During the “Black women ain’t got no man” public lamentation tour earlier this spring, I refrained from writing a blog on the so-called man shortage, or on my alleged inability [...]]]> There, I said it, but I probably don’t mean what you think I mean.

I never want to see another talk show cover the “single woman epidemic”… EVER!

During the “Black women ain’t got no man” public lamentation tour earlier this spring, I refrained from writing a blog on the so-called man shortage, or on my alleged inability to find a suitable mate because I’m educated and particular. Honestly, besides registering my shock at the likes of Steve Harvey and Sherri Shepherd telling me why I suck because I’m not married, I just didn’t feel that I had anything to add to the discourse. Twitter had already allowed me to register the usual “what?”, “Oh, HELL no”, “bitch, please” and “that big gummed Negro?” reactions to the 2010 single-black-woman minstrel show; all the other sister-bloggers covered quite adequately my outrage at being told there’s something wrong with me and my subsequent wonder at why there weren’t similar conversations about why White men were still single.

Today, however, I want to bring up the Single Black Female meme yet again, but I’d rather look at what we’re looking for in a marriage rather than the (erroneous) fact that we’re not getting married. A Twitter friend called my attention to a January 2010 New York Times article dispelling the myth of the educated married woman over 40. Notably, the article pointed to shifts in economic dependence as the reason for women marrying later. To put a fine point on it, we don’t need your money, so we’re not looking for your companionship, no matter what Slim Thugg or whatever his name is says about it. Which got me thinking about the real reason the successful, educated, attractive, otherwise eligible Black women I know are still single: our view of marriage has not kept pace with our image of ourselves, or with our lifestyles.

My Grandmother Wouldn’t Even Recognize Me

As a woman, I look along my maternal line for signs of successful marriage and find both my mother and grandmother. Granny was born in 1908, the daughter of a Black woman and a White man. I don’t really know if my great-grandmother was married when she bore massa’s child. I will, however, hazard a guess that she’d jumped the broom with the Black father of her other children, and imagine my Granny’s birth was. . .interesting at the very least.

Being a mulatto “love child” influenced Granny’s marital choice, and she stated outright that she married my granddaddy because he was the darkest man she could find, lest she be accused of trying to pass. I’ll assume that she at least liked him enough to bear him 14 chilluns. Then again, I don’t really know anything about my grandparents’ relationship other than the fact that by the time I came along, they were sleeping in separate bedrooms. As was the case for poor Black folks in the south at the time, my grandfather was a sharecropper and my granny picked, washed and cleaned whatever she needed to in order to keep the kids clothed, fed and under a roof. Marriage was probably as simple as this: you did it for survival.

Many times in the last few months I’ve marveled at how different my life is from the one my grandma lived. I have no husband and no children at an age when she was already well into both. I went to college, even graduate school when she may not have finished high school. I’ve traveled outside the U.S. while she inhabited the same few square miles for her entire life. Granny might be astounded that her progeny could even have a life like mine, and perhaps proud that her work with her own children lead to such interesting leaps forward. Then again, she might feel sorry for me because I don’t have my own family, even though I hardly need a baseball team’s worth of kids to work the farm these days.

In spite of the myriad differences between my life and my grandmother’s life, I still expect to meet and marry a man, have some kids, and live with him ’til death do us part like she did. And I pretty much expect him to work as hard as my granddaddy did to make a life for me and our children. Perhaps I won’t want my husband to be as strict a disciplinarian as my grandfather was, but he had 6 daughters and knew where the Klan lived, so strict is in the eye of the beholder. I don’t fault my grandparents for choosing each other and turning out the kind of children they did: poor Black folks in South Carolina did what they had to do with limited resources. On the other hand, how can I look at my grandparents’ relationship as “successful” just because it lasted until they both knocked off for the big plantation in the sky? Longevity may be a goal in marriage, but it isn’t the only barometer of success.

Good Role Models Screw You up Just as Good as Bad Ones

I’ve often that my parents gave me a great model for marriage, and that they ruined my life in the process. Well, they didn’t ruin my life exactly, but they gave me very high expectations for partnership and, thus, no man I meet is ever good enough because he’s not like my Daddy. Before you start talking Oedipus and nonsense, let me break it down for you.

