Mourning a Child's Choice

The idea for Family Affair: What it Means to be African American Today is one that I’ve been considering for years. The fundamental question of identity has always been a compelling issue for African Americans, so I wanted to create a project that provided a neutral environment for “us” to examine the grand contradictions, marginalization and grotesque lies that have been used to define who we are.

My primary goal for this project is to stimulate dialogue that will lead African Americans to construct healthy environments for our lives, families and communities.  The various voices featured throughout Family Affair reflect a variety of opinions, attitudes and beliefs that represent the foundational themes in the black community. Their stories will spark a revival that creates honest reflection about where we’ve been, who we are and where we’re going as a people. Think of it as a declaration of our humanity and also as an expression of the strength and resiliency of African-American people.  

Family Affair represents a 21st century idea that everyone can embrace. It addresses questions that every American—black, white, red, yellow and brown—have had to deal with at one time in their life’s journey.  The problem of race in America—and for that matter throughout the world—has always been about identity, and the value of that identity within our larger society. I sincerely hope that Family Affair breaks through issues to reveal the commonality that we all share. As cliché as it sounds, we are all God’s children, and despite our differences, it’s time that we accept that we are equal.

I invite you to read an excerpt taken from this book and become a part of the conversation.

—Gil L. Robertson IV

Chapter 14: Mourning a Child’s Choice

The “five stages of grief” Elisabeth Kubler-Ross wrote of in her 1969 book, On Death and Dying, were reactions to death—someone else’s, or one’s own. But Kubler-Ross’s process also applies to other kinds of tragedy. I went through each of these stages after being greeted with the news that my eighteen-year-old daughter had decided, after her freshman year, to drop out of college.

Denial. Oh, no, you didn’t just say that after wasting nearly $20,000, you’ve decided to jump off the only guaranteed path of success in America to “take a break and find yourself!”

Anger. I will knock you into the middle of next year—just in time to start a new semester—if you persist in this foolishness.

Bargaining. If you just reconsider the negative impact this will have on your life, you will see how big a mistake this is. You want a car? You don’t need a car if you’re not in college. Do you want a car?

Depression. It must have been something I’ve done. How could I have stressed education more? Maybe I should have visited her classes more often, helped with her homework each night, kept her at home, and driven her to and from school daily. Maybe I should just lie here on my couch, the couch to which she will return and sleep every day, all day, doing nothing, aspiring to nothing, feeling nothing. I am such a failure.

Acceptance. This is where I am now, three weeks after learning that my beloved daughter—the brilliant actress, artist, singer, writer, veterinarian, and preschool teacher—has decided that she doesn’t know what she wants out of life, what to feel about life, or what to contribute to life.

It has been three weeks since I reminded her of the two choices I gave her, the two paths by which she could gain skills, and the consequences of each.

The first: Attend school full-time to learn—wait, not just learn, but master—a trade that will provide the lifestyle you want.

The second: Work full-time now and gain on-the-job skills for the lifestyle you must accept.

There was no third option that included lying around at home and working part-time at McDonald’s. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It is respectable employment for those who aspire to it or for those who have settled for less than they can do in an economy that shows no favorites. But I come from a family of edu­cators. My mother was an English teacher. My father was a chem­istry professor. My grandmother was a substitute teacher who quit her job to take care of her three grandchildren because her daughter contracted multiple sclerosis at the same time that she lost her hus­band.

And my grandfather? He was a powerfully built, stocky man with skin the color of coal. He had a sixth-grade education, but he al­ways made sure we could afford good schools and books. That’s right. In the structure he built while working in a cotton mill, cleaning up lawyers’ offices downtown, and driving a cab, we had a beautiful, loving home with a library of our own. I read our World Book Ency­clopedia volumes as much as my Nancy Drew mysteries. I knew the works of Langston Hughes and James Baldwin and Ernest Heming­way. I revered Lorraine Hansberry and Alice Walker. I still remember crying after finishing A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

There was never a time in my life when I didn’t know I was going to college. It was not an expectation. It was the law.

I raised my daughter the same way. We journeyed from “Whoville” to the shores of Normandy. I introduced her to The Cat in the Hat and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. We traversed history and math and science together—all in preparation for the day I’d drop her off on a campus to study these things alone.

The day I did drop her off, I felt like I was living a rerun. I had been here before a thousand times in my head. But in my head, I did not lose her.

That day, as I walked out of her pink-on-pink-on-pink room, watching her watch me, her head slightly tilted and smiling that glo­rious, goofy grin she gives me when she thinks I’m being silly, I didn’t realize I’d lost her. If I had, I would have moved in and embarrassed her royally, but I would have done anything to keep her in school.

