Happy Friday, folks!

If you’ve stopped by BeyondBabyMamas.com at any point during this week, I’d like to personally thank you. If you’ve told someone about our online community, shared or retweeted a link from your social media account, or decided to like or follow us on Facebook or Twitter, triple thanks!

Word of mouth is an invaluable resource for start-up initiatives like ours, who are looking to grow their readership, participation, and support. So keep telling others about us–and if you’d like to tell us about your own initiatives, get in touch! If your objectives dovetail with ours, we’d love to cross-promote your efforts.

Most importantly, though, we’d love it if you told every single parent of color you know — mother or father — as well as every adult you know who was raised in a single-parent household, that we’re looking for writers who are willing to write and submit personal stories about their family experiences.

Community Bloggers are the heart and soul of our website. Each time a mother has been brave enough to submit her work, we’ve seen some of the best response ever in the history of our site. Comments roll in on the site, as well as our social media accounts, affirming and encouraging the writers and expressing how resonant their experiences are.

For us, one thing is certain: there’s power in storytelling. And the varied and diverse stories of single mothers of color are seldom being told in ways that don’t pathologize our life experiences. We need people from all walks of life, from experiences both positive and challenging, to write for us — and we need those who read the stories we post to share them. As one Twitter follower commented recently, “These stories are helpful for all of us. This is a real (and not wrong) part of our world.”

So, this Founder Friday post is dedicate to all you closet, aspiring and veteran writers out there with a need and a desire to share your parenting and/or life experiences. Check out our submission guidelines. Read them carefully. Pass them onto someone you know.

We really look forward to sharing your work.

In the meantime, check out the pieces we’ve posted this week:

First Family Realness: A Single Parent’s Response to the 2013 Inauguration.

‘Second Generations Wayans’ aka ‘No Country for Single Mothers.’

From Woman to Pit Bull and Back Again: Overcoming Post-Divorce Bitterness.

Have a safe and loving weekend. We care. We’re here. And we applaud you.

With hope and admiration,

Stacia L. Brown, Founder

Did any of you catch last night’s special presentation of Oprah’s Next Chapter with songstress and mother Cissy Houston? If so, you know it was at turns revelatory, admirable, and deeply tragic — much like the life and career of the woman Oprah and Ms. Houston came together to discuss: Cissy’s daughter, the incomparable Whitney Houston.

Though there’s much that I could say about the interview itself, throughout which Ms. Cissy is candid, calm, and (mostly) gracious, though it’s clear that her pain is deep and the strain of her grief hasn’t eased in the near-year since Whitney’s death, there’s one quote that really stood out for me, as the mother of a young daughter.

When asked about her relationship with her daughter, which experienced some strain as Whitney battled addiction, Ms. Cissy mused, “You want to be the most important thing in their lives–but mostly you’re not.”  It was a simple statement, a comment on what it’s like to feel helpless as a parent to an adult child.

Though Ms. Cissy remained married to Whitney’s father until 1993, when Whitney was 30 years old, for the 19 years that follow, during which Whitney’s addiction spiraled, Ms. Cissy struggled with mothering alone.

By her own account, it was difficult. The aforementioned quote suggests feelings of powerlessness — or at least a diminished sense of power. Mothers will always hope they have the ability to call their wayward children home when the porch light comes on. But sometimes, the porch remains empty, the fear and worry mounts, and it’s hard to trust that you’ve done the right things for the child you’ve raised.

In her last interview with Oprah, Whitney herself spoke of her mother’s persistence in getting her to commit to rehab. Ms. Cissy got a formal injunction and two sheriff’s deputies as escorts. She said she wanted her daughter back and that she hadn’t raised her to behave this way. Finally, Whitney relented and entered rehab, getting clean for what would likely be the last time in her life:

“She was so angry at me, cursing me and up and down,” she writes. “Eventually, after a good long while, Nippy did stop being angry at me. She realized that I did what I did to protect her, and she later told people that I had saved her life.”

Toward the end of Ms. Cissy’s discussion with Oprah, Oprah cited a quote from Ms. Cissy’s new memoir, Remembering Whitney: My Story of Love, Loss, and the Night the Music Stopped:

“In my darkest moments, I wonder whether Nippy loved me,” she writes. “She always told me she did. But you know, she didn’t call me much. She didn’t come see me as much as I hoped she would.”

My own mother, with whom I watched the program last night, identified with that statement. “You do feel that sometimes, as a mother,” she thought aloud.

As an only child, I was only a little taken aback. I’ve told my mother I love her — and I thought I’d done a good job of showing that love through action. But I also could relate to Ms. Cissy’s statement, because as a daughter, in my own darkest moments, I’ve wondered the same of my mom.

It speaks to how fraught and complex adult mother-daughter relationships are that there could ever be such uncertainties among mothers who are far from estranged from their children and who do, in fact, consider themselves fairly close to them.

It’s unfortunate that Whitney passed without being able to reassure her mom of her love and that Ms. Cissy had to leave her own reassurances in memoir form, cementing them for every reader but the one for whom they’d mean the most.

Can any single mothers of adult or near-grown daughters speak to this experience? Can you relate to Ms. Cissy’s comments on motherhood? Leave a comment and let’s discuss.

When I found out I was pregnant and officially accepted my mission to be a mother, I didn’t count on my daughter and I being an odd couple. As my pregnancy progressed, I knew that I would be a single parent. I made peace with it and have pretty much been winging it ever since. Yet there are two things I didn’t think I would ever have to fret over until I encountered them head on.

Six years have gone by and I still find myself in the trenches of these nuisances. Let me start with the most obvious oddness: the difference in our complexions. I’m turning out to be the kind of mother that has to (or feels the need to) correct certain people when they look at my kid and immediately make assumptions based on our complexions.

Hold up a kindergarten picture of me next to my kindergarten child. You should see a reflection of me within her. She has my mouth, which sometimes flashes an extra bright smile that reminds me of what I looked like at her age. When she smiles her cheeks become full and rosy just like mine. Her hair is luscious and thick just as mine was around that time. Her eyes! She has the most amazing brown eyes with long lashes that are sure to captivate any weary soul. I actually envy her lashes. Initially I thought she inherited a cool eye trick that her father has, her pupils changing color with her mood. However, her genetic make up decided (at least for now) to keep her pupils a deep warm mahogany.

The only immediate difference is our skin. I’m more of a maple brown and she is, taking after her father, a blush of butter pecan. During her newborn to toddler stage, she was a few shades paler than her current complexion. When she was born, I was aware of her color, but she is mine. The rest of her physical attributes would prove that and I didn’t think anyone would dare to question the validity of my motherhood.

Silly me.

I’ve been mistaken for her nanny and another relative (as in I married a white relative of hers, but there is no ring on my finger). I still remember a shopping outing with my mother and my daughter. My daughter was only a few months old and a white lady passed us by and ogled at her for a few. She complimented how adorable she is and boldly asked my six-month-old child, “Where’s your mother?” I was standing right there. Before I could say anything my mother spoke, “She’s right there.” The lady looked embarrassed. She turned a shade of red and kept walking.

For a time she “earned” the nickname “Pinky,” among family. At first it rubbed me the wrong way, as it was associated with comments like, “You sure you belong to us?” or “Sit that child out in the sun.”

I know my family didn’t mean any harm. It was all in the name of a little joking. Yet I wondered if, subconsciously, a generational self-hate was rearing its head. Like many other African-Americans, on both sides of my family, my relatives range in all shades of black. Beautiful shades. But somewhere, somehow, the seed of self hate was planted and it carried for generations.

Even as one generation shouted, “I’m Black and I’m Proud,” the snide comments continued. Even as my mother and father enforced, “You are a beautiful child of God,” I couldn’t help noticing how society flocks to the lighter, whiter side of things.

