What could be perceived as a lack of one parent, instead turned into a particularly inclusive outlook by a single, strong parent—my mother.
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There seems to be a growing movement of people which puts less and less emphasis on many of the American cultural themes I grew up with as a kid, like Manifest Destiny, cowboy masculinity, bootstrap isolationism, and male-centric exceptionalism. This pleases me to no end because I’ve always had a decided lack of machismo. It just didn’t come to me in the same playground-aggression way it came to other boys at St. Luke’s School way back in the day. It didn’t calcify in me the way it did with my uncles’ generation before me, forged by World War II and hardened by Vietnam. I think a great deal of my well-rounded outlook on life comes directly from being raised by a single mother.
I didn’t know what it was like to have a male counter-narrative for the cultural, ideological, and spiritual foundations she was building for me.
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It’s not that I’m not a strong male role model for my kids (one girl, one boy), or that I don’t set and keep boundaries with them or in other personal relationships. I’m not a pushover and I can most definitely be assertive, especially when talking about matters over which I’m passionate, like social justice and our war-mongering culture. But it appears I have had the rougher edges inherent in American maleness sanded down by the direct and exclusive rearing afforded me by my mother the first 9 years of my life. Until I was a pre-teen, I didn’t know what it was like to have a male counter-narrative for the cultural, ideological, and spiritual foundations she was building for me.
My earliest memories with my mother are these: sleeping under the stars of our hilltop home in Los Gatos; splashing in the freezing waves of the beach in Santa Cruz; touring the Exploratorium at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco; watching Sesame Street and Lilias, Yoga and You on PBS; listening to Wake Up Everybody by Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes and Heat is On by the Isley Brothers while poring over the LP sleeves. Probably most crucially, my mother bequeathed me an artistic spark which caught fire as a comic book illustrator when I was still a toddler and became a firestorm as a writer in college.
I don’t think my biological father would’ve necessarily pushed against any of those choices. I just don’t know what he would’ve done because I still don’t know him that well, though we get along now. I have no basis upon which to “judge” his fathering as it never happened where I am concerned as his son. Also, I don’t mean to imply that all fathers’ parenting contradicts all mothers’ parenting down-the-line in households where both parents are intact for their kids. But I do think that the aggregate effect of being raised by my mother, during those crucial early years, endowed me with a particularly keener sensitivity and willingness to hear others’ voices. I’ve been especially sensitive to disheartened, oppressed, or disparate voices, as a young man and now as an adult.
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When I was 12 years old, my mother married the man whose surname I now wield as a badge of he who actually cared for me, clothed and fed me, and paid for my education, with my mother, from junior high into adulthood. My last name is also something of a “brand” now too, though I have no Sicilian blood coursing through my veins. When I was 17, my biological father made a peace offering (if not exactly a mea culpa) for having abandoned me before birth. He would continue to reach out to me for years—and be rebuffed—before I later conceded the importance of becoming acquainted with him once my first child was born 11 years ago. When my daughter Samía came into the world, there was a strong, intrinsic, cultural significance to inviting my biological father back into my life.
The reasoning for reintroducing my bio dad into my life upon my daughter’s birth was ethnocentric. My mother is a blonde-haired, blue eyed woman of German and English descent and my biological father is African American. Beyond what would be considered the “traditional” American parenting curriculum my mother instilled, she also had the double-duty of being a white parent raising a black baby in the California Bay Area only 5 years after Martin Luther King was assassinated; and only 4 years after the Free Breakfast for Children Program was initiated by the Black Panther Party in nearby Oakland. It regularly floors me that my mother had the wherewithal back in the Seventies to educate me on my blackness as well as everything else she gifted me with in my formative years.
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Over 20 years ago, while I was in college, Iron Mike seemed to shake up the discourse on what it’s like to be an American man. A Men’s Movement began to parallel feminist dialogues. Today, male self-awareness and self-reflection is becoming more “acceptable,” more understood. There’s a proliferation of introspective and accountability-seeking groups like The Good Men Project discussing what makes a man, a man. This is all very cool, but it’s often much of the same thoughts, feelings, and beliefs I’ve always privately and inherently held. Personally, I have been overjoyed at the themes and topics in forums like TEDTalks and by the likes of Brené Brown and others who focus on connection, intimacy, and vulnerability, as opposed to the older, stubborn, emotional distancing of “conventional wisdom.”
I learn from folks like my old friend John Kim who’s branded as The Angry Therapist, who upends traditional psychoanalysis and life coaching models. I laugh at dudes like John Fugelsang, who identifies as very Christian and very liberal, and is a comedian. He swims upstream against what usually typifies most arguments about religion and politics. I think there are many of us writing and interacting in the blogosphere who agree that the “traditional” American masculinity of John Wayne, cowboy grit predicated on stifling feelings and hyper-individuality doesn’t serve us men as well as was once believed. It certainly doesn’t make us better fathers to our children.
I am fortunate that in what could be perceived as a lacking of one parent instead turned into the growth of a particularly inclusive emotional, cultural, psychological, and spiritual outlook by a single, strong parent—my mother. I think I am a better father, partner, brother, and friend because I haven’t been as beholden to the typical notion of American masculinity for myself. And I contribute a ton of my broader and kinder disposition on being raised alone by a young mother who just wanted to do whatever she could to enrich and provide for her baby boy.