Working to settle, or settling to work

By Chris Watkins

Photo by Julie Hogue

Even my father would admit that he was not well-suited for the job, not to mention not all that interested in the on-the-job training that comes with raising two boys to eventually be fathers themselves. From Hazlehurst, Ga.—in a rural Southern community replete with as much dysfunction as you would find in any Faulkner, O’Connor or Morrison literary realm—my father carried his painful baggage all the way to Dayton, Ohio, via the Dixie Highway, to marry my mother, Miriam Smith, and, in a sense, he never stopped traveling. He never unpacked his tattered but firm portmanteau, and perhaps we would never have known of its existence if not for his strained effort in performing the simplest actions. He preferred distance, and struggled if a situation required any manifestation of familial love, such as empathy, passion or encouragement. If she could, my mother would characterize their 22 years together as living with a ghost who figured his only duties were to turn over his truck-driver paycheck and to keep us in a recently integrated middle-class neighborhood, but she is too generous and patient to use such words.

Making up for my father’s physical and emotional absence, my mother made a concerted effort to surround my brother and me with strong role models, primarily men at St. James Catholic Church who held sacred their duty to raise strong, competent and stable black boys. Without fail, she would arrange it so that we spent time in clubs run by them, houses built by them, and conversations directed by them. From there, she shipped us off to Morehouse College, an institution that embraced the same sacred duty, but this time focused on building men. However, somewhere along the way, even as we learned to be prodigious students and leaders, to represent the race and ourselves with the utmost pride, the idea of being fathers got lost. Somehow, we believed, we would be great fathers because we were great men. How could we not be?
Well, it was pretty easy. Many of my friends from over the years have done truly great things, accomplishing much in business, law, medicine, religion, government and education. But in parenting, they have sorely lacked, leaving much of the job to their incredible wives.
Contrary to popular perception, African-Americans can be some of the most traditional—dare I say conservative—in their ways of viewing gender roles. The majority of my preparation for manhood focused on life outside the domestic space, for the world existed to be conquered, but only by the prepared, who could not be bothered with the mundane distractions of hearth and home. If we just made sure everything looked OK—married the right woman, lived in the right neighborhood, attended the right church, found the right schools and joined the right social organizations—we would realize the Dream. While many dreams indeed have been realized, sadly, many a nightmare has resulted because of fathers as distant as was my uneducated Teamster farm boy of a father during my childhood.
Early on, surely the result of nothing more than the grace of God in blessing me with an incredible wife, I realized that, as with anything worth pursuing, I needed to be an intentional father. In other words, I could not leave the parenting to chance or solely to her; neither could I cherish the blind faith in material gain that so many of my peers did. Going about such intentionality, however, has been the greatest and most rewarding challenge of my life.
As I alluded to earlier, my mother was superwoman, but my father did not fully appreciate her powers. They divorced in 1982, and soon after, miraculously, he signed on to a new job—fatherhood. Suddenly, although he had perfected distance, he reached for the discomfort that came from genuine human interaction. He picked me up on the weekends, took me to the pancake house, and actually asked me questions and talked about himself. Awkwardness, for both of us, characterized our interviews, but over the next few years, we learned to relax. I realized that this man, of whom I was the spitting image, was someone I had never really known. And in getting to know him, I, of course, began to know myself a little.
Now that I am a father of two daughters, almost daily I reflect on the awesome responsibility. And even though I often refer to my wife as a superwoman, I try to match her efforts as best I can, ostensibly to be a superman, but not beyond the threshold. More than anything else, I desire to be a hero in the home. Being a super-dad requires doing the things my father did once he and my mother split. Engaging my girls in conversation, continually being fascinated with their every word, and giving them all the love I can muster. I often kid them about my being their servant, and how much I need the job and am willing to do whatever it takes to keep it. My hope is that they are beginning to see that I really am.