My mom got married at 32, which was late for her generation and was the last of her siblings to do so. Apparently, Mommy always wanted to be a stewardess and would definitely have looked cute in the air hostess outfits. However, she fell deathly ill shortly after meeting my father, so health concerns put the kibosh on her plans to see the world from 40,000 feet. As fate would have it, she married an over-protective type of man who wouldn’t have wanted her to work anyway, so it all worked out financially. My dad was the UR-husband, Provider Extraordinaire. He always worked 2 jobs to keep both wife and daughter protected and decked out in Lord & Taylor finery. Good times and big closets were had by all.

“Traditional” marriage means something different for Blacks than Whites.  Chew on that.

In the context of the Ward and June Cleavers of the world, my parents had a traditional marriage, one where the man made the money and the woman made the beds. However, my parents’ marriage was certainly an anomaly in my extended family – and among many other Black families that I know – because we had a single-earner (not single-income) household. Mommy was the only one of her sisters that didn’t work outside the home, and the only one with a single child. While my parents’ situation presented me with a stay-at-home mom role model, it still showed me that Black folks need two incomes to make it happen in the world.

Even though my mom made none of the money, she made all of the decisions about finances and everything else. For someone who calls himself “simple”, my Dad always had a lot of vision but lacked self-confidence. He needed my somewhat overbearing Mom to goad him into action with a combination of pep talks and ass-kicking. She was the proverbial woman behind the man, the not-so-silent partner. My Dad, bless his heart, still generally needs to be told what to do and when to do it because my Mom was the perfect person to tell him what to do. Which might explain the heart attack she had in her 40’s, but I digress. Before my mother died, she told me that I’d be lucky to find a man like my dad. After she died, Daddy told me that she was his soul mate and he’d never marry again. Since nobody else was in the room when each of them professed their love, I’m gonna say it was legit. Occasionally I find myself longing for a husband like my Dad, someone who’d try his hardest to take care of me under any circumstance. Then I wake up and realize that I don’t really want a man to take care of me. Furthermore, I don’t see men lined up around the block clamoring for the chance to relieve me of my financial obligations. Yet, I want a man to want to take care of me in ways that have nothing to do with money or shelter or basic necessities but I don’t really have an appropriate role model for that kind of relationship.

If you’re gonna talk about relationships, either help a sister out, or shut the f@$& up!

I’d like for the love pundits, the armchair relationship gurus and the rest of the talking heads that tell me I’m wrong for being single and picky and almost 40 to take a look at what marriage has meant in American society.  Then I’d like for them to take a look at the institution in the Black community and how we’ve managed and made do with each other for 400 years.  After all that inquiry, I then expect those so-called “experts” to tell me how the hell the species has managed to stay afloat.  I won’t hold my breath, but I’m definitely expecting some answers.

As the saying goes, you don’t know what you’ve got ’til its gone, but I definitely knew what I had with my mother.  Her name [...]]]> I never thought I’d want to get married until I lost my mother.  Be patient, readers, because I’m taking the long way around on this one.

My Mom was Better Than Your Mom

As the saying goes, you don’t know what you’ve got ’til its gone, but I definitely knew what I had with my mother.  Her name was Dorothy and she was pretty amazing.  I’m not saying that just because we shared a body and genetic material, since other non-biological connections agreed with me on her overall coolness.  If I had an electronic photo of her I’d post it, but she died in 1994 – before digital photography, Flickr and Facebook – so you’ll have to settle for a few less than 1,000 words instead of a picture:  Mommy was 5’8″, willowy, and looked like a cross between Diahann Carroll and Michelle Obama.  Apparently when my Dad saw her, he forgot all about the other woman he was supposed to meet and asked for the digits.  #TrueStory.  Not only was she beautiful, but she was really generous and funny with a little bit of an edge.  That personality, and my smile, are what I inherited from her; I got my father’s nose and – thankfully – his feet.  “Dot” was a gossip (my cousins used to call her “Rona Barrett”; you young folks might want to Google that), a mean cook, and the smallest bit naughty, like when she announced “you have to have sex before you get married to make sure you like what he can do.”  Okay, she didn’t know my 13-year-old self was in the room at the time, but I’m gonna have to agree with her on that bit of advice!  Nobody could fry a chicken like my mother, and I’d kill right about now for one of her over-beaten, slightly-overcooked chocolate cakes.  Baking was not her strong suit, but she had many, many others for which to compensate for that one culinary shortcoming.