Instead, I drove home and pretended that she was grown up. I wasn’t there while she made discoveries of her own.

She discovered music and clubs and boys and freedom.

She discovered sleeping until three in the afternoon and having breakfast for dinner.

She discovered a life that didn’t involve asking me for permis­sion.

She loved it, and she really hated that school got in the way.

When I was four, my mother made me memorize a single phrase to guide my life: “A quitter never wins, and a winner never quits.” My siblings and I hated that phrase as much as we hated walking over to her wheelchair so she could pinch us each time we used in­correct grammar. (She especially hated “ain’t.”)

When my daughter told me she was done with college, she may as well have told me she was pregnant with the child of a gang mem­ber on the lam from the FBI for murder, and she’d see me when she’d see me.

OK, maybe not.

But for a moment, the words were in a foreign language. I searched for meaning in her face. I actually thought I had misheard her, and greeted her with that quick, startled sound that parents make when they heard exactly what their child said, but dare him or her to say it again.

“Whah?”

She said it again, telling me that it was my fault, that she had told me she wasn’t ready for college, and that I’d made her go anyway. She explained that she now needed a year off.

From the looks of her grades, I told her, she’d already had a year off. So what was the problem now?

 “College isn’t for everybody,” she told me, quoting every bad influence she must have met on and off campus. I wanted to hunt them down like dogs, those miscreant influences without ambition who had the nerve to tell her not to excel.

“College is not for everybody,” I repeated. “But that does not apply to you.”

It does not apply to any of the young people I mentor, regardless of their backgrounds. I’ve peppered hundreds of journalism students and dozens of foster children with the same lessons, adages, and ex­pectations that I have for my own daughter. I did all of that only to learn that the child I’m closest to was listening the least. I wanted to tell her that, but she stopped me cold in my tracks.

She hit me with the one thing I could not change, the one thing that had never been true before, ever, in our lives.

“You can’t make me.”

And there it was, lying between us like a chasm that might keep us from touching each other ever again. The emotions so swirled me in that I could not speak. I imagined saying that to my grand­mother.

Well, actually, I didn’t. I couldn’t imagine that. My mind would not let me go there. She would have heard the first two words, real­ized where they were going, and consciousness would have ended. I talked back to my grandmother, all four-foot-eleven of her, only once. We were in the kitchen of the house I grew up in, the place where I learned about books and dreams and respect and admira­tion. She had just told me that I couldn’t do something or couldn’t have something or couldn’t go somewhere. Whatever the “couldn’t” actually was is irrelevant. After she spoke, as I leaned on the oak hutch that held her dishes—the good ones with the ring of flow­ers—I said something back to her, under my breath, with my head down.

Neither my sister nor my brother remembers there being any warning. Of course, I can’t either. My grandmother walked away from the stove, black skillet in hand, and hit me. I don’t know where she hit me. It had not happened before, and she never had to do it again.

But this is 2008, and one thing I decided when raising my child was that violence was not necessary. Spankings could not accomplish what a good, old-fashioned talking-to might. At that moment, three weeks before now, I wished I had spanked her.

I am growing into this acceptance, and so is my daughter. It is harder for her. You see, I told her that our original agreement applies. So if she decided to forgo the path I’d chosen for her to learn her life skills, then she’d have to take the other path: full-time work and living on her own. I told her that as of that moment, she lived in a different tax bracket, and that she could no longer afford many of the things she had become accustomed to: amusement park trips, beauty salon visits, expensive clothes, or a car.

My daughter is now looking for a job on a bus line and a nearby apartment. She also is considering accepting a part-time job as a nan­ny with one of my best friends, who like me, believes in all children. When I told her what happened, she said, “Send her to me.” Some­times being a good parent means knowing when to accept help.

For the first time, my daughter is creating a budget, and she cannot believe how many items are on it. As I listened to her ask about electricity and a phone line and talking about needing neither, I kicked myself for not making her keep up the checkbook ledger I’d gave her when she was eight, the one where I made her write down any of the money I spent on her.

She has so much to learn, and she is hating it. I figure she’ll be back in school by January. At least, I hope so. But if not, I will wait for her, patiently, with a “faith that the dark past has taught us,” as James Weldon Johnson wrote so brilliantly. I will always believe in her and her future and what she has to give this world. She remains the hope and the dream of the slave. The dream, deferred briefly, will hit her like lightning, and she will find her place.

And as she gets used to the lifestyle to which she now must be­come accustomed, I’ll continue to talk to young girls—including my own—about studying and learning and preparing for the life you want, instead of accepting the life you’re given.

That is, after all, what college and parents are for.

Rochelle Riley is an award-winning journalist and a columnist for the Detroit Free Press.