What hurts my ears to their core are comments from family, friends and strangers when they look at my daughter and place their assumptions about light skinned females on her.

“Oh she a red bone, all the boys going to be after her.”

“Oh, she’s a red bone, the older she gets her wardrobe is going to have to be on point.”

“I wish my kids were light like that.” (Just heard that this morning from a parent at my kid’s school.)

“Oh she’s light skinned. She’s gonna have to know how to fight. Light skinned girls always have to fight.”

My child will be six in about two months. I’ve been doing my damnedest to combat these negative feelings that others have. I’ll be damned if this generational self hate mess continues with her. Sometimes the comments warrant lashing out. Other times, they are so ridiculous I have to laugh.

One of my favorite books to read to my daughter is I Like Myself by Karen Beaumont. While the character in the book is a little black girl, it doesn’t address the issue of race — unless you wanna call a cute illustration of her waking up early in the morning with her uncombed afro is a big ball of poof addressing it. It highlights all of her silly differences (her knobby knees or hippo hips or purple polka-dotted lips) and affirms that she is proud of who she is no matter what people say.

The other part of our oddness is our social awkwardness, more mine than hers, as my daughter is VERY outgoing. It’s actually my daughter’s love for other people that is testing and pushing my limits with other grown ups. I’m trying not to be overprotective of her, but it’s so hard. She’s the kind of kid that will give anyone on the street a hearty hello and depending on her comfort level will strike up a conversation. I worry that the wrong person will take advantage of that but that’s another topic altogether.I’m finding that, as I plan her first out of school birthday party, not many of my friends or relatives have children her age. Everyone is either too young or too old. That pretty much leaves me with the kids in her class and their parents. You’ve seen the web series, The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl. I’m THAT girl when it comes to socializing with other parents. I’m trying my hardest to break out this shell, by striking up little small conversations when the time is right, such as if I find myself on a yellow bus with them as we head down class field trip lane.

I have to admit I dropped out of a social group before my membership was even “approved.” A wonderful network of stay-at-home moms called Mocha Moms is a national organization that encourages fellowship among mothers of color. The moms have play dates, arrange activities for the kids and even have a moms’ day or night out. It seemed like a gem of an idea for me, as I work from home, on a budget but love to do weekend activities with my daughter. Yet I let my social awkwardness talk me out of it.

Now I’m thirsty to fellowship with moms who have kids around my daughter’s age. I am committed to working on this. For six years it has felt like my daughter and I against our own oddness. No one prepped me for the complexion wars or groomed me to be open to other parents and befriending them. I always envisioned the two of us living a life of facing adventures together, sans the noise of the real world. Of course this is slightly off from our reality. Yet as each year goes by, I pray that it gets better for us and I won’t have to protect her as much from light skin verses dark skin statements, and she won’t have to push me as much to be receptive to other mommies.

Mahoganie Jade Browne is an acrobatic word slayer – ok a freelance journalist and creative writer – based in Washington, D.C. She’s a high-heel-wearing single mom to a soon-to-be-six-year-old, high-top-sneaker-wearing Aries princess. Catch her musings at http://mahoganie.wordpress.com.

… We’ll work to strengthen families by removing the financial deterrents to marriage for low-income couples, and doing more to encourage fatherhood – because what makes you a man isn’t the ability to conceive a child; it’s having the courage to raise one.

Stronger families.  Stronger communities.  A stronger America.  It is this kind of prosperity – broad, shared, and built on a thriving middle class – that has always been the source of our progress at home.  It is also the foundation of our power and influence throughout the world. — President Obama, 2013 State of the Union address

The brief chastisement of absentee dads that President Obama ticked off during last night’s State of the Union address quickly became the sound byte and retweet heard ’round the country. Which is fine. Because if there are fathers who were watching who are completely uninvolved (or underinvolved) with their children — and they are absent because marriage or remaining present and engaged presented financial impediments, then they may’ve needed to hear that. I’m all for taking any parent to task who’s willfully refusing to pull his or her own weight.

I also won’t pretend that single mothers don’t appreciate statements like this; it validates the experiences of those whose partners are not invested in parenting. Perhaps it even makes them feel as though they alone aren’t being “blamed” for their single parenthood.

But as I’ve learned through the research I’ve done and the stories I’ve solicited since starting Beyond Baby Mamas, there are fewer completely absent fathers and men who are unwilling to “stick around and raise the children they’ve conceived” as there are well-intentioned men for whom parenting proves more complicated than they initially anticipated. From the incarcerated dad to the father whose long-term unemployment makes financial contributions impossible to the father who tried marriage, learned that it wasn’t sustainable, and struggled to recalibrate effectively after divorce, there are many reasons — other than garden variety callousness or indifference — that fathers aren’t as involved with their children as they could be.

Let’s not pretend that the “it takes a real man to stick around and be a father” memes aren’t just as much as act of shaming as the “should’ve kept your legs closed and/or made him put a ring on it” memes are for mothers.

None of this is to say that incentives that encourage fatherhood are unnecessary or in any way ill-advised or that incentivizing marriage for low-income partners is a bad idea necessarily. But to couch those intentions in warmed over assumptions and criticism is counterproductive.

Few bother to fully investigate the root causes of father un- and underinvolvement. Few allow for the fact that those causes are varied and can’t necessarily be fixed by shaming a man into “doing better” or tossing him a monetary bone.

Consider the case of Obama’s own father, married three times with a number of children for whom his emotional and financial investment was decidedly limited. Was it because he wasn’t “man enough to stick around” in any of these three family structures or were there mitigating circumstances — perhaps different ones, in each of these cases?

I certainly agree with the president that stronger families lead to a stronger America. I just question whether or not challenging the manhood of fathers who, for whatever reasons, struggle to be what society considers “good” at the gig is gonna be enough to get us there.

Community Blogger Nesha Finister discusses the love and loss of a close friend and fellow single mother named Cassie. 

I grew up with Cassie’s family.  Cassie was 5’11”, evenly golden brown, eyes shined like diamonds, legs as long as the Mississippi River and her body mimicked the curves of a coke bottle.  Cassie was beautiful, athletic, and smart. Cassie was basically grown when I was a child.  She left and went on to college and then law school becoming an attorney.  Cassie married and worked as an attorney and became a mother for years before losing it all.  Cassie succumbed to the pressures of drugs and a bad relationship with her husband.  Her life spiraled out of control in a disarray of failed attempts to make her marriage work, kick the drug habit, and continue to be a mother to her daughter.

Cassie decided to pick up herself and her daughter and move back home.  She had a support system there.  She knew the environment she was raising her daughter in was toxic.  She didn’t want that for her daughter.  She no longer wanted the drugs for herself.  She wanted to be whole again.  She wanted to smile.

Cassie came back home broken, dilapidated, but her eyes had a glimmer of a twinkle.  She had lost a severe amount of weight and was struggling to stay alive.  She spent months in the hospital, upon her return, battling a MRSA infection.

Cassie fought her way back to health.  During her initial battle for her health, Cassie and I reunited and bonded on the grounds of single motherhood and divorce.  She was a source that I could vent to about the struggles of raising children alone.  I listened to her struggles to come from the death that drugs and her divorce had made her life.

Cassie became my sister friend.  We would meet up and drink wine and watch movies, talk for hours on the phone.  Cassie’s laugh was infectious, contagious.  Cassie was putting her life together one step at a time.

Cassie got a job at a local law firm and they helped her regain her license to practice law.  She worked hard.  Cassie enrolled her daughter into school and after school programs.  She watched her daughter develop socially, spiritually, and physically.  Her daughter was smiling, more open and ready for conversation unlike when she first moved back home.