The other best part about my mom is that she was MY MOM.  And I’m an only child, so I selfishly didn’t have to share her with brother- and sister-types.  The thing about mothers, though, is that even when you have to share them with other people you still only get one, and the singularity of that relationship defines you in ways you may never really know.  Mommy may have been sister, friend, neighbor to some, and I have tons of cousins, classmates and business associates, but I’ll only ever have one mother.  Sure, I live with my aunt now, and all she’s like a mother to me but not my mother.  For example:  if I leave clothes, dishes around the apartment, my aunt tells me off; when her daughter does it, the lecture comes with clean dishes and a load of laundry.  Not that I expect anyone to pick up after my grown ass, but I just miss having someone who would do it, with or without lip service. (Actually, Dorothy Mae would give much lip; its hereditary.)   I think about that sometimes and remember Mommy‘s words to me after her own mother died;  I’ll never forget riding in the car with Mommy and noticing that she’d been crying.  When I asked her why she was so sad, she said “I miss my mother.”  It didn’t seem possible to my 8-year-old brain that my own mother actually needed mothering.  After all, she was in her 40′s with a husband and a daughter; she was all grown up and had lived for a few years since my Granny’s passing, so what was with the tears?  Of course, as I sit here crying over the loss of my Mom over 16 years ago, I totally understand that you can never replace a mother.

This Mom For Hire:  A Great Service for Motherless Daughters

Think, if you will, of the most important moments of your life, and how they warrant a mother.  My friend Sarah lost her mother a year prior to getting engaged, and had to deal with snotty wedding gown saleswomen who didn’t think she could buy a dress without her mother present.  “Don’t you want to bring your mother in to see you in the dress?”, they’d ask.  “Uh, no, my mom is…well, she can’t….she died,” was probably close to what Sarah said to the folks at Kleinfeld before she returned to the fitting room and had a good cry.  I imagine myself doing the very same thing should I ever find myself trying on frothy bridal creations, though I’ll likely be bawling the entire time.  Also, daughters need a mother at the annual gyno visit when they don’t know when Mom started menstruating, or stopped, or how the whole process was.  I don’t know when she lost her virginity (presumably before marriage, but I prefer not to think about that) or any sexual/reproductive history other than the fact that I was born and I’m biological because I look like both my parents.  All the details I’d need about that part of Mommy‘s life are things that a husband or a sister wouldn’t necessarily know or even remember, so I have nobody to fill in those blanks.   True, adopted children don’t have them either, but they know from jump that it’s gonna be that way; someone pulled the mother rug out from under me when I was 22 – old enough to know that I’d need her, but still too young to really comprehend just how much.

Can you replace a Mother with a Husband?  Maybe…

On her deathbed (which I didn’t know was such, but she probably did), Mommy gave me a few sage pieces of advice.  The last words she ever said to me were, “Be good.”  I don’t know what she meant by that, but I’m trying anyway.  And the other advice she gave me was to find a man like my Dad.  Her exact words were, “If you’re lucky enough to marry a man like your father, you’ll be very happy.”  At the time, I laughed and said “I’m too young to get married.”  Then she died and my Dad pretty much gave me the exact same advice, using words like “soulmate” and “I’ll never remarry.”  Over time, I’ve given some thought to the other, singular relationship you have in a spouse.  Yeah, people get divorced and cheat and the like, but not my folks.  Witnessing my father’s grief, I also saw that his loss was as unique, as inconsolable as mine:  husband and wife is not a replicable bond, at least when you do it right.  And even if you do it wrong, or multiple times, nobody is that spouse at that time, and nobody means the same thing to you as someone with whom you’ve chosen to live until death (or you realize what a horrible mistake you’ve made, give or take a few years).

For years, I’ve held onto the belief that finding a soulmate would somehow fill the void left in my life – and my heart – by my mother’s death.  Not that I’m looking for a man to take care of me like a mother, but more so I’m looking for that singular, unique relationship.  I believe that in the same way that you only get one mother, you only get one “spouse-as-soulmate“; the purely selfish relationship in which the two people in it can’t get from anyone else what they get from each other.  Clearly I don’t know what it is that these soulmates are getting from each other because I haven’t found mine yet.  Or maybe I’m wrong in believing that my man should be as irreplaceable as my mom, that both warrant an unapproachable place in my life, my heart, my world.  Still, I yearn for someone in my life that loves me more, in a different way, than they love everybody else, and vice versa.

