While everyone was in a huff over Lebron going to Miami, I was getting worked up about Leicester Bryce Stovell claiming to be his father and suing him and his mother for $4,000,000.  As I said on twitter, “nothing says I love you son like suing him and his mother for millions.” :-/

The long and short of the story is that Mr. Stovell claims he met Lebron’s mother when she was 15 (and he was 29, gross), they have bad sex and later she told him she was pregnant.  He never directly asks her if the baby is his, nor does she ever confirm his suspicion.  He told her if the baby is his make sure he plays basketball.  She said “ok.”  This statement and the fact that he believes they look alike (they really don’t) are the reasons why he believes Lebron is his.  In spite of his mother’s wishes, Lebron did participate in a paternity test with his father and the results concluded that Leicester was not the father.  But Mr. Stovell wasn’t going out like that and insists that the results were tampered with.

Which got me to thinking?  At what point do you lose your “right” to be a father?  It always makes me angry when I hear about celebrities who grew up with their fathers and then as soon as they make it big, here goes dad.  We saw this with Oprah, who wouldn’t even give the latest contender the time of day.  Is there a statue of limiations on when you come back into a kid’s life?  And do they have to let you back in?  To that last question, I give a resounding no.  I think that if you neglect your child until adulthood, you cannot roll back in their live and try to play parent.  It doesn’t work that way.  As a friend says, “if you aren’t there for the grind, you can’t be there for the shine.”  Or something like that.

Even if this man is Lebron’s father, which I don’t think he is, what does he deserve? What’s his prize for doing what he should have done 20-something years ago? So you’re the father, now we all have a face to the absent father who did absolutely nothing but contribute some genes to this man’s success.  That does not earn you $4 mil.  I don’t think it’s slander to say you weren’t there because you weren’t there.  He needs to go to the hood and mentor some kids or something – or take the good Princeton education and tutor someone, but please, leave Lebron and his mother alone.  They do not owe you anything.

Very Smart Brothas also wrote about this issue – but talking about how Lebron reminds that men can have daddy issues too.  Good read, check it out.

peace,
e.

I figured since I’m going to Cool Kids PhD Club retreat next weekend and I had to submit a working paper, might as well drop it off here if anyone’s inclined to read and/or comment.

Daughters and their Relationship with their Nonresident Fathers (working title too).

Enjoy.

peace,
e.

I read somewhere that A Belle in Brooklyn writes all her posts on her Blackberry. Since I have an hour commute to work I figured I’d give it a shot. And I really need to write since I’ve already  fallen off my write every day wagon. #weak

At any rate, I’ve been thinking a lot about these interviews I’m doing (hopefully for my  dissertation). So far I’ve only done and to be honest I was not prepared for what I heard and how I felt afterwards.  I’m interviewing daughters who grew up in different households and I’m
trying to explore how they maintained these relationships, what these relationships are like now and if these relationships have affected their dating habit and/or sexual behavior.

I know what my “daddy story” is and have been thinking about blogging that just to get it out of my system and to just sit and think about what it is to me and how it’s affecting my research.  But that’s another post

Anyway, what’s surprised me most about these interviews is how sad they make me.  Granted there were a lot of sad parts in the interview, the sadness I felt is most likely my own shit rather than empathy.  It just boggles the mind how fathers can disappear and move on with life
so easily – especially when their own fathers weren’t there. They know what it feels like, and at some point they must have said “I’m never going to do that to my child.” And yet the pattern continues.

At some point, I’d like to interview the fathers. Not sure how well that would work out. Probably like how it is when Oprah interviews child molestors.  She can’t be cool, she barely holds it together and you can just feel her disdain for them.  Maybe my emotions aren’t that
strong, but I would be going in with judgment and emotion. That doesn’t mix well with science.

Back to the interview. It helped me form a hypothesis about how these relationships are maintained.  I’m going to see if these next two relationships confirm the pattern.  It’s exciting.

peace,
e

The title alone makes me cringe: Childless man freed after serving time for child support violations.

Yeah read that again, this dude has no kids and has gone to jail, no once, but TWICE over child support violations.  Basically what happened was dude was with some chick, she got pregnant and told him it was his.  They break up shortly thereafter.  She goes after child support (or if she was on public assistance, the state went after child support).  Like many low-income men, he couldn’t keep up with the child support payments and the state threw his butt in jail (that law is so dumb, but that’s another post).    Then he got out, got a job and couldn’t pay again and then went to jail again.  13 years later he hears whispers that he might not be the father and decided to take a DNA test.   So eventually Mr. Haltey take 2 paternity tests and it’s concluded that the child is not his.  It’s good in the hood right? No, Mr. Hatley still has to pay his back child support even through the child isn’t his.  Why?  Because he signed a consent agreement to pay child support back when he thought the child was his.  The court is holding him to that, so he has to pay more than $16,000 in back child support.

How could this happen?  It’s actually really easy.  All you really need to do to establish paternity is pay a small fee to get your name on a birth certificate.  I’m not aware that you actually need to have a DNA test to do this.  So if you’re messing around and aren’t sure where your seeds are growing, you too could get caught up.

My biggest problem with the article is that it assumers that if you’re aren’t paying child support you’re a deadbeat dad.  I hang around a lot of fatherhood researchers, and they call it something else: dead broke.  I think most men would gladly pay child support if they were earning a decent salary.  I was watching this documentary and this man said by the time they took child support out of his pay check, he had $0.16 left.  You just can’t live off of that.  And even though it is selfish, to want to put food in your mouth over child’s, I get it.