Cassie job ended at the firm, but she was determined that was not the end of her career.  She opened up her own small firm and was doing corporate law for local oil and gas companies.  Cassie had pulled herself out of the murky depths of hell on earth and was now soaring above the skies of other’s doubt using her brilliance and new found tenacity to get her and her daughter above the death of what her life was.  My sister friend had taken her life back.  She was becoming a great asset to the community, volunteering in the church and even substitute teaching at the local school.

She showed our girls that the way that is isn’t the way that it has to be.  Cassie’s struggle was giving beautiful ripe fruits.  My sister friend was gaining more and more ground with her corporate law office and gaining respect when her health began to fail.  Cassie’s gall bladder was removed in an emergency surgery.  My sister friend thought that would be the end of it, but it was the beginning of the end for her.  She went through multiple procedures, but to no avail.

Cassie left this earth on February 16, 2013.

Cassie left her daughter, her most precious possession, a legacy she can be proud of.  Her mother was a beautiful brilliant soul.  An innovator, a woman of substance, phenomenally made.  I am forever grateful to her for allowing me to be her friend.  For allowing me to see that second chances are real and start with forgiving yourself.  Cassie taught me that my most important job was first and foremost being a mother to my children. I will forever love her.  Her tenacity and awesome spirit will never be forgotten.  She didn’t let her single mother status limit her, but used it to motivate her to greatness right until the end.

May we all have her strength to survive and leave a legacy for our children.

Nesha Finister is a 32-year-old single mother of an eleven-year-old girl and a six-year-old boy. A product of a single-parent home herself, Nesha unintentionally kept the tradition of single parenting going. She has a full-time job in the oilfield sector, which makes for a blue-collar lifestyle at work and a nurturing life at home. It is hard to be both roles, but she makes it work.

In case you’ve missed it, unmarried motherhood has reached an all-time high according to the latest numbers from the Pew Research Center… which means there’s been a lot of public speculation about why mothers aren’t marrying the fathers of their kids.

Beyond Baby Mamas founder Stacia L. Brown writes in favor of actually asking some mothers, instead of using the numbers to create hypothetical, often alarmist narratives.

From the article:

The latest numbers on unmarried parenting are out. Pew reports that 58 percent of first births in lower-middle-class households and 40 percent of all U.S. births are to unwed mothers. Like clockwork, society has turned its collective gaze to the social and economic crises facing the single mother. And like clockwork, we mothers these statistics represent brace ourselves for the public’s moral scrutiny and fiscal concern. We become like specters; we may be at the center of national conversation, but we don’t often see much of our real lives reflected in it. Everyone’s asking around us; few people are speaking to us.

[...]

The simplest way to gain accurate perspective about unmarried mothering is to ask unmarried mothers. Beyond Baby Mamas, a new online support and advocacy initiative for single parents of color, focuses on facilitating this type of discourse. As its founder, I invite mothers to write personal essays and commentary about their families for our website and to engage in discussion via social media. Most importantly, we talk about our social, emotional, and financial needs and how they might best be met.

Read “How Unwed Mothers Feel About Being Unwed Mothers” in its entirety here.

A single mother’s ears are always burning. People just can’t seem to resist talking about us. I wrote about the tendency society has to talk about — not to — unmarried mothers for The Atlantic last weekend (and if you haven’t already, take a minute to bookmark The Atlantic’s Sexes channel, where our article appeared. It’s great!), but what I didn’t say is that we aren’t completely ignored when talk of marriage emerges. Sometimes, people do, in fact, address us directly. And when they do, it’s hard to believe some of the things that come up.

Here are a few of the untruths and half-truths we single mothers are often told about marriage. (If you’ve heard one we haven’t mentioned, feel free to add your own in our comments section.)

1. If he left, he never loved you.

We get this one a lot — and if someone believes this, there’s little you can say to convince them otherwise. Fortunately, you don’t have to. Loving and leaving are not mutually exclusive. The former isn’t always enough to prevent the latter. As painful as it is to have someone walk away from a relationship — especially after children — the last thing you need to feel is pressure to defend yourself as lovable.

2. If he’d married you, he wouldn’t have left so easily/quickly/cavalierly.

Not only does this comment assume your partner left “easily,” it also presumes that marrying a person who would be inclined to leave at all would somehow change his core personality. Legally, marriage makes dissolving a romantic partnership more difficult. But it doesn’t prevent a partner from walking away, especially if he would consider a child, a hardship, or an emotional trigger as a reason to do so.

3. If you’ve been married before, you’re not “really” a single mother.

Women from various backgrounds and with a number of different relationship statuses identify as single. Divorced women are among them. In some cases, they are the sole or primary caregivers and providers for their children.

4. Married couples don’t need “welfare.” Their combined incomes will be enough to support the family.

It’s far more difficult for two-income households to qualify for food or housing assistance, but that doesn’t mean they don’t need government assistance. Here’s economics professor Casey Mulligan on how need is determined, according to marital income or household size for unemployment benefits and SNAP (food) benefits:

For household heads and spouses experiencing unemployment and earning no wage or salary income in 2010, the rate of receiving unemployment insurance was about the same for married and unmarried people: a participation rates ratio of about 0.9. But the SNAP participation rate was twice as great among the unmarried.

For the other earnings categories, unmarried SNAP participation rates range from 1.5 to 2.5 times what they are for married people.

The bottom line is that SNAP is largely a program with unmarried participants. SNAP may be an effective way of feeding people, but its low participation among married people may make it politically less popular than unemployment compensation.

Combining marital income only ensures adequate financial provision if both incomes amount to a livable wage (and, of course, livable wages vary according to family size).

5. You need a husband to complete your family.

No child should ever be made to feel as though his or her family is “incomplete” because two parents do not reside in his or her home.

6. Marriage makes you (and, by extension, your children) more respectable.

Tying “respectability” to marriage is problematic for everyone involved, but it’s most damaging to children. It encourages them to connect their societal, cultural, and moral value to their parents’ relationship status (and, eventually, their own). Children of divorce (who’ve arguably witnessed marriage at its best and worst) suffer from this reasoning as much as children born to unmarried parents.

7. Being married doubles your emotional, financial, and physical support as a parent.

This depends on the person you marry, not the institution itself. For single parents, the level of emotional, financial, and physical support depends on his/her “village” or community of friends and family.

8. Married couples have more loving and stable households than single parents.

Again: this depends on the spouse, not the marital institution itself. Single parents are capable of providing their children with both love and stability; within the context of their family and their support community, this can be more than enough to produce a healthy, emotionally thriving environment for the child.

9. If the father of your children isn’t living in the home with a commitment of marriage, he’ll probably leave and become a “deadbeat.”

A fairly current Penn State study conducted by sociologist Valarie Kong shows that far more fathers are making an effort to be “highly involved” with their children, post-breakup, than in decades past. See also: this fantastic Pittsburgh City Paper article, “Deconstructing Deadbeat,” by Brentin Mock, on just how few fathers are willingly, entirely absenting themselves from their children’s lives.

10. It’s harder for couples who’ve never been married to co-parent after a breakup.

It’s hard to effectively co-parent, period. It isn’t necessarily easier for people who have been married and are no longer together to reach amicable co-parenting, visitation, and financial support terms than it is for an unmarrried couple whose split was not acrimonious.

11. If he didn’t love you enough to “commit” to you (via marriage) before having kids, he’ll never marry you.

Unmarried couples may be likelier than marrieds to split after childbirth, but a number of them are also marrying each other after the fact. (Bonus point: level of emotional commitment isn’t necessarily best measured by willingness to marry, particularly in “shotgun wedding” situations. In the latter, the impetus for marriage may be societal/familial pressure, not commitment or marriage-readiness.)

