6
Single Mother
Our breakup was short-lived. I knew I was pregnant that night in the summer of 1993 when my baby was conceived. After we made love, I fell asleep in Mark’s arms and had a dream so vivid, it should have been pinstriped and in Technicolor: I was sitting on the bed in my apartment, back straight as an arrow, a smile as bright as the sunlight streaming through the window, with my hands outstretched. In them was a tight, tiny bundle wrapped in blue. “I’m pregnant,” I blurted out when I opened my eyes. Mark, freshly showered and shaved, was sitting at the foot of the bed, pulling on socks, getting himself ready for work. He didn’t even bother looking up at me. “Yeah, whatever, Taraji. No you ain’t.”
Sure enough, God had planted a little butterfly in my cocoon. Lord, I was so happy. Not in the sense of some pop-cultural fascination with baby bumps, cute pregnancy clothes, and balloon-filled baby showers, or a naive teenager’s obsession with wanting a tiny, powder-scented, doll-like little one to hug on and snuggle; I wasn’t sitting in class, drawing pink bubble hearts around a long list of baby names in my English notebook and imagining what my pregnant belly would look like or which cute boy in my school would make the prettiest little girl. I was more into the Leave It to Beaver aspect that came with parenthood—the caretaking part of it all. This was the family dynamic I saw around me: when I looked at my extended family, I saw mothers keeping beautiful homes and raising their children with stern, loving hands, and fathers protecting and providing for their families. Sure, my mother raised me all on her own, but she was no different from the majority of the women in my family who were married with kids. All of them relished their role as their family’s caregiver and nurturer, having a hot breakfast ready for their kids in the mornings, sending their children to school freshly dressed like a million bucks, making sure that when company came through, not so much as a speck of dust was on the coffee table, doing what it took to remind their men that they were kings of their castles. That vision of domesticity was ingrained in my DNA, and I’ve never strayed far from the ideal. Even as a little girl, I would set up all my ultragirly toys—my play iron and ironing board, my kid kitchen, my pretend vacuum cleaner, all of that—and imagine I was the lady of the house, cooking dinner and doing laundry while waiting for my husband to get in from work. Barbie? Please—she couldn’t do a thing for me but remind me that I didn’t have much. Barbie had it all, condos, shoes, cars. Hell, just having Barbie would have broken the bank, considering all the accessories you had to buy to make her extra fly. I was much more into changing pampers on doll babies, pretend feeding them bottles and smushed applesauce and peas, and then play rocking them to sleep. That instinct—that desire for motherhood, marriage, and domesticity—only grew stronger after puberty hit and stronger still after I trotted off to Howard in pursuit of an acting career. It bloomed right along with every other facet of me.
When I found out I was pregnant, I was still a junior at Howard but in a good place—paying my way through school, living in my own apartment, making good money as a supervisor on the Odyssey, another dinner cruise ship that operated on the waters of the Potomac. I’d even started making some noise in theater at Howard, getting my due onstage and pulling in some cash at gigs around town. What’s more, the moment we confirmed with a doctor that I was, indeed, pregnant, the Mark I fell in love with showed up and put in the work to support our unborn child and me. Truly he was an angel: he made sure I ate, picked me up from and took me to my doctor’s appointments and class and grocery shopping, rubbed my back when it was sore, and fell down to his knees right beside me when I prayed for our baby. He was always quick with bringing the fun to it all; pillow fights were standard, playful name-calling essential. He kept me laughing. Content. He even started showing up to family functions with me, something he’d never done in all the years we’d been together. My aunties would hug and kiss him, and my uncles would slap him on the back and make him feel welcome. I’d be by his side, beaming, grateful that he was there and totally saying to myself, Finally we’re going to be a real family. He gets it. We saw nothing but good things for our baby. And for us.
Of course, my mother saw my pregnancy a little differently. When I told her the news, she freaked out. It was, “Oh my God, this is the end of your career!” and “Oh my God, your life is over!” She threw in “Oh my God, how will you manage all this?” too, convinced that because Mark and I were not married, I would be every bit as emotionally and financially drained as she was as a single mom. The wedding ring—and the commitment that came with it—mattered. Her concerns were valid, I guess. She knew firsthand, after all, how hard it was to be a single parent, to juggle motherhood and a career without the stability that comes with a second parent consistently present, and to be physically, emotionally, and financially accountable to raising a child alone. She knew, too, the pressure that both a mother and her child feels when they’re the ones that everybody is whispering about—when they’re the ones carrying the burdens of stereotypes and low expectations and the avalanche of statistics that insist that kids from “broken” homes won’t make it.
I knew the stakes, too. I am, after all, the product of a single-parent household—the only child in my extended family to grow up in a nontraditional home in the inner city. My mother constantly struggled under the mental, emotional, and financial weight of providing for herself and me, and I felt that pressure every time my mother had to go to work rather than stay home with me, every time we left my aunts’ spacious homes in the suburbs and came back to our tiny apartment in the inner city, every time my mother had to tell me, with tears in her eyes, that she just couldn’t afford things that seemed to be a given in two-parent households, from exotic vacations to fancy clothes to college tuition. I borrow from Langston Hughes’s poem “Mother to Son” in saying this: Life ain’t been no crystal stair for my mother or for me.
Still, there was never a question about whether I could or would keep my baby. When those two red lines slowly crept into view on that home pregnancy test, there wasn’t a second of hesitation. I knew God intended it and that I could handle what was to come. I didn’t want anybody crying for me, even and especially my overly worried mother. Besides, Mark and I were still together, and though we were not married, I fully believed he would be a good father to our baby and a sound partner in parenting. When my mother freaked out, I put the grown woman in my voice and let her know what was up: “Why you over there crying and stuff?” I asked, annoyed. “I can’t have negativity. I won’t have it! This baby is not a disease. You’re up here acting like I’m fifteen and in high school. I’m twenty-four years old, in college, paying my own way, and I’m on the dean’s list. There are other things you could be freaking out about; this ain’t it.
“I don’t need anything from you except your unconditional support,” I added. “I’m having a happy, healthy baby and I’m thrilled about it, and if you and your family aren’t down for that, I’m not coming around.”
I thought she was going to come out of the phone and choke me; you don’t talk to black mamas like that. Instead, she dried up those tears real quick.