“Where did you get that rubber band?” I whispered to Marcell as he pulled on it and slung it between his fingers.
“I found it on the floor right there,” he whispered back, pointing at the floor beneath the pew in front of us.
When I took Marcell up to the coffin to see his father for the last time, he had that rubber band in his hand. “Do you want to put it in there with your dad?” I asked my son as he peered into the casket.
“Yes,” Marcell said quietly.
He tucked that rubber band into his father’s hand, and we slowly returned back to our seats.
• • •
I’ll always miss Mark, my one true love, but his absence was much more acute for my son, particularly after my father died, leaving him without a male figure in his life, burning out his joy just as he matured and the fire of adolescence and hormones built up. By the time he started high school in 2008, he was shutting down—refusing to talk, angry, depressed, smoking a lot of weed. I’m a fairly liberal parent; I believe most things are okay in moderation. But I knew my son, who was using marijuana to numb his pain of not having a father around, was overdoing it. He was missing the guidance he craved as he was becoming a man, though my father pitched in as much as could from afar. There are no two ways about it: boys need their fathers. No matter how hard I tried, no matter how much I depended on his basketball coaches to step in and instruct him on how to tie a tie or how to dress for specific occasions or how to comport himself as a sportsman and gentleman on and off the court, no matter how much he picked up from his friends who had dads in their homes, Marcell needed more: he needed his father to show him how to walk this earth as a black man.
The impact of not having a father around came to a head in high school, when, finally, the questions, along with the anger, started flying. By then, he was asking outright: “Where was my dad? Where was he?” It was a question that had been bubbling in his heart from as early as the eighth grade, but that I didn’t realize until we found ourselves in joint therapy sessions, trying to figure out the source of my son’s anger and depression. When the therapist helped us finally put our finger on it, I went back to old photos of my son to see when, exactly, his face began to betray those feelings he said he’d held on to for so long. Sure enough, it was there; I had missed it. There were all these pictures of him in elementary school and seventh grade, with this goofy grin and bright eyes, looking happy. And then in one picture of him in the eighth grade, there was barely a smirk, and the light in his eyes had dimmed. Where there had been joy, there was nothing. I was devastated, and beat myself up for a long time after that for not noticing then that my baby needed therapy—a place where we could dig out all of the emotional muck that came from Marcell’s holding in his feelings about his father’s absence.
I, too, am culpable for my son’s emotional fragility—I know that. It was while I was away filming my role as Joss Carter on the CBS show Person of Interest that his anger came to a head. I agreed to a two-year commitment to film in New York out of love for my son and parental duty: I needed the money to take care of my kid. High school was $30,000 per year, and then there were uniforms and books, extracurricular fees, and the like, on top of the expense of feeding, clothing, and housing him. Plus, I was thinking about college tuition—being able to knock out the cost of at least four years without having to worry about the bill. I asked his permission and he was gung-ho for my opportunity. Marcell said he understood why I was leaving. I was resting easy when I left because my mother agreed to leave her home in Maryland and move to California to be with my son while I worked—a huge blessing considering she left all she knew, her family, friends, and way of life, to hold my life together. While there, I parented the best way I knew how: I Skyped with my son regularly, kept in touch with his teachers and coaches, checked in with my mom to make sure the two of them had everything they needed, and flew back to California whenever I could so that we could spend quality time together, no matter if I had as little as two days to spare.
Still, my son needed me to be physically present. He wasn’t happy. I wasn’t happy. My mama wasn’t happy. It was the hardest time of our lives. The little boy in Marcell needed his mother more than I knew, precisely because I wasn’t there to help him unpack and work through the emotions that came from being fatherless. Even though I gave him the world—the life I could only dream of as a kid—he wasn’t fulfilled. There was no way he could wrap his mind around the loss of his father and grandfather. Money couldn’t buy that for him.
In therapy, we had to walk through fire and it was painful. Accusations of my not being home with him full-time flew, and I was neither prepared nor willing to swallow that pill. “I didn’t have a choice!” I yelled. “This is what it is. These kids you’re hanging around with, their moms don’t work and they’re eating Snickers and Cheetos for breakfast, but you want to tell me what I’m not doing? I’m bringing home the bacon, cooking it despite working all these crazy hours, and making sure your ass is eating something besides Snickers and Cheetos. When I did have to be away from you, I made sure the next-best substitute was there: my mother. Don’t talk to me about what I didn’t do.” I threw in a few expletives so he knew how very serious I was.
In another session, I had to come clean to him on why his father and I broke up. That was a tough one. Until then, I’d kept to myself the details of his dad verbally abusing and hitting me because I didn’t want to sully Marcell’s image of him, but in therapy, it was clear he needed to know why we broke up so that he could begin the long road toward closure. The pain in his eyes and his rage in response to the revelation hurt me to my core. “But why would you hit my mother!” he yelled, punching the pillows decorating the therapist’s couch where we sat.
“Marcell, baby, you have to let this go,” I reasoned, physically holding on to my son to restrain and try to calm him down. “You can’t carry this hate in your heart. I’m sure that if your father had to do it all again, he wouldn’t have hit me, but he learned from it and I did, too. And you know not to ever do it, either.”
It was hard work, but therapy did wonders to help him—to help us—get healthy and back on the good foot. Of course, it didn’t solve all of our problems, and, like adolescents everywhere, my son acted out in ways that got him into hot water with me. Like the time he scratched up my brand-new Porsche—not even a month old and barely driven—taking it out of the garage for a joyride. He never even made it out of the driveway, he was so scared of what he’d done. He tried to cover up the scratch with a black Sharpie, but he ultimately came clean to me. Then there was the time Marcell got caught sneaking out. He was seventeen and still fighting maturity. I recognize that he was old enough to be separate from and independent of his mom, but in my house, I had rules. If I told my son he couldn’t go out, well, he better get comfortable on the sofa, pick up a book or find a show to watch on the television, because he wasn’t going to going out—simple as that. As much as it had irked me as a child, I’d adopted my mother’s no-nonsense, “do exactly as I say, or else” style of parenting that I’d made a point of obeying when I was younger.