Free Redefining Realness by Janet Mock Page A

judged outside of the lens of fatherhood, outside of our connection. When he was in the streets, he was not Dad. He was Charlie the crackhead.
    I vividly remember the routine sight of a baby girl wearing a soiled diaper, playing with an equally dirty doll on her lawn. No parent or sibling in sight. She would just cry and cry and cry. No one asked, “Where’s her mama?” Her wailing became the