12. Your unmarried state is troublesome and your non-traditional family is at the core of the country’s moral and economic blight.

As a support community, Beyond Baby Mamas is committed to dissuading unmarried mothers from seeing themselves in this light, regardless of what statistics indicate. They can only be responsible for their own families and their own parenting. For many of the reasons listed throughout this write-up, marriage alone is not a moral or economic curative in 2013.

13. Women are responsible for making themselves marriageable./Motherhood diminishes your marriageability.

The gender bias involved in holding women solely responsible for cultivating characteristics that make them “marriageable” is truly shameful. The success of a marriage depends on both parties. And “marriageability” is a highly subjective concept.

To the second myth, I’ll refer you to this 2011 New York Times piece by Angela Stanley:

A look at recent census data will tell you that the 70 percent we keep hearing about has been misconstrued. According to 2009 data from the Census Bureau, 70.5 percent of black women in the United States had never been married — but those were women between the ages of 25 and 29. Black women marry later, but they do marry. By age 55 and above, those numbers showed, only 13 percent of black women had never been married.

14. If you weren’t so independent or “emasculating,” you’d be married. (“You kept saying you could do it all on your own; now he’s making you.”

Hmm. Yet another argument that places sole responsibility on women to maintain a healthy relationship. It would appear that, in the eyes of the culture critic, women just can’t win. (Note that this particular lie isn’t reserved just for single mothers; it’s heard by single women, childless and mothering alike. Please also note, that following a pregnancy during which your partner decides to walk, you better hope and pray that you are independent, married or not.)

What people think single mothers’ past relationships were like (especially when marriage came up):

In actuality, we’ve had a few different experiences. Like the majority of adults who’ve ever attempted to navigate a relationship.

And unless you’re interested in treating single mothers with respect and humanizing your perceptions of single motherhood by listening to women experiencing it…

After all, single-mom shaming is clearly helpful in decreasing the national average of unmarried parenthood, yes?

And when trend pieces on single motherhood are published, the commenters are really interested in fair, open-minded discourse, right?

This discourse is also helpful for policymakers. It helps serve modern families really well.

We totally expect to be stereotyped and under-engaged in “mainstream discourse.”

But it stings a bit more when it comes from other people of color.

And when we try to politely request that people hear us out, resist assumptions, and/or let us go about the difficult work of childrearing without finger-pointing, we get pushback.

At times, it seems there are as many instigators as allies.

Still, we’re really grateful that we’re on everyone’s problem-solving agenda. And we’re totally open to engaging concern-trolls at each and every turn. For real.

But there’s just one suggestion we’d like to lodge, with those interested in taking single moms to task for our “troublesome condition” and suggesting that we solve our problems with marriage.

And don’t take offense if we don’t show up for lengthy comment section debates about the lives we lead. We’re kind of busy.

Happy Friday, y’all!

Black mother-daughter relationships have been criminally under-explored in literature. There are a few truly great offerings available (Silver Sparrow, In Search of Our Mothers Gardens, and Sula* spring to mind), there’s a dearth of work that evaluates the nuance and complexity of black mothers’ relationships to their daughters. A lot of what we get are “bad mother” tales, with little light or love: PUSH, The Darkest Child, and 32 Candles** spring to mind). The problem with the latter is that, even though there are some truly horrid, ruthless, unsympathetic black single mothers, more often, mothers are not entirely villainous. We rarely get to experience relationships that gradate, from cold to compassionate, from abandoning to embracing, from rejection to redemption.

Maya Angelou’s Mom & Me & Mom — out tomorrow — seems to be just the change we need.  In a touching, expansive, and beautiful excerpt posted at The Guardian last Friday, Angelou discusses how her mother sent her to live with her grandmother, then reunited with her at the age of 13.

What struck us most, though, was Angelou’s account of how her mother received the news that Angelou was expecting a child at the age of 17:

When I was 17 I had a baby. My mother never made me feel as if I brought scandal to the family. The baby had not been planned and I would have to rethink plans about education, but to Vivian Baxter that was life being life. Having a baby while I was unmarried had not been wrong. It was simply slightly inconvenient.

I found a job when my son was two months old. I went to Mother and told her, “Mother, I am going to move.”

“You are going to leave my house?” She was shocked.

I said, “Yes. I have found a job, and a room with cooking privileges down the hall, and the landlady will be the babysitter.”

She looked at me half pityingly and half proud.

She said, “All right, you go, but remember this: when you cross my doorstep, you have already been raised. With what you have learned from your Grandmother Henderson in Arkansas and what you have learned from me, you know the difference between right and wrong. Do right. Don’t let anybody raise you from the way you have been raised. Know you will always have to make adaptations, in love relationships, in friends, in society, in work, but don’t let anybody change your mind. And then remember this: you can always come home.”

The idea that the arrival of a child — whether planned or unplanned — is “life being life,” not a shameful mistake, a stupid decision, or the end of the world, is a healthy one. And we loved Baxter’s welcoming attitude. It’s important to draw clear lines for young mothers: our children are our responsibility. This is especially useful if the young mother has been well-raised, herself. It shows both your confidence in her rearing and her ability to rear, encouraging her to be fiercely independent. But it’s equally important and deeply loving to have an “open-door policy,” allowing a young mother the option to come home, temporarily, if striking out on her own with a newborn proves more than she can handle.

• Will you be reading Mom & Me & Mom? (We will!) 
• What are some of your favorite books about black mother-daughter relationships?
• How did your mother take the news that you were expecting? 

We’d love to hear from you!

* In Sula, her mother may seem cruel when she makes the memorable — iconic, really — confession that she loves, but doesn’t like her (narcissistic, arguably sociopathic) daughter. But it’s the honesty of it — and the fact that it’s an opinion informed by lifelong observation — that makes it such a nuanced claim. 

** 32 Candles is a fantastic novel. It’s important to stress that. But the main character’s mom is off-the-charts evil, from beginning to end. 

J. Drew Sheard and son, Jacob. Credit: Facebook

There may not be many representations of healthy black motherhood in scripted television, but thanks to Viacom-funded networks like VH1 and BET and Bravo’s Real Exes of Various Cities, there’s no shortage of minority single mothers on reality series. From RHOA‘s Kandi Burruss (a relative success story) to the women of Love and Hip Hop and Basketball Wives, single moms of color get more than their fair share of airtime — as long they’re struggling with rejection, infidelity, or basic, healthful communication.

With a new reality show sub-genre emerging — the church-based series — it was only a matter of time before the single mom storylines made their way to the pew.

In last night’s premiere of The Sheards, gospel icon Karen Clark Sheard’s son, J. Drew dealt with what is often referred to as “baby mama drama.” Shantel is the mother of J. Drew’s son, Jacob. They were together for “ten years” — as Shantel often stresses to J. Drew in this episode and in upcoming ones — and he’s made clear his intention to move on. He is interested in co-parenting only, but Shantel tearfully balks at that idea. She begs, cajoles, urges, and waxes wistful about their shared history. But J Drew’s having none of it, stressing that he’ll always be there for their son. “For him,” Shantel wails. “What about me?!”

Regardless of viewers’ personal circumstances, it’s difficult to watch this. If you’re childless, it’s uncomfortable and embarrassing to watch someone play herself to this degree. But if you’ve ever been completely dismissed by a long-term partner, Shantel isn’t entirely unsympathetic, even though she really is playing herself here.

The feelings themselves are familiar. It can be hard to accept that a man who once loved you decides after a child that he’s entirely disinterested. It can be hard when he avoids contact with you and refuses to linger on any conversation — no matter how innocuous — that isn’t about “his” child.

