It really does take a village...

It's my first post for What About Our Daughters while Gina, our fabulous BlogMother, is on hiatus. I'm in fine company tag-teaming with my Twitterific "psychic twin" Faith of Acts of Faith Blog. For the most part I'll be cross-posting from my own blog (hitmebackblog.blogspot.com) but for today I had to add my verse to this tone poem about Raising Him Alone.

Just over a month after my nephew's 5th birthday, his father was murdered.

My nephew's father and my sister were not married -- she'd been there, done that and didn't want to do it again -- but they had a strong, loving relationship and were also effectively co-parenting my nephew.

It would have been very easy for my sister to fall completely apart in the aftermath of the murder. First, there was the trauma of another brother -- her love -- being lost to gun violence. Then the timing compounded other traumas our family was managing -- D's death came just a year after the sudden, back-to-back deaths of our mother and grandmother, and less than two months after the Sept. 11th tragedy.

Finally, my sister had to contemplate and navigate raising this impossibly gorgeous, curious and precocious 5-year-old "alone."

Her foundation was shaken and cracked to the quick -- but not completely broken. With the considerable support of family, friends and faith she has raised that 5-year-old into an impossibly handsome, thoughtful and brilliant 12-year-old. A boy who now towers over us and greets us with an increasingly deep tenor "what up?"

An academically gifted boy who is enrolled in his school's honors program. A boy on-the-brink-of-manhood. Raised by a committed, single, Black, college-educated mother and supported by a community of family and friends dedicated to his development and well-being.

Imagine that.

I tell this story only because I found myself floored by the summations of my loveable but flamethrowing fellow bloggers Faith and Gina about the Raising Him Alone organization.

Nothing I've read makes me believe they're glamorizing or even encouraging single motherhood. We can and absolutely should advocate for fewer unwanted pregnancies, fewer teen pregnancies, fewer Black children being raised by single parents below the poverty line. But we shouldn't knock an organization providing resources, a clearinghouse and a community to dialogue about what's here and what is.

Because for every functional single mother like my sister is one like my cousin. If Ronald Reagan could have drawn a picture of the "welfare queen" he demonized so many years ago, it would be my cousin M -- who became a teen mom with 5 kids altogether by 5 different daddies. One of the daddies is dead and the ones who are living are worthless. M herself has never adequately cared for her children, all boys and one girl. M has left that largely to her grandparents, her childrens' great-grandparents.

There are a flood of reasons why Cousin M's life has tumbled into the very prototype of dysfunction -- but the bottom line is that her utter inability to properly parent has directly impacted the community "big C" -- school system, court system and what's left of the welfare system -- but it's also been a drain on the "little c", the community of my family that has had little choice except to be drawn into the economic and emotional drama.

I'd rather the sister who is at her wits end turn to Raising Him Alone than to put her hands on her child. I'd rather the sister who is lonely with no adequate support turn to Raising Him Alone than succumb to some random man for sex to fill the void -- and possibly become pregnant again.

I'd rather the sister who is already a single parent have an open, resourceful, non-judgmental outlet to help her get herself and keep herself together and if Raising Him Alone strikes a chord, so be it.

Organizers seem to have put a lot of thought in the kind of information and resources they share. My only quibble is with their recommended booklist. I'd love to see a lot less Jawanza Kunjufu and Kevin Powell, and a lot more Healing Hands by neurosurgeon Ben Carson (son of a single mother), more Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama (raised by a single mother, and his grandparents), more Autobiography of Malcolm X, more Manchild in the Promised Land, and James Baldwin's Go Tell it on the Mountain and The Fire Next Time. More WEB DuBois' The Souls of Black Folk

I'd rather let them know what I want to see as opposed to dogging them for what's not there.

To suggest that marriage is a panacea for ails the Black community is disingenuous. I believe that, as Nikki Giovanni wrote so long ago, that "Black love is Black wealth." But if marriage were truly the community cure-all, the divorce rate wouldn't be as high as it is among all races and classes of Americans.

I think it's more important to provide Black children with a strong, stable, supportive, functional, non-violent circle of family and communities with the resources their parents and/or guardians need to make that happen.

Let's not forget that "it takes a village to raise a child" really was a wise and revered African proverb long before Hillary Clinton co-opted it. Supporting my Single Mama Sistas,

Sabrina

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