All in all, I’m glad Mr. Hatley is out of jail but let this be a cautionary tale.  Fellas, be aware of what’s going on.  If you don’t think you can afford 18 years of child support payments, or just don’t want to pay them, wrap it up and call it a day.  Ladies, when telling men that the child is theirs, please be sure you actually know who the father is.  Fellas, if you aren’t sure they child is yours, please get a DNA test.  Yes, I will still call you a dick for putting a pregnant woman through the drama that is men figuring out who the father is, we will all be happy in the  end when we know who the actual father is.  As you can see, if you make a mistake with this, you’re stuck with the consequences.

peace,
e.

Man, a President who supports responsible fatherhood makes me so happy!

President Obama wrote an article about being a good father for Parade Magazine.  Read the entire article here.

peace,
e.

Fathers, and pretty much anyone that deals with them.

I’ve called on pastors nationwide to stop the stream of momma, grandmother, aunts and female cousins coming to the altar for baby dedications with no man in sight. That pastor should say, “Until I personally meet with the father, I will not dedicate this child.” Somebody has to hold that man accountable for his actions.

It’s time that men hold their “boys” accountable. Actor Hill Harper had a friend who once said that he hadn’t seen his child in some time, but he found time to play basketball with Harper. Hill said, “Unless you call your child now, we can’t play ball.” See, Hill had to force him to accept his responsibilities.

I’m down for men holding other men accountable.  Not sure how I feel about pastors refusing to baptize kids.  It’s not the kid’s fault the parents don’t get along and the dad wants to disappear.

I mean we even got kids trying to hold their dads accountable.  Al B. Sure’s son wrote him two public letters, and the fool still hasn’t even responded. lame.  ABS, do better dude.

But for real, I think men should hold themselves accountable.  I don’t know that I would want my dad to acknowledge me solely because his friends won’t ball with him anymore.  I want my dad around because he is my dad, because he loves me and because he wants to be there.

peace,
e.

I saw Notorious on Friday.  In my opinion, it was ok.  I think they could and should have developed every character way more.  In spite of that, I was pleasantly surprised to see a lot about fatherhood in the movie.  Biggie’s struggle to be a good father, a litle insight into why he wasn’t the best for a while and his desire to be a better father in the end.  It was a pleasant surprise.  I wasn’t the biggest Biggie fan, so I didn’t know he had two children.  I can’t say that I was surprised, but it was nice that the children even had a place in the movie.

peace,
e.

Last night I came across this article on CNN about men who are using surrogate mothers to become fathers.  Granted most men that employ this method of fatherhood are gay men, mostly in committed relationships, who want to become fathers.  I thought it was interesting that CNN chose a Black gay man as the example of gay men, for obvious reasons.

picture from cnn.com

Jeff Walker, pictured above, wanted to be a father.  He had his first daughter with his partner and a surrogate.  Jeff and his parnter broke up but Jeff wanted more children so he use the same surrogate, diferent egg donor and had a second daughter.

The second example, Steven Harris, is a straight man that opted for surragacy when he became tired of waiting for the right woman to marry.

“I thought getting married was the only way to go, because I did want a family. But having Ben, I feel complete now,” Harris says.

You know how I feel about single parenthood, especially planned single parenthood, but I must say I’m happy to see men who genuinely want to be fathers and are willing to spend a lot of money to become fathers.  CNN reported surrogacy can cost $100,000 (wowza).

All in all, very interesting.  I had never thought about the men who can’t find the right women and go on with their family plans.  It makes sense, I’ve met a lot of women who have said if they can’t find the right man at a certain point in their life, they would adopt or impregnate themselves through invitro fertilization.  I need to read more on this phenomenon.

What do you guys think of these mens creating families through surrogates?

yet again.

One of the projects the research center I’m employed at is working on the the evaluation of a noncustodial parent earned income tax credit in New York City.  The way it works now, custodial parents (read: mothers) get a tax credit and noncustodial parents (read: fathers) don’t.

This experimental tax credit is geared towards low-income black fathers with child support orders.  The goal is to incentivize paying child support, and is really a round about way of incentivizing legit work.  Sounds good in principle but it’s really a mess.  The cap to get the tax credit is something crazy small that you could only make if you didn’t work all year and if you don’t work all year, how can you be current on your child support.  whomp.

Anyway the blow came because this great nation can’t get all it’s systems to work together and basically it was decided this tax credit could never go federal because the child support system is run by the states not the federal government and they didn’t think they’d be able to get both systems to work together to get the credit out to the men.

Another program for low-income, low-education, predominately men of color bites the dust.

peace,
e.

So I was perusing some blogs and someone mentioned this one – some single women choosing the single mother route.

“I don’t need a man to have a baby. I don’t have to find “The One” and fall in love and get married to procreate. My body doesn’t actually care if Cupid has shot my heart straight through with arrows. Love and sentiment technically have nothing to do with the fact that since my menstrual blood began I have been able to have a baby — whenever I want.”

This concept is not new to me, it just frustrates me.   Yes, one doesn’t need a man to have a baby but so much research shows the benefits of two parents.  I was raised by a single parent, and it was ideal considering what my father was up to, but that wasn’t the choice that my mother intended to make.  I haven’t met anyone of my mother’s generation that willingly had a child on their own.  They either divorced or broke up, but we all came from a relationship.  I’ve met quiet a few successful Black women who have said that if they aren’t married by a certain point in their life they were going to have a child on their own.  To each her own.

And I know where this thinking comes from.  It’s no secret Black women are least likely to marry.  And I’m sure these women will make amazing mothers, who will love their children unconditionally and do everything they can to give their child anything they could ever want or need, but that’s not for e. Given my line of research, I can’t, in good conscience, just have a baby just to have one.  If I have a child I want to bring it into the most supportive, loving and stable enviornment I can.  And to me, that means in a stable, happy and functioning marriage.

peace,
e.