About a Son, for a Father Part 1

In the movie Baraka, the "Balinese Kecak Chant" is a moment to be reckonded with. All men of the tribe, all focusing their energy in a straight forward movement, moving centrifigally in both clock-wise and counter clock-wise directions. Together. In unison. All by the call of the one elder to lead the group. But the circle splits and half of the men are flattened by the overpowering cackle and taunt of the other men standing, and directing themselves like machine guns and fighter jets strafing young men flat in their tracks. All said and done, they seem little compared to their counter parts. This ceremony has lead me to better investigate the ideas that lend to how men are supposed to be. Inertly we know the repercussion of negative actions, but more often than not, men and women will expect certain behavior over other behaviors. As if by sure chance, the men standing, fall, and the men flattened raise up in their own empowered will and effortlessly engauge their kin with the same resolve and refuge that their relatives had directed towards them. This act of conflicts both great and small, both foreign and domestic, all under the watchful eye of an elder who will call for each change in the mantra. Fathers, sons, cousins, uncles, grandfathers and grandsons, like those who came before them. All together and all unequivately different. The triumph that they're together, generations, living on the same things that have sustained and nourished their ancestors. I met a young father the other day who deserved my audience. Like most fathers who live with out their children, we had many things in common. Drama, abuse, and verbal retorts that would corrode the slickest PVC laid by the best. I found myself just watching, listening...Remembering. How hard it had been for me, when my son was born. Managing my own life was hard enough, but it took me forever in 6 months to just get used to the idea that I was going to be a daddy. I remember sitting there, no way I could miss the little one forming in her womb. Finally, one day it just dawned on me, if it's a given you grow in there. And I've been growing out here for a couple decades by that point, it couldn't be so hard having to do it with someone so up in my face. My life went from what am I gonna do about, or for myself, to including someone else. Now I understand we all do things differently and some things come to others harder than the rest of us, but together, we have always overcome the hardest circumstances, why not little ol' me? What could be so bad about making my intention help this manifestation, this beautiful child of ours, our past and future made easy, cause now, it could learn to eat for itself. Who would want to question his worth? Neither his mother nor I have ever not made our best intentions to focus on his own. But here I am, having surpassed his 5 birthday in March, living 3000 miles away from my little boy because his mother and I cannot talk without the 3 syllable spoken being an insult. I'm living away from that, listening to a young man swear by his own convictions, and in the same breath devising the next way to stay at par with his child's mother. No amount of judgement from others will ever be able to understand how much this man wants to be there for his child. All of us fathers can remember how unnerving it was to handed this human being incapable of lifting its own head, and having to figure out how not to get poop on our fingers as the sure mechanics of sealing another poop screen around our child's behind becomes something above rocket science. Having the opportunity of that first year together, we, he, me, She made a lot of sense. Without a job (I was fired when he was 3 months old), without anything beyond the bills paid, and our bellies full. We added cable, and a few amenities never thought possible on just unemployment, wic, and 200 dollars of food stamps. Yet, a year later things became so hectic and nasty that I began my ever present struggle of worrying about Aviv's well being. While at the same time ducking the nastiest rhetoric that has left my family unable to resolve this conflict, but everyday watch it get worse. For any readers just happening upon my post, I would like to clarify. This is the worst, most horrific place to be as a father. In any case, the best I could do was manage a place on my own, make my own business and handle the world with Aviv every couple days, or every other week. He and I dealt with a lot when he became a year old. Mama, while she has the best intentions, needs someone to let her in on why dad's are so important. Or weren't the groceries brought upstairs every week. Diaper duty was a great contrast to you two, while he suckled. A man becomes a man by the men he has around him. I'm not allowed around my son, without his mother's permission. A feud that was sparked by real alarm on my part and a decision imparted to her that has left no room for Aviv to have any idea of the benefits I was imparted as a child. Growing up where I did, in the time I did, gave me the most open and diverse world at my very finger tips. Everything growing up was about who people were, what they had contributed and why every person is so important to be able to contribute and sustain the whole. I went to public school and was able to attend each school my family thought appropriate. My parent's are white. His mother, not. Something I hold as a glimmer of what growing up in a city will entitle a person to look past any personal limitations and see why the tree is grander holding the soil, than sun light could keep it from flying off into space. We could have struggled living together, or left to handle our own residences. But the worst thing we did was deny that struggling to grasp the full picture of raising a child. Of finding out why it is so important to have both parents around to answer all of a child's questions would, could and will take our perpetual fighting into space, a place where it can't do anything but allow the real important stuff to take over for the real dumb shit. We never did. We never made ourselves to step up to the challenge. If only he were 18, 2 years ago, he could have let us both go and cared for himself in the ways that only we know how to mend ourselves. He was only 3. They would taunt me, on sundays about 9:35/9:40, in the morning. What do you think he knows? He's so little. He can't even talk right. And at 11:30 on the dot, he would walk out of my life again, until the next sunday. I hadn't done anything, tried to stick up for him. Tried to put forth my step to intiate those who work on these things daily. But slipped thru a crack. Managed myself, and him, but in a construct so far from anything the system has any idea how to engauge. He seemed ok to them and she and I more a conflict than they could see any deeper. I became an example, I am now one of many fathers not givien a chance to be heard in family court. I am sitting at the anniversary of the worst of what transcended my life as a full time single dad, to the lowest I have ever been. I was probably trying to find someone who would listen to Aviv rather than just to me. I found a truly gifted person in this respect. A man who had taught at my elementary school for generations. A man who sat with Aviv and I in his home for 3 hrs and fed us cookies till we spilt our milk. In these circumstances its not the most profound moments that reveal the greatest strength. It's anything at all. And Mr. V sat with Aviv ever so patiently and openly that afternoon. Allowing the story to unfold in both actions and gestures, we walked out of his house having found that we were not only distraught, but he could now very clearly articulate that he did not like it. It took another 5 days or so to have a city social worker interview Aviv, that by this time he was so far resolved in his own reconstruction of his experience that there was no way they could see anything wrong with him. He was by and large conscious that he had been upset, why he was upset, that the abuse he had experienced was not because of something he had done, but that it had happened to him and he did not like it. He was resolved, but too pink to be able to just tell anyone. He knew by this time that he only need trust those who earned it, and I knew how hard it had been to get him to express anything more than a blood curdling scream. We spent the following year and half held to only one two hour visit a week on sunday mornings at the Family Court Building in Philadelphia. He spent the first 6 weeks very confused and rightfully betrayed. I would look at him and have to take in the first outburst he would make in a week at the dishonor of having returned to a place before it's possession could be resolved to something better. The first time I saw him, he exclaimed, "How could you?!" But, remember he was only three, and after a few months he was resolved to this being the only time I have with his Daddy, we would play board games and build structures out of building blocks with our alloted time slot. This became such a routine that his mother would find it imperative to limit even these short and regimented arrangements that by last august, I hadn't seen him for 6 weeks, and wasn't going to until his mother deemed acceptable. Having to wait another six months to have the audience of a judge, I needed something else. By the end of August, I was somewhere other than Philadelphia, with the proposal that I could stay where I was, sitting in my lap. I spent what was meant to be a vacation away from it all with the notion that I entertain the idea of staying and finding work, instead of traveling back to my home. I thought long and hard. I finally accepted the idea that no matter how I channeled my energy. No amount of energy I expended was going to help this situation get any better. So instead of trying, I would stay, with the notion that only if I got a job working with children. That I would use the skills that I know best and give everyone else more than enough space to do what needs to be done to make this situation a life worth living.