My Mother’s Day Advice

Fortunately, I have no regrets in my relationship with my mom.  I told her I loved her, and I treated her that way even when she annoyed me.  I sat by her bedside for months when she was sick, because there was nowhere else I would have been.  And, for the most part, I think I’ve made her proud.  She didn’t regret the sacrifices she made for me, and told me as much, which is what I think a mother is supposed to do.  I do wish that she’d gotten to live more of her life taking care of herself the way she took care of me and of everyone else.  I also wish that I got to know her more as an adult, as a friend, as a woman, than the Uber-Madre as I sometimes see her.  Sometimes I think that I’m a bad daughter because I don’t go out to the cemetery to put flowers on her grave, or that I don’t really know where said grave is.  Then I remember that she always said “give me my flowers while I’m living,” so I write about her instead.  So, Dorothy Mae, if you’re sitting up in Heaven, drinking a cup of coffee, trying to bum a cigarette from St. Peter without getting caught, know that I’m always thinking of you.

Happy Mother’s Day.

Thanksgiving [...]]]> The Winter holiday season is upon us, the end of yet another year of….whatever it was you did this year.  You’re probably headlong into Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa or Ramadan shopping with last Thursday’s poultry but a distant memory.  But I’m prone to reflection and I’d like to shed a little light on the meaning of Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving means that you now have roughly 6 weeks of continued negotiations with your parents.

Like lots of people my age, I live in a different state than my parents.  My mom passed about 15 years ago and the remaining parental – dear old Daddy – lives 2,500 miles away in Las Vegas.  I have the best Dad in the world, and I’d dare anyone to challenge me.  However, in spite of my paternal reverence, I generally prefer that at least a few states separate me from my father.  Here’s why:  he doesn’t think I’m an adult yet.   I’ll illustrate what I mean by telling you a story from this weekend.

My Dad was in town for Thanksgiving, and we had dinner with family in New Jersey.   Since I don’t have a car, we borrowed one to make the trip, and I volunteered to drive.  Bad idea.  First, let me say that I’ve had a driver’s license for over 20 years.  My Dad taught me how to drive on the highways and streets of New York City, crazy cab drivers and all.  In the past, I have actually owned a car and driven it throughout Los Angeles, North Carolina, and the NY Tri-State Area.  Let me also remind you that I’ve lived in NY for most of my life so I know my way around.  Finally, allow me to note that I’ve only been in 1 car accident in which I was not at fault.  Why, then, must my Dad subject me to driving lessons, tips, and directions the likes of which I’ve not seen since I was 16 years old?  If I hear anyone say “there’s a car coming up on your left” once more, I’ll throttle them I swear.

Hold on, I hear you say, your still his daughter, aren’t you glad he cares?  Sure I am, but when driving one’s father to an airport that’s in spitting distance from your childhood home, one should not get directions on how to get there.  Thanks, Dad, but I got it.  I’ve actually visited a few airports in my day – business trips, vacations – and managed to get into and out of them without your help, so I’m all set.  When I think about it, my Dad will probably always see me as a teenager because he still sees himself as a 50-year-old.  And if we’re both over 20 years younger, I should probably start whining about an allowance and slamming the door to my room.

Tell me: does anyone else get the teen-age treatment when going home for holidays, or is it just me?  Please, help me recover from over-parenting so I can make my Christmas flight plans without adding a hotel room.

I live with my Aunt E, in what I consider her home. She’s lived in this apartment for about 20 years, in this town for over 40 years, and raised 2 children here.  Her church is here, as [...]]]> Oh, there’s no place like home for the holidays, or so the song says.  But where is home, exactly?

I live with my Aunt E, in what I consider her home. She’s lived in this apartment for about 20 years, in this town for over 40 years, and raised 2 children here.  Her church is here, as is her job and her other ties to the community, so I feel pretty justified in calling this her home.  Auntie E will not be here for Thanksgiving; she’s going to what she calls “home,” to South Carolina, her birthplace and the every-day home of her sister, Aunt F.  This sojourn will include my other 2 aunts and 2 second-cousins, all of whom grew up in the same town.   It’s like a mini-reunion, and I’ll momentarily buy the “home”-iness of the situation.

