Doing the Best I Can. Kathryn Edin
Читать онлайн книгу.
of Philadelphia’s working-class youth. Ozzy was out with a group of his friends and Dawn was with her friends, and after the collective laughing, teasing, and flirting was over, the two ended up exchanging phone numbers. Four months later Dawn was pregnant.
There were bigger problems though, aside from the fact that they had known each other such a short time. The first was that Ozzy was an unemployed high school dropout who still lived at home and had developed a problem with a variety of substances, including alcohol, Xanax, Valium, cocaine, and marijuana. The second was that Dawn was only sixteen years old. “I lied to her about my age,” Ozzy admits. “I told her that I was like twenty. Then after a couple of months I started to like her a lot so I told her the truth.” Despite his problems, Ozzy was thrilled—without reservation—by the news of Dawn’s pregnancy. “I always wanted to have a kid,” he told us. “But before I met Dawn I never really found the right person to have one with.”
Terrell, a black nineteen-year-old supermarket stock clerk, was just seventeen when he heard the news about the conception of his oldest child. But this came as no surprise to him, as he had lobbied hard for his girlfriend to have a baby. He had just begun his sophomore year at West Philadelphia High School when he met Clarice, a friend of his cousin’s. “I come home from school one day, and I saw her sitting on the porch. Ever since that day I’ve been liking her. I had it in my mind that I’d get her.”
Terrell was surprisingly sure of himself, seeing as how seventeen-year-old Clarice was pregnant with another man’s child at the time. Meanwhile, he was doing poorly in school and cutting classes regularly. After he violated a contract that required attending a certain number of days per month, the school finally kicked him out. It was when Terrell was “sitting at home with nothing to do” that he began to “get with” Clarice, who had just broken up with her newborn’s father. The first thing he did was to try and convince her to get pregnant by him right away, despite the fact that he had just left high school and had no job or any prospects of one. “I wanted a son so bad. I saw all these guys with kids, especially with boys,” Terrell explains. “I always wanted a son, especially when they start walking.” Clarice was understandably reluctant, but Terrell was persistent. “She came around to it, came to her senses,” he says with satisfaction. “We sat down and had a long talk about it. Two months later she was pregnant.”
Ecstatic that he was about to become a father, Terrell immediately signed up for Job Corps after hearing the news. After spending several months in Pittsburgh acquiring some of the skills of the construction trade—drywall and plaster work—Terrell quit and returned to Philadelphia to witness the birth of his son. Several months later, just as he was adjusting to being the father of a newborn, Clarice had some additional news for him: she was pregnant again, this time with twins.
What the stories of Ozzy and Terrell reveal is that men’s willingness to embrace, or occasionally even pursue, pregnancy does not always, or even usually, hinge on their life circumstances. In fact, it is often men in some of the worst and most desperate situations who are also the happiest when learning of a pregnancy. Why would this be so? How would the prospect of bringing a child into the world under these circumstances be an appealing one?
The answer lies in the way men answered one important question: “What would your life be like without your children?” One might expect that men would complain about lives derailed, schooling foregone, and job opportunities forsaken. Yet we heard very few tales about sacrificed opportunities or complaints about child support and the like. Overall, children are seen not as millstones but as life preservers, saviors, redeemers, and the strength of the sentiment behind these fathers’ words makes them all the more remarkable.12
Kervan, a black twenty-one-year-old who had been working construction but has just finished bartending school, says that without his kid, “I’d probably be in jail.” Quick, who is black, twenty-four, and a student at the Community College of Philadelphia, says, “I’d be dead, because of the simple fact that it wasn’t until Brianna was born that I actually started to chill out.” Apple, a black twenty-seven-year-old who washes dishes six days a week at Jim’s Steaks, a hoagie shop on South Street, says, “I guess after I got caught up in the bad life, as far as jail, the kids helped me keep my head up, look forward. I got something to live for. Kids give you something to live for.” Lee, who was just laid off from an optical lab and is currently working odd jobs to get by, is an African American forty-two-year-old father. He says, “Without the kids I’d probably be a dog. I hope not with AIDS.” Thirty-seven-year-old Seven, the black on-and-off house painter, tells us, “I couldn’t imagine being without them because when I am spending time with my kids it is like, now that is love. That is unconditional love. It is like a drug that you got to have.”
For these men the imagined alternative to becoming a dad is not a college degree or a job as a CPA, it is incarceration, death, rehab, “the bad life,” “a dog with AIDS.” Kids, on the other hand, are something to live for, to fight for, “a drug that you got to have.” Self is a twenty-one-year-old African American who is certified as a home health aide but can only get part-time work at a nightclub. He recalls, “What influenced me to have children was that I felt alone. It’s a good feeling to always know that I have somebody to relate to. A child at that. Somebody that’s going to look up to me, to learn from me and things like that.”
White metal finisher and part-time construction worker Alex, age twenty-two, says that without his children, “I would be out getting high because I would not have anything. I would have my girlfriend but my baby is the most important thing in my life right now.” Will Donnelly is white, twenty-four, and works part-time as a mechanic. He teaches boxing on the side at the Joe Frazier gym.13 He says, “I think I’d probably be in jail. My little brother is in jail, and I figure without kids, whatever he was doing I’m sure I would have been doing it with him.” A white building superintendent and jack-of-all-trades, Bill is thirty-eight, and white carriage-driver Joe is now forty-five; both offer particularly poignant responses. Bill says, “I’d still be out there. I’d still be fucking off, drugs and all. I think about my kids and there’s just this hope I have now of getting a good relationship with them.” Joe responds, “Man, I wouldn’t even know how to answer that, they are such a big part of my life. I would probably be in jail down on Eighth and Race.”
We ask Lacey Jones, a black forty-two-year-old who cooks at Jessie’s Soul-on-a-Roll in North Philadelphia, “How did you see your future before you became a father?” “I didn’t have no future,” he replies. “I didn’t care. I lived for the moment.” We ask, “Did you think you would live to see forty-two?” “No. Nobody did,” Lacey admits, and then adds, “Nobody expected me to be there to see seventeen.” Lacey now lives with his fiancée and her daughter plus the nine-year-old child whom he gained custody of a year ago. He gets up at 5 a.m. to ensure he’s on time for his 7 a.m. shift, works forty hours a week, never touches anything stronger than beer, and spends most of his leisure time with family—visiting with his eighteen-year-old daughter and her kids, offering advice to his seventeen-year-old son, or spending time with his fiancée and the two little girls who live in his household. “I spend as much time as I can with my family,” he says with satisfaction.
His life wasn’t always this way, though. The two oldest children—only nine months apart—were conceived on the heels of his release from prison at age twenty-three, after his murder conviction was overturned on a technicality.14 Both women lived on his mother’s block, and “it was back and forth. I’d mess with her for a minute. I’d go mess with the other one for a minute. Once one got on my nerves, I went with the other.” In both cases, Lacey says, he was “just not thinking” when conception occurred. By age twenty-four he was incarcerated again for robbery. He began seeing the mother of his nine-year-old while in prison, where, somehow, she got pregnant; Lacey wasn’t released until the child was five. Lacey treasures all his kids, but especially the youngest, because she offers him the opportunity to watch one of his children grow up. When asked what his life would be like if he didn’t have children, he says, “I can’t imagine that one. I really can’t. I can’t imagine it. ’Cause my life without them, it would be empty. It would be empty. That’s what kept me going in prison, knowing that I had to come out and be there for them.”
How