You probably expected this to be a story about my love life. It is not. It is however, a much more interesting story about my mother’s.
When you grow up without a father, it means your mother raises you without a parenting partner and sometimes, a romantic partner. So, she dates. Because like you and like me and like most everyone else, she wants love. She wants companionship and support along this bizarre journey we call “life.”
My mother dated men — and I understood early why they were drawn to her. She is an attractive, stylish woman who in her day rocked blown out hair with curled ends that bounced on her shoulders. Sometimes she’d wrap a chic headband around the crown like Farrah Fawcett. She wore all the 80s fashion trends: crop-tops, pedal pushers, and high-waisted, stonewashed jeans. Almost eclipsed by it all, at last you’d notice the application of her signature dark purple lipstick, a flawless outline around her mouth. She was, she is, packaged grace and glamour. Potential suitors came to her with ease.
It was the best of boyfriends, it was the worst of boyfriends.
Let’s call the best one, Terry. I adored this boyfriend. Terry emulated the wholesome dads he admired in the family sitcoms we sat on the sofa and watched together. Carl Winslow from Family Matters, Uncle Phil from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Dr. Huxtable. It felt like I was in one of those families when Terry was around. Like we were in a show where parents and children spent quality hours together and no transgression was left unlectured. If we watched a movie, Terry would have discussion questions ready after. When we played Monopoly, he’d explain our bad financial decisions and how we could’ve better strategized.
It wasn’t all talking and TV watching. When we moved to a rough neighborhood and our home was burglarized every couple of months, Terry protected us. One of those times, burglars broke the deadbolt lock on our door and damaged the hinges to the point where it couldn’t be secured. Terry slept on the floor in front of the door until morning, when he would go to the hardware store and purchase items necessary for repair. Soft-spoken, mild mannered — he handled me, my mother and brother with incessant gentleness.
A year or two into Terry’s relationship with our mother, my brother and I began orchestrating mock wedding ceremonies because we knew she wanted to marry him. We wanted the same.
Terry Forever.
As a child, in a sense you’re dating your mother’s partners as well. There is no romantic component, but they are part of your life. You develop feelings for and can become attached to them. That is if the feelings are mostly positive, like mine were for Terry.
A ring from my mother’s jewelry box served as her wedding band during these trial wedding runs. After my brother and I had the couple repeat random vows, one of us would hand the ring to Terry so he could offer it to his bride. But every time. Every. Single. Time. He pretended to tremble with nerves while our mother stretched forth her hand. He exaggerated the trembling and fumbling as he reached the ring toward her. Just as the fake symbol of commitment touched the tip of her finger, Terry dropped it to the floor. He wasn’t ready.
After what she deemed too long, however, my mother was fed up with Terry’s procrastination. She was done waiting. Done pressuring. Done with fake, playful ceremonies. She ended their relationship and dove back into the dating pool.
The sharks circled.
The worst boyfriend, we’ll call Kareem. He was stone-faced and quiet. Not the kind of quiet that appeared meek. The kind that sat seething beneath a clenched jaw waiting to unleash poorly suppressed fury.
Anger gurgled from Kareem’s throat when he barked out commands. It made his already raspy voice sound like it was underwater. He said little to me or my brother unless irritated by reminders we existed.
“Shut-up!”
“Turn the TV down!”
“Go to bed!”
He was a monster who did what monsters do — assault everyone in close proximity in almost every way imaginable. Mercifully, it felt like he was around much longer than he was.
When our mother broke things off with Kareem, my brother and I celebrated. We danced and played loudly. We giggled, watching Kareem from a window as he leaned against his powder blue Honda parked in our driveway and blasted Barry White from the car stereo. He alternated between staring up at our mother’s bedroom window, dropping his head toward the ground, and gazing off into a distance.
“I did it for you,” my mother tells me when I am much older. “I didn’t care so much what he did to me. It was how he treated you and your brother.”
This contrast between Terry and Kareem taught me something I’ve carried ever since — that how you’re treated in a relationship matters more than who’s willing to walk down the aisle. I also understood the power of now. Of seizing the opportunity for pure love when you have it — not putting it off for a perfect tomorrow that may never come.
I discovered that it is possible to wilt under the weight of desire, and worried that this fate might be what awaits me.
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Read more about Terry, Kareem, and the plights of a girl growing up fatherless in my just released memoir Daddy’s Little Stranger.
