Taraji P. Henson: "Becoming a Single Mother Was a Parenting Decision That Would Save Our Lives"
I went into labor on Mother's Day in 1994, just after my boyfriend Mark took our mothers and me to dinner. I'm at least ninety-five percent positive I ate my way into the contractions. The whole time I was stuffing my face, Mark was clowning with me like he always did, calling me a beached whale and a few other things that had me cackling and feeling good. I swear, all that teasing is the reason why Marcell came out looking just like his daddy; they've got the same head and eyes, the same thick, hard, leathery hands. Marcell is Mark's boy, indeed. And Mark was so excited to be his father. It was he who helped me into the wheelchair and rushed me through the halls into the emergency room. He was so excited and nervous, he was bumping me all into the walls. When Marcell finally made his big debut, Mark lay on top of me and cried tears so joyous, so infectious, everyone else in the room fell out in tears, too.
It was beautiful and it stayed that way, for a while; Mark was an attentive dad in the beginning, picking up and dropping off the baby while I took my classes and went to work, making sure I had what I needed to juggle the demands of both school and my job, while parenting a newborn. We were doing exactly what I'd envisioned for us: we were a family, and I was holding us down while helping Mark see that life could be good if we worked together.
But the novelty wore off and life got real again. With his work schedule, my classes, a new baby and the physical and financial difficulty of juggling it all, tensions ran high in my apartment, which we were now sharing. Finally, his temper started getting the best of him and the more complex things got, the more violent he became. It started with him barking at me when I asked simple questions, and quickly escalated to confrontation. The curses would fly and there would be a grab or two, especially if I called him out. I found myself screaming at him more and more, as his excuses for not being around became more implausible and his accountability less dependable. Just when I thought it couldn't get worse, things escalated.
I hardly ever questioned his whereabouts; he was a grown man and I trusted him, so, like a dummy, I believed Mark when he said he was out doing odd jobs or looking for work. But on this one particular evening, he had my car and I was late for work on the dinner cruise ship where I was the supervisor, responsible for making sure everything ran smoothly. What kind of example would I set as a supervisor by showing up late? I was pacing back and forth, mad as hell. Marcell was on the bed, laying there looking at me with those great big ol' eyes, tense. He was only a little baby, but he could sense my distress.
Finally, I heard Mark's key rattling in the front door a good half hour after I was supposed to have punched in at my job. I was undone. "Where the hell you been with my car?" I yelled as he pushed the door open. "You know I had to be at work. You're so damn disrespectful!"
I whooped. He whooped. Then, the next thing I knew, Mark's balled up fist was coming straight for my face. I fell onto the couch crying and holding my mouth; blood seeped off my lips and across my teeth, washing a nasty, bitter metallic taste over my tongue. Droplets splashed across my couch, the dark red slowly creeping into the fibers of a throw resting there. Marcell's screams rose into the air, thick and piercing.
I pulled my hand from my mouth and looked at the blood on my trembling fingers. Tears formed in my throat, travelled up to my nose and finally pooled into my eyes. My words crackled like thunder. "This is over! Get out!" I growled as I rushed toward the phone. Mark already was headed to the bedroom when I began dialing my father's house; he was crying and snatching the drawers of the bureau open and stuffing his clothes into a bag when my little stepsister, April, answered the phone. All she heard was her big sister, seventeen years her senior, screaming and crying into the receiver; she started screaming, too, calling for my father.
"What's wrong, baby," my father said, terror ringing his words.
"Daddy, I need you!" I yelled.
I didn't have to say anything else. He was at my door within five minutes of that phone call. April, little squirt with plaits and barrettes and baubles in her hair, burst through the door and made a beeline for her nephew, scooping him up into her arms as she tried to soothe him. She was frantic. By contrast, my father, eerily, was the picture of calm. He walked slowly toward our bedroom with his hands in his pockets, and when Mark was in his line of sight, Daddy planted himself in the plush carpet and stared him down.
"You didn't have to put your hands on her," he said, finally, slowly, which surprised me. All my life, after all, Daddy was the one you called only when you were ready to launch the nuclear bomb. I expected my father to rip Mark limb from limb. Daddy later told me that he'd had a sixth sense that Mark had hit me and, despite his newly-minted Christian ways, had actually plotted a way to kill Mark in the moments it took him to get to my place. "I literally was going to walk in, snap his neck, throw him over the balcony and call the cops," he said, a sinister look darkening his eyes. "I'd planned on telling the police, 'It was self-defense. Look at my daughter's bruises.' But I prayed to God all the way over here; my grandson was in this room and I couldn't take his father."
Instead, Daddy faced off against the man who'd bloodied his daughter by talking rationally. "I understand it's hard out here for a man," Daddy told Mark. "But you're better than that. This is my daughter you hit. She's a woman. Real men don't do that."
Mark stood there and cried while my father gave him a heart-to-heart speech about how he'd done the same thing to my mother, and how it ruined his relationship with her and obliterated his chances of being a full-time father to the love of his life, me. I knew firsthand that this was something my father had long regretted, and over the years, after he cleaned himself up and got himself together and found God, he made a point of apologizing to both my mother and even her husband for laying hands on her.
I didn't want an apology from Mark. Though our relationship had long been rocky, it hadn't been physically abusive until that evening. Still, I knew that if it happened once, it would happen again and again. His punch knocked me into reality; like a dog who tastes bloody meat and never, ever wants to go back to dry kibble, a man who hits his lover once will never go back to keeping his hands to himself in the middle of an argument. I knew that well, especially because I was the product of an abusive relationship. "That's a seed I sowed," my father would say days later, after Mark was gone. "I knew I would pay for what I did to your mother, that it would come back through one of my babies. This is my fault."
Like my mother before me, I made the difficult decision to cut off that romantic relationship with the father of my child, not just for my sake, but also for that of my baby boy. With that separation, my forever man, my first love was no more and my dream of building a family with him was over. In so many judgmental eyes, I'd become another statistic: a baby mama. But my becoming a single mother was about making a sound parenting decision that would ultimately save our lives.
Of course, choosing to be a single mother, even under such dire circumstances, still opened me up to some severe criticism. The common-held assumption used to be that if there's no diamond on the ring finger of the hand pushing the baby stroller, the mother attached to it must be an irresponsible lazy ass who got pregnant by accident (or on purpose so she could live off the government), and the poor baby in said stroller is either a mistake, a statistic or a paycheck. Hardly anyone ever considers that the children of black single mothers are made from love-that we care deeply about our babies and, like any mother with a heart that beats and a mind that is reasonably right, want the very best for them. Hell, even the president of the United States-four of them, in fact-were raised by single mothers.
Nevertheless, mention that you're a single mom, and all-too-many of us still have to cut through a thick, gristly layer of stigma before we're given our proper due. The grace and understanding for the familial choices of married women is a given. The humanity of single moms comes with asterisks, ridicule and judgmental questions.
I never saw my baby as a roadblock to my goals or a strike against my ability to do exactly what I planned to do with my life; I simply started planning and dreaming about ways I would get what I wanted out of life while I had a baby on my hip. Having my son gave me a laser-sharp focus. That is the miracle of single motherhood: it is not easy to raise a human being with a partner, but doing so alone requires a Herculean effort that is all muscle and grit, built up with repetitive sets of sacrifice. Whatever you gain, whatever you earn, you give to your baby and you work triple hard to show your child-not anyone else-that moving forward, no matter how tiny the steps, is possible. This is a single mother's love.
Taraj's memoir, Around the Way Girl is on sale now.
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