Things Fall Apart

I had never imagined one day I’d find myself smack in the middle of a domestic dispute with the mother of my youngest son. But here I am, with a relationship turned sour in the rear-view mirror, a precocious young boy seemingly caught in the middle. I’m searching for ways to redirect the constant exchange of insults and innuendos, the defamation being traded between us.
I have always regarded myself as a positive thinking brother; I just didn’t believe in allowing negativity – and negative people! – into my private domain. I’m still scratching my head as to how it happened.
Lately, though, my thoughts have turned outward to the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of black fathers across America, missing in the lives of their kids or who at one time may have been involved in promising relationships with the mothers of their children, but through some breakdown in communication, some odious inability to work things out, things, to quote the venerable Achebe, fall apart, the center cannot hold.
So now that I am a member – a card carrying member, apparently – of this club, I speak from where I am.
Brothers, there is only one person caught in the cross-fire of contempt between you and the mother of your child or children: your offspring. Isn’t it funny how two people who claim to be adults can’t call a truce in the interests of those little ones who never asked to be caught up in the riff-raff in the first place?
A part of me hurts. Or maybe all of me hurts, yet is divided into parts. One that pines for my son, his loveable ways, his adoring smile, the other that grieves the death of a relationship, the cessation of love, the end of the affair.
If I sound like I am waxing romantic here, it’s because I am. I cannot see love as anything but a tragic romance, even with its comedic tapestry. But the real tragedy is the stunted emotional crisis forced upon a young child.
Brothers, we cannot allow our crisis to become their crisis and, regrettably, so many of us have elected to fade from the scene rather than deal with the ignominious effects of lost love.
If you are a brother reading this, and love has long since died, know that there is a constant source of love in the eyes of your child or children, who yearn to connect, or reconnect, with you. If that doesn’t happen, a part of you will always be dead, a part of you will haunt that child and that, in spite of your wishes to inflict as much emotional pain onto the mother, will be the greater calamity of their lives – long after you leave the scene.
Fortunately I have today, while there is still a specter of hope and while I can still see clearly the ramifications of my actions. I will not allow my grievances with an individual who co-created my son, to shatter my future as a good father, indeed, as a good man. Things may indeed fall apart, but, when we consider what’s in the balance, the center must hold. A future depends on it.