Now Aunt E’s daughter, who I’ll call Cousin S, is not coming to NY for Thanksgiving.  Rather, she’s taking her 2 kids to Montreal for the long weekend.  In the spirit of family, she will be stopping here to see her mom for a day before journeying to Canada.   Cousin S’s plans sound groovy to me; her kids have passports, so they can leave the country, experience another culture, and get some mother-child bonding time in the car.  So what’s the problem?

This morning, Aunt E was exasperated that her daughter wasn’t coming “home” for the holiday.  After all, she proclaimed, “everyone goes home for Thanksgiving; I’m going home.”  I pointed out that there was no need for her kids to be here for Thanksgiving if she’s not going to be here.  Still she insisted, “they should want to come home.” I was really confused:  the daughter in question has never lived in this apartment, hasn’t lived in this town since 1985, and has made a life with (ex) husband, career, house, kids, community in another location.  Further, the rest of her family will be elsewhere, so what’s so “homey” about this apartment that she’s gotta be here when both her parents (and her sister) will be someplace else?

Maybe I don’t understand because I’m an only child.  Once my mom died, I didn’t really care about my childhood house and I encouraged my dad to sell it.  He lives in Las Vegas now, which isn’t home to me.   NY – the entire city – is home to me because it’s familiar, I’ve lived here most of my life, and because the majority of my friends and family lives here.  But home also the location I choose to dwell, where I can be myself, where I can unpack all my Wusthof knives and chop to my heart’s content.  It’s not a city or a building, but a feeling that I think people should really look for on Thanksgiving.

What do you think?  What is home for you?

Any child of the 1970s who has been aboard a cruise will likely have the same reaction.  Why isn’t this ship like the one from The Love Boat?  And why couldn’t you just skip the Pacific Princess and drive to Puerta Vallarta from LA?    That last part is probably [...]]]>

Norwegian Sky: Its no Love Boat

Any child of the 1970s who has been aboard a cruise will likely have the same reaction.  Why isn’t this ship like the one from The Love Boat?  And why couldn’t you just skip the Pacific Princess and drive to Puerta Vallarta from LA?    That last part is probably for the Angelinos among us, but it stands to reason why my boat, Norwegian Sky, didn’t really have the same oomph I expected from a cruise liner.  Perhaps the magic of television just made everything seem nicer.  Perhaps its because I’m older and, like going back to high school after you’ve graduated, cruise ships look different to adults.  Or perhaps it is because they never showed you real cabins on The Love Boat.

Apparently the word “cabin” isn’t the term du jour among cruiselines.  I stayed in a “stateroom”, and believe me when I tell you there’s nothing stately about it.  Ok, so I didn’t choose my room, and I am unemployed so economy is important.  However, when a bed folds out from the wall and I’m expected to sleep in it, something has gone horribly awry.  Most likely, that fold-out was meant for a child, and the room was not meant to be shared by 3 larger-than-average sized adults, only one of whom is physically able to mount the upper bed.  Even still, the room was teeny-tiny.  You couldn’t open the door without closing the closet, and two people had to be in bed in order for the third to get to the bathroom.  Don’t get me started on the bathroom.  When we embarked, the bathroom smelled like, well, bathroom.  Like Greyhound Bus, public toilet bathroom.  Not a good first impression.  However, if I’d been given 2 or 3 welcome aboard cocktails instead of one, I doubt I’d have noticed.  You’ll be happy to know that the smell dissipated eventually.

For a small room, though, they did cram lots of things in.  There was a “lamp” on the wall behind my fold-out bed, the pillows were good, and it was rather comfortable once I got used to the idea of potentially careening towards the floor in the middle of the night.  And once I convinced myself that the bed would make several creaking noises before breaking off from the wall, crushing my cousin Von beneath it, I slept like a baby.  Maybe it was the water (which I couldn’t see or hear from the window-less steerage cabin), or perhaps it was the Drink of the Day, every day.  Or perhaps it was knowing that there’d be no phones to answer, no e-mails to read, no incessant need to update my Facebook status.  While eating dinner, someone noticed that for the first time in years, there were no cell phones on the table and you couldn’t see thumbs flying in the midst of a frantic text.

In other words, we were on vacation.