If we’re honest with ourselves, not many of us wouldn’t take a few shots at trying to rekindle a co-parent’s interest. Even if we don’t want him back, we want him to care about us — our feelings, our progress and maybe even our appearance — because, provided he’s an involved parent, we know we’re stuck with him.

Co-parenting can feel like being stranded on a desert island; the only other person in the world who’s been in the same boat — who knows how it feels to be the parent of your child — is him. If you think of it that way, as being stranded with someone for at least 18 years, the last thing you want is to imagine a life where this person pretends he doesn’t know you or what you once were to each other.

All this aside, it would be nice if Shantel, at 24, knew better than to frequently press J. Drew for a more personal relationship when he clearly isn’t interested. But I’d wager that the reason she doesn’t know better is the same as the reason she, J. Drew, and so many other young churchgoing single parents are totally unprepared for the gauntlet of real responses and reactions to sex and its outcomes.

No one tells them anything.

The Sheards, counter-clockwise: Kierra, J. Drew, Karen, J. Drew Sr.

Churches have been under-educating kids on sex for ages, so as not to “encourage them to go out and do it.” Birth control, it’s believed by some churches, should be forsaken for moral fortitude and a desire to please God. And while the latter motivation for abstinence is admirable, ambitious, and doable, too many Christian teens (and adults, if we’re honest) are deciding not to grapple their way up to the church’s moral high ground.

For this group, premarital sex is already considered an anathema. In the event that their resolve toward abstinence fails, they they focus on beating themselves up about succumbing to sinful urges rather than focusing on finding out how to protect themselves against STIs and pregnancy.

From there, if their unmarried sex results in pregnancy, said pregnancy is often viewed as a punishment for sin. It’s nearly impossible for a couple who believes that not to punish each other, in turn. It’s also improbable that either of them will understand that that’s what they’re doing.

Enter J. Drew and Shantel. All he wants is not to have to interact with her, even if he regards their child as a blessing. She represents his moral weakness. All she wants is to get him to reconcile and recommit to her because he represents her moral weakness. The difference is: she believes all can be redeemed through marriage.

For the Christian single parent, marriage is often touted as a kind of retroactive redemption for the sin of premarital sex. But this is such an oversimplification precisely because so few Church-raised couples have enough emotional and psychological insight into sex to sustain a healthy marriage. Shows like The Sheards illustrate this firsthand.

Editor’s note: The following post does not discuss the permanent loss of a parent through death, though we do intend to devote a future post to this topic.

Though it wasn’t often part of direct story lines, single motherhood was very much at the heart of the hit 1990s sitcom, The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. In fact, aside from The Bernie Mac Show, it’s one of the only high-profile, pop culture examples of black communal parenting. As the show’s iconic theme song explains, Will’s single mom sacrificially sends him to live with wealthy relatives in a better neighborhood because their own West Philadelphia community is a riskier space for young black men to navigate.

The show only touches on the complexities of this arrangement a handful of times. On episodes where Will’s mother visits, she is quick to remind him of his roots and that this highfalutin living situation is only temporary. At one point, after seriously dating and contemplating remarriage, she asks Will to return home (presumably because, a marriage would mean a live-in father figure for him). And it becomes clear over the course of the series that sharing custody of one’s child with extended family can be a real gamble.

But there are also times when having male role models or “social fathers” as a consistent presence is an indisputable win, no matter how complicated. And the above clip, where Will’s biological dad shows up and vanishes, is an example.

When the episode debuted in May 1994, the “how come he don’t want me, man?” scene was the subject of intense buzz and community conversation. Both touching and emblematic, Will’s monologue gave voice to many viewers whose own absent or semi-absent father situations were similar.

But Uncle Phil’s silent gesture of support, affection, and understanding was equally buzzed about. Too often, when a child faces a parental rejection, there’s no Uncle Phil present to embrace him.

Father absence, it should be noted, is not usually as absolute as cultural assumption would have us believe. Non-custodial parents more commonly drift in and out, in cases where clear visitation schedules are not legally set and adhered to.

The damage this causes can be just as bad — and in some cases worse — than absolute parent absence. The rising and falling hopes may train children to anticipate disappointment and to become skeptical of the adults in their lives.

We asked a few members of our community how and when to explain why a non-custodial parent is absent. Based on their feedback, here are a few tips that may help single parents navigate this family dynamic:

•  Many children first become aware of a non-custodial parent’s absence at age 4. Their social cognition is becoming more acute, and their interaction with other children via school and communities provides them with exposure to a variety of different family structures. At age 4, it may be difficult to tell children why a parent is not a consistent presence. In the event that the parent is occasionally present, perhaps starting by saying, “He/she will visit as often as he can,” could work. This implies that the parent will make an effort to show up, even if circumstances (real or imagined) disallow a more consistent effort.

• In the event that the parent is completely absent, one mother suggested explaining that the parent isn’t able to be present. Whether this inability to engage is emotional, circumstantial or physical, this may be enough of an explanation in toddlerdom.

• As the child grows older, most parents agreed, it is imperative to let him form his own opinion about the absent parent. Talking negatively about the parent to the child is always a bad idea — even in the interest of “truth-telling.” Find a way to explain why the parent is not present without vilification.
• To that end, it’s also unhealthy to keep your own frustrations about a parent’s absence entirely to yourself. Find a trusted family member, friend, therapist and/or ally who is willing to be a listening ear. Voice your frustrations as often as necessary, but never within earshot of the children.

• If a parent is willing to engage via letters, Skype or social media, but physical distance, incarceration, or other prohibitive circumstances disallow a more consistent presence, encourage the engagement the non-custodial parent is offering.

• No matter the situation, make certain you (and every adult in your child’s life) understands that, even if a father is completely disengaged, the child is not “unwanted.” Point out often how loved and appreciated the child is by all who are actively engaged in his or her life. This will not necessarily lessen the sting of the absence, but it provides an alternative means of love and support.

What do you think of these tips? Do you have any you’d like to add or an experience you’d like to share about navigating parent absence? Comment below!

Nefertiti Austin is an author and single adoptive mother.

I am not the first or only single non-famous Black woman to adopt in America, and yet it seems that way.

In 2006, I had no clue how hard it would be to wrestle against cultural norms by adopting a baby. Nor did I have guidance on how to handle reactions from Black men who questioned my motives for wanting to mother a boy. I adopted for a multitude of reasons, the least of which included waging a one-woman campaign to inform other Black women about adopting. But, here I am, six years later, responding to emails and returning phone calls from women I do not know. They heard that I adopted and wanted to know who, what, when, where and how much it cost.

Though emotionally prepared to solo parent, I did not foresee coming up short when seeking information about single woman of color that adopt. After all, the Black Venus did it in the 1940s and 1950s. With her self-described “Rainbow Tribe”, Josephine Baker adopted 12 children and Actress Robin Givens adopted her oldest son in the 1990s. My angst about not finding adoptive mothers who look like me seems silly now, given the heavy promotion of OWN’s Raising Whitley, comedienne/actress Kym Whitley’s reality series about her unplanned adoption of a baby boy. And Google results for producer/director/writer extraordinaire Shonda Rhimes, who lovingly adopted two girls, are just clicks away. How I wish their stories were around when the desire to adopt crawled into my shadow.

Single black adoption, then and now. Left: Josephine Baker and her “rainbow tribe.” Right: Kym Whitley, her son, and the cast of her reality show, Raising Whitley

But in the old days, like 2006, the myth of the Black adoption, where relatives come to stay and never leave, prevailed. Sort of like a Black divorce, a Black adoption skips the legal portion of the process. Parts two and three of said myth are that we adopt nieces, nephews, cousins or long-term foster youth in our care. We do not adopt outside our family. Newsflash to Black people: we do adopt kids we do not know. And when we do, there are few, if any, cameras to witness these random acts of humanity.

Even though I did not see myself in adoption testimonials, memoirs, books or on the cover of People magazine, I didn’t stop looking. I even went to the end of the Internet and read articles about how-to adopt, artificial insemination, egg transplantation and sperm donors targeted at and written for affluent couples, gay and lesbian couples, women with fertility issues, time-clock issues, professional conflicts and single white female starlets.

I fit into none of these boxes and finally drew my own map to adoption.

Under the best circumstances, adoption is as joyous as it is stressful. There are incompetent social workers, less than enthused family members, financial fears and negative articles like “Single Black women choosing to adopt” by John Clark, which allege that single Black women adopt as a substitute for a man. Really. With press like that, no wonder single women of color send up prayers for the motherless, get another degree, buy a home, take extravagant vacations but do not adopt for fear of proving “them” right.

Meanwhile Black children, boys in particular, languish in the system until Academy Award winners Sandra Bullock and Charlize Theron ride in to save the day. While their adoption chronicles receive lots of airtime and gigabytes, “…our journey in motherhood and middle-class angst and bliss [is not] told in cutesy books or on network sitcoms about modern family. The white experience (motherhood or otherwise) is viewed as universal,” writes Kimberly Seals Allers in her New York Times Blog, “Hollywood to Black Mothers: Stay Home”. The absence of our adoption stories remains palpable and does the 510,000 children in foster care a disservice. It also perpetuates negative suppositions that the Black family is a relic of the past, incapable of healing itself from within.

While parenting challenges – potty training, homework, finding affordable daycare – are universal, adoption for single women of color is not. We must overcome our own fears and steady the people around us who call us (to our faces) crazy for adopting a “crack” baby. We must stand our ground with the men in our village who are opposed to our adoption of a man-child, and then not lose sight of our goal of motherhood via adoption. At least that was my experience.

I could be wrong but I doubt that white women, especially celebrities, feel pressured to carry a list of explanations as to why they want to adopt in their purses. As open as this community is to the practice of adoption, the revelation of my son’s domestic adoption casts me as simultaneous outlier and brethren among my Caucasian brothers and sisters. Newsflash to white people: Black people do adopt, but when we do, there are few, if any, cameras to witness these random acts of humanity.

Maybe the core issue isn’t race but class. Whatever it is, single motherhood, not white motherhood or black motherhood, via adoption is a choice made with much soul-searching and deserves recognition in all communities.

For funnsies, I randomly check the shelves at the library and do online reconnaissance for books about Black women who adopt. Occasionally, I hit the jackpot and find a feature in Essence magazine or advertisement in Jet or a parenting blog. Admittedly a smidgen better than the pickings in 2006, this black hole in the parenting sphere reaffirms the obvious: if I want to read about single women of color who experience motherhood through adoption, I’ll have to write a book about it.

Nefertiti Austin is the proud single adoptive mother of a delightful six-year old boy, with plans to adopt another man-child later this year. She is also a published author, currently writing a memoir about adopting as a single woman of color. In February, she began training prospective adoptive parents for the County of Los Angeles and keeps the lights on as an adjunct history instructor at a couple of community colleges in Los Angeles.

Nefertiti infrequently blogs at www.mommiejonesing.com.

On NPR’s Tell Me More this Tuesday, I participated in a segment designed to offer married mothers tips on how to manage their temporary solo parenting experiences. The idea for the segment came from a clever piece in Working Mother magazine by author and family therapist, Lori Gottlieb, who also participated in the conversation.

During the talk, host Michel Martin mentioned a recent comment by First Lady Michelle Obama. Earlier this month, FLOTUS referred to herself as a “busy single mom,” then immediately self-edited:

“Believe me, as a busy single mother — or, I shouldn’t say single, as a busy mother. Sometimes, you know, when you’ve got a husband who is president, it can feel a little single. But he’s there.”

The Huffington Post, in reporting the comment, quipped: “It’s OK, Mrs. Obama, we got what you meant.”

Or did we? One of the most curious phenomena I’ve experienced since founding BBM last year has been the various baggage around referring to oneself as a “single mom.” We’ve tackled it various times here at our blog and I suppose we’ll continue tackling the term and what it means for years to come. Officially, our stance is that single motherhood takes a multitude of forms. It is not tied solely to relationship status, but relationship status certainly factors into it, most of the time. Instead, single parenthood should be defined with the level of social, financial, and custodial responsibility one assumes for the child.

In short: just because a partner is physically present doesn’t mean a parent cannot feel that she (or he) is taking on the lion’s share of kid responsibility alone. Indeed, community blogger k l moore wrote for us back in November of last year:

i am a mother without a partner.

i am unmarried; marriage does not denote partnership.

i know married women without partners.

i feel as though all women, despite matrimony status, are single mothers.

you are the only mother your child has. [this statement is non-respective of same sex partnerships and extended families by virtue of divorce and re-marriage.]

But not everyone shares this inclusive view. We recently confronted an internet meme circulating on Facebook that took issue with mothers referring to themselves as single if they were co-parenting:

While some Twitter respondents to our discussion of this idea dismissed it as the rant of a frustrated co-parent, others were genuinely perplexed and/or offended by it. At best, it’s a short-sighted and underinformed idea. At worst, it’s insulting to co-parents, especially mothers. (No one ever scoffs at a non-custodial father’s reference to himself as a “single parent,” after all.)

When asked why he shared the above graphic on his Facebook feed, an anonymous married father explained:

I think a lot of people want to pretend they’re going through the struggle. You have successful people who pretend they grew up rough. Well-off suburban kids who pretend they’re in the same position as poor kids from the hood. Mothers with good fathers to their children who pretend they’re in the same position as women who do it alone.

People try to create an underdog scenario for themselves. I know women who struggled to take care of their children because the father didn’t do his part. They paid everything (without the help of government assistance), had their kids 7 days per week most of the time, kept up with educational events and extracurricular activities.

I think it’s a slap in the face to them to claim you’re a single parent when you get help from the other parent…. Don’t claim single parenthood just for sympathy.

I think mothers who “do it all alone” (read: maintain sole custody with zero involvement or visitation from the fathers of their children) are given too little credit if we assume they’re going to take umbrage with someone else identifying as a single parent, when he/she “receives help.”

The fact is: if we’ve ever cared for our children at length either alone or with unequal investment/participation from the other parent, we can empathize with a single parent’s experience.

In essence, this is what the First Lady’s comment was really about: sometimes, I feel like I’m doing this alone.

And sometimes, to be certain, during the course of her husbands meteoric career, she has.

Fellow NPR panelist Aracely Panameno affirmed this point:

Single parenting sometimes doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re single. You can have a spouse in the military, and if that military personnel has been deployed multiple times, lengthy periods of time, even if you’re married, you’re still single parenting and you can be also be a father single parenting your children.

And some prefer to ditch the labeling altogether. Early on, in our very first Conversation with Single Mothers of Color, community member Vik VarWoo said:

I don’t classify myself as a single mom. I’m a mom. And we’re whole. We’re whole.

Indeed, during the short months I’ve spent curating a space for minority mothers and fathers, I’ve met people from a wide range of personal histories and experiences — and they all have their own ideas about how best to ID themselves. As they should.

We own our stories. And we have the right to title them in whatever ways we wish.

But more importantly, we have a responsibility not to create a false “us” vs. “them” binary. We’ve always been against “othering” among mothers here at Beyond Baby Mamas. Mothering is mothering is mothering — and it’s all hard. Who has time to compete about who’s got it worst?

For restaurants, Mother’s Day is big business. For single-parent families, it’s just a big expense. If your children are old enough to contribute, it can be fun, provided they have jobs or a few siblings to split the costs. They may also opt to cook for you, which can also be pretty cool… if they know how to cook.

But for moms of younger children or moms who tend to spend Mother’s Day cooking for or dining out with (and paying for) their own mothers, it may be a cost-prohibitive affair.

To help, Beyond Baby Mamas would like to treat one special single-parent family to dinner this Mother’s Day (or at least split the tab).

We’re offering a $60 gift certificate to one of the following restaurants:

• The Cheesecake Factory
• Olive Garden
• Red Lobster

The winning family chooses, and the electronic gift card will be delivered to the email address provided on your contest entry form.

To enter, you MUST:

• follow, like, or subscribe to us on at least one social media site (Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, or this blog).
• submit a complete Contest Entry Form.

Mother’s Day is Sunday, May 12. Our contest ends on Sunday, May 5. The winning family will be notified and their gift certificate emailed no later than Wednesday, May 8.

Good luck!

Co-Parenting 101, an organization Beyond Baby Mamas deeply admires, recently featured divorce writer, coach and mentor Mandy Walker on their radio broadcast, Co-Parenting Matters, here they talked single parents and new relationships.

It’s worth a listen, whether you’re dating, you plan to, or you want to know how to navigate your co-parenting relationship and a new romance.

But if you’ve just broken up or you’re not quite ready for moving on or you’ve just hit a dip on the emotional rollercoaster that is single motherhood, you may need more than advice.

You may need a mixtape.

Here’s one we’ve assembled for you, with songs of love, loss, and moving on. Because dating’s hard. And, as our single mother friend Moxie can attest, so is divorce. And so is pining for a relationship you’re not ready to pursue. And you should be easy on yourself this weekend. Just click “play” and get your life*.

(Special thanks to everyone who contributed a suggestion for this list! It was truly a community effort!)

1. “Not Gon’ Cry” – Mary J. Blige

2. “No More Rain (In this Cloud)” – Angie Stone

3. “Heartbeat” – Taana Gardner

4. “Take This Ring” – Toni Braxton

5. “Superwoman” – Kandi feat. Tiny

6. “After the Love is Gone” – Earth, Wind, and Fire

7. “Outta Love” – Reel People feat. Omar

8. The Badu Trifecta: “Other Side of the Game,” “Green Eyes,” and “Out My Mind Just in Time”

9. “You Gets No Love” – Faith Evans

10. “Love Under New Management” – Miki Howard

We know you were probably looking for Vesta’s “Congratulations” and Cheryl Pepsii Riley’s “Thank You for My Child.” But it seems like any time people utter the words “music” and “single moms” in the same breath, these two songs come up. So we wanted to bypass them.

Feel free to add your own picks to the comment section below!

When you hear, see or read people talking about single mothers, more often than not, the comments are negative. Single mothers are branded harlots and sinners for not having a child within a legal marriage. They are blamed for crime and violence in our communities. Their ability to parent their children is questioned because there is no man in the house. The government tries to punish them for transgressing societal norms around motherhood (reducing public assistance benefits).

What individuals, the media, and the legislators refuse to understand is that parenting a child alone is simply another way to parent, just like two-parent heterosexual families, gay and lesbian families, and families that include extended relatives. Regardless of whether single motherhood was an active choice a woman made, it is a legitimate family structure.

What single mothers need is support, so they can effectively raise their children in a loving, financially stable home. Despite the ominous statistics about how the children of single mothers fare in life, millions of single mothers raise healthy and happy children into adulthood.

I am one of them.

Was my life perfect? Of course not. My mother struggled financially, but I never went without the basic necessities of life and often had more. My mom wasn’t perfect, but what mother is? Looking back, I realized I had a pretty good childhood.

My mother and my grandparents were a great support system. They were my second and third parents, really. Yearly vacations, two sets of Christmas presents every year, good food, clean clothes, and love were what they gave me.

Of course, I wished that my biological father was in my life, but I didn’t dwell on it too much because I did have a father figure in my grandfather and uncle. What many people don’t realize is that just because the biological father isn’t in the home doesn’t mean children are not receiving any male influence. Often there are grandfathers, uncles and cousins, acting as surrogate father figures.

I’m not saying that single mother families are all like mine, cause that is not true. There are too many mothers who are struggling day in and day out to put food on the table, keep their kids engaged in school, prevent their children from becoming victims of violence, finding employment that actually pays enough to live off of, and have somewhat of a personal life. What single mothers need is not our shaming, but our support. Offer to babysit so a mother can go on a job interview, or go to class, or just get some much needed time to herself. If you have connections or information about a job or education, that would help a mom and her family, share them! Let a single mother know that you are here for her. Last but not least, start advocating for policies that support single mothers, and by extension all mothers, with affordable high quality childcare, generous paid parental leave and sick days, living-wage employment, affordable housing, and higher education opportunities.

T.H. is a 27-year-old child of a single mother. She currently works as a grant writer at a nonprofit organizations that provides housing and supportive services to homeless families. In addition to her job, she has volunteered with organizations that focus on issues of maternal and child health, HIV/AIDS, clean water access, and juvenile justice.

Part of what we do here at Beyond Baby Mamas is push back against memes and media that criticize, denigrate, and/or label single mothers. The month of May has given us quite a bit of material to work with. Aside from commentary related to the Pew Research Center’s report on breadwinning moms (which may receive its own post next week), this meme recently caught our eye on Facebook:

And a post at the blog, Real Goes Right, titled, “Why Are Some Black Women So Comfortable Being Single Mothers?” crossed our Twitter feed just yesterday. (Google it if you’re interested; we won’t be linking.)

One of our contentions with the latter is that it makes broad assumptions about single mothers’ attitudes and motivations, without speaking to or referencing more than one single mother. (And, per usual, it does nothing to investigate fathers’ attitudes or motivations, opting instead to address women who preemptively prepare for the possibility of parenting alone.)

This is a fairly common practice, whether the lay cultural commentator uses underanalyzed statistics, informal conversation with a friend, or quick, out-of-context observation of strangers.

As we often point out, minority single mothers are among the most scrutinized and the least engaged group within the mothering community.

That makes the meme above all the more troubling. Not only does it appear to be primarily circulated by women, but it also seeks to actively disengage and distance one single mother from another based on differences in problem-solving and attitudes. It’s problematic because women within an already oppressed and stereotyped group are publicly fueling a larger societal effort to vilify unmarried mothers. Rather than piling on by attacking a single mom’s responses to issues that are much larger than how loud she is, how she confronts a child support issue, or how she manages money, it would be infinitely more effective to either engage her in nonjudgmental conversation or stop referencing her altogether.

Why not find out why she handles things differently instead of suggesting that she is less respectable than other single moms?

This is not to say that unmarried mothers will never find the actions of other unmarried mothers troubling. It’s likely that many of us will encounter moms whose parenting practices make it difficult to relate or empathize. But understanding one another always begins with mutual respect — and, for better or worse, we should absolutely want to understand one another.

As single mothers, our first line of defense against public misrepresentation is private and public respect for each other.

If you believe this, and want to join our efforts to spread this message of respect, share one of these images via social media:

Please consider linking back to our site when sharing, and if you’re sharing via Tumblr, please re-blog these images from our Tumblr page.

With respect, support, and encouragement,

Stacia L. Brown, Founder

Acclaimed poet and performing artist Roger Bonair-Agard is the first guest to be featured in Beyond Baby Mama’s Affirming Black Fatherhood Series. Every day this week, as a lead-in to Father’s Day, we’ll be featuring the experiences and insights of unmarried minority fathers. We are proud to present his story. 

Roger Bonair-Agard

Having spent three great (albeit tumultuous, on a personal front) years in Chicago, I was about to return to my beloved Brooklyn. Half of my stuff was packed. My moving date was two weeks away. I was scheduled to attend a wedding the following day with an on again/off again lover, whom I had dated fairly consistently when I first moved to Chicago, but now we saw each other every other week or so after having gone through a stretch of time when we had broken up and didn’t get down at all. It seemed like it’d be a chill enough road trip to go with her to her cousin’s wedding – a six-hour jaunt to Cincinnati. But she wanted to talk to me that night, the night before we left – urgently. I couldn’t understand why because we were going to be sitting in a car for six hours the following day. So I meet with her and she drops The News. I’m stunned. She was on the pill. I ask, “What do you want to do?” She says, “Oh, I’m keeping it…”

Three months later I’m having coffee with a friend I haven’t seen in years in a coffee shop at the corner of Franklin and Fulton in what used to be one of the most gully neighborhoods in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. This woman is a brilliant, thoughtful, sensitive, poet with whom I went to college. We’ve enjoyed a parallel poetic literary evolution in the world, even publishing books with the same press. My time in Brooklyn now is temporary as I make plans to return to Chicago in time for the birth and to figure out how and where I will be a father and co-parent. I tell her the story of how the ‘news’ got dropped on me. She says, “You know… I don’t believe a woman ever traps a man, but you ain’t exactly freed a nigga either. That’s that shit I call The Abstracted Trap.” We bust out laughing over our expensive coffees, can’t stop giggling for five minutes before we return to the morning sport of hipster-watching.

But it dawned on me shortly thereafter that what happened between Lydia – lover/baby-mama – and I that evening was really powerful. Faced with an unplanned eventuality, we both made very empowered choices. She wasn’t waiting to hear what I wanted to do, and one can surmise that at that moment she was quite willing to get on with her life with a baby even if I had said I wanted nothing to do with it. Indeed, I felt in that moment empowered to do that if I wanted. After all, we were having sex with the assumption of protection from pregnancy (though I’d like to stress that one should be aware that babies are a potential consequence of any kind of fucking). But I intended to be involved in a positive way in the life of any child I was ever to have, and so I made a choice too – to figure out, alongside her how we were going to raise a child. It is important to understand that not every one has the same kind of freedom of choice. Lydia and I are college educated, and both old enough to consider the responsibility of the choice (she, 27 and I, 44, at the time of The Decision). Neither of us had other children, or situations in our lives that would make attending to the task at hand any more complicated than it was already going to be. Straight away I decided I’d be back to support with doctors’ visits and what not, and for at least the first three months of the child’s life. As the pregnancy progressed and the idea of what life might look like I decided I’d be moving back to Chicago for at least the first year.

I forget who said it but I’ve heard, and am willing to get behind, this oft-repeated quote: “the best thing my father ever did for me was to love my mother.” My grail has become exactly this. How do I love my daughter’s mother? Nina was born one month ago as of the 13th of June. This is my first ever Father’s Day. What was to be a last fling kind of a “it’s been real, I’ll see you round the way when I’m back in town or you in Brooklyn” kinda deal, has turned into an elongated romantic consideration in which we’ve decided to live together for the first three months (during those turbulent feeding and sleeping schedules), and then close by, while continuing to share responsibilities for Nina, and lives as lovers. Because we have had in the past a non-exclusive sexual relationship though, there is the chance soon enough, of other lovers of ours entering Nina’s life. For me, the question about loving the child’s mother becomes more expansive. How do I make choices that allow me to model responsible, fair, fulfilling, loving relationships with any woman who enters my life, including of course, the woman whose importance in my life has now deepened and broadened a thousand-fold; her mother?

If you refer to the woman who has carried your child to term as ‘the mother of my child’, no-one bats an eyelid. Refer to her as ‘my baby-mama’ and folks bristle. Why would you call her such a thing? It appears that the connotation of the more colloquial reference is far worse than if I were to use the Queen’s English, and apart from the complex race and class undertones involved here, is the question about assumptions of what it means – to use an antiquated, sexist, phraseology – to make an honest woman of her. Chances are that over the course of the next 20 years, my relationship with Lydia will evolve radically. The chance of its adhering to a conventional model of family life is slim. I’m going to be charged with ensuring that ours is a united front of respect and love and that ‘baby-mama’ has the same weight as wife, as mother of my child, as person with whom I will forever be fortunate to have made a child. Nina will need to see us work hard to accommodate each other’s needs, and to meet hers, and to respect each other’s boundaries. Most of all, she will need to be able to see her father as an ally towards respected personhood and feminist empowerment. I will have to work even harder to keep myself honest in that regard.

If you are a man who has had even moderate success in the dating arena, your friends will shake their heads when they hear you have a girl child on the way, or they will say it serves you right, or they will say it’s time to buy a shotgun or they will say – to the man with multiple daughters – poor guy! They will say, now you will know what it is like. Your infant daughter will immediately be cast in the role of the hunted, the infant boys – young hunters. Your daughter is prey before she has left the womb, and we hold this up. We celebrate the continuance of this every day. If you haven’t already been engaging in this introspection, you will certainly consider the times you yourself participated in this and even if, like me, you fancy yourself enlightened, you will dig deeper into the crates of your romantic history attempting to deconstruct your own selfishness, your own roughshod run over the emotions of lovers past. You will be forced to cross-examine who you are/were, and to what extent you’ve taken advantage of the power of your being a man in the relationships in your wake. Whatever ghost of girlfriends past digging you have to do, you have to draw a line between yourself and every woman with whom you interact, romantically or no, and ask yourself about the nature of power, the nature of masculinity, the difficulty of the gender construct. And when I say you, I mean me. And when I say you have to draw the line between you and all the women in your life, I mean I’m looking here at the first real opportunity I have to destroy the idea that a baby-mama is a less worthy individual than a wife and that there is such a thing as a woman, whom by her behavior, ability to marry or sexuality is more or less worthy of lofty position in our lives. Here is the chance, with a brand new girl human being in my life, to assert that not only does my baby mama come without the requisite drama, but that she is loved and treasured, her boundaries honored, and she is forever part of my family. She is no less so than if we were to be married, or exclusive partners, or any of the other ways in which certain kinds of relationships are privileged over others. She is certainly no less so than if I straightened up my diction, pronounced all my th’s and referred to her as ‘the mother of my child.’

When friends talk about how I will menace the boys who try to date my daughter, I wonder sometimes what then is my role if she decides she will date girls. Mostly, I hope that Lydia and I and her myriad aunties and uncles and godmothers and godfathers will have done such an awesome job, that menacing her dates is wholly unnecessary. Still, I fully plan to ensure that my daughter’s ability to defend herself physically, is formidable. I hope her ability to defend herself and open herself emotionally are equally formidable. I tell my friends that I have no intention to proscribe her sex to any greater degree than I would if she were born a boy. I want her to recognize the double-standard of the world she is in certainly, but I’m more interested in her feeling absolute ownership of her yesses and nos. I have more work to do in the deconstruction of my own transgressions in this regard. Much of that work must continue in therapy, but this here is the golden opportunity, to teach my daughter and her friends, and the youth whom I teach, boy and girl alike, the value of their choices, and the certainty of their ownership over them. Some day, if she so chooses, Nina Jane Merrill Bonair-Agard will be somebody’s baby-mama. She will be cherished. She will be loved. She will have entered and been embraced by someone else’s family. We will all be enriched for it.

Roger Bonair-Agard is a native of Trinidad & Tobago, and author of three collections of poems. His most recent, ‘Bury My Clothes’ is published by Haymarket Books (haymarketbooks.org).  He is Nina’s father.