andrea—only one in a string of poorly disguised infidelities. Byron hung on for thirteen years and enjoyed a fairly good relationship with Shari, but then lost his city job due to drinking, and she put him out of the house. He blames her actions on the fact that he was suddenly unable to contribute financially, not on the drinking that cost him the job. He also blames her for “cheating”—though her so-called infidelities occurred after she had broken up with him and kicked him out.
Will went on to have three more children with Lori, who then became an addict and left Will to move in with her drug-dealer boyfriend, trading the children back and forth every other day. Finally, the mother of Jack’s two children, ages nine and eleven, moved out after twelve years together—she could no longer deal with his outbursts of anger. He is hoping to reconcile. In the meantime, he lost his job when a judge ordered him into a residential rehabilitation program: just after the breakup Jack was charged three times in a single week for driving under the influence.
Through the life stories of these men, whose backgrounds and circumstances are fairly typical of the range of fathers we spoke with, some of the seeds of relationship destruction—the first deadly strike against those who wish to stay involved with their children and father them well—are revealed. Tenuous relationships and a lack of sufficient desire to avoid pregnancy produce unplanned conceptions and births. Drawn by the possibility of a profound connection to another human being, a child of one’s own, future fathers and mothers—young people who may barely know each other—often work fairly hard to forge a significant relationship around the impending birth. The new baby often spurs these efforts further, at least for a time. But the conditions under which these conceptions occur make the odds of success very low. Next, we explore in greater detail how these so-called unplanned pregnancies actually come about, how fathers react to them, and why.
TWO
Thank You, Jesus
“Guess what?” Charlene called to her young nephew Andre as he burst through the front door and bounded up the stairs to his room. Fifteen-year-old Andre and his older brother, as well as his two younger half sisters, mother, and stepfather, were all living with his Aunt Charlene, the seven-member extended family jam-packed into one of the fourteen-foot-wide, shotgun-style row homes that populate much of Camden. In 1970 the Green family had followed the path of so many other African American families in the migration up the coast from their home in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. Ever since, Andre’s mother and her sisters have often offered one another shelter during hard times. In fact, Andre cannot remember a time when he hasn’t shared quarters with some combination of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. “What?” he replied cautiously, noting the disapproving tone in Charlene’s voice. “You know your old girlfriend?” Andre pictured Sonya in his mind and recalled their on-again-off-again relationship with mixed emotions, impatient now with the way his aunt was drawing out the drama. “Yeah, what about her?” As if unable to hold back the news a second longer, Charlene blurted out just two words: “She pregnant!”
This was indeed a surprise, a shock really, not only to Andre but soon to everyone who heard the news. Andre was the exception to the other kids in the neighborhood—a serious, church-going boy who made the grades in school, stayed off the streets, and carried himself “like a young man,” he tells us later while recreating the scene. “I was always a gentleman type. I was never a gangster type with my pant hanging down and all that.” As the information about Sonya registered, Andre gathered as much shock, disappointment, and anger into his voice as he could muster and shouted, “Oh, man!” before stomping off to his room and slamming the door for added effect. But, as he tells us with a sly chuckle, it was all a performance for his aunt’s benefit. “I was just doing that as a front around her. When I went to my room I was like, ‘Yes! Thank you, Jesus!’ Boy, I was jumping around, couldn’t tell me nothing! I was happy!” He grins, recalling the moment. “When my aunt and them came around me I be sitting there like, ‘Ah, man, what I’m a do?’ But meanwhile, on the inside I was happy.”
What prompted such enthusiasm in a boy just starting high school? Andre says simply, “Because that was me. I always wanted my own child. People didn’t understand me. They like, ‘How you gonna take care of this baby? This baby is going to be born in poverty’ and all this stuff. That’s what they was saying.” But Andre shrugged off these negative assessments. “To them it was a mistake, you know. My daughter wasn’t no mistake to me!” He adds, pointing proudly to the sleeping child, Jalissa, “My daughter, she is the bomb!”
Andre makes clear he is no “hit and run” father for whom children are mere trophies of sexual prowess. “I want to be a real father to my kids. I want to not only make a baby but I want to take care of my baby. I want to be there.” He is dedicated to ensuring that Jalissa will grow up “with stuff that I didn’t have,” especially “love from her father. I didn’t have that. She’s got a father that’s there for her, that she knows, that she loves, that she calls ‘da da.’ Oh, she knows her da da!”
Andre is determined not to be like his own father and uncles who are, in his words, “dogs.” “They will create their kids—and they got kids all over the place—but they never really took care of them or spent time with them.” Andre points to four boys around his own age that he’s run into by chance—half brothers he didn’t know existed. He spied the first boy while walking through the neighborhood on the way to visit his cousin. Noting the striking resemblance to himself, Andre asked who his father was. The name the boy offered was the same as Andre’s own father’s. Not long afterward, Andre and his mother were at the grocery store, “and this boy was helping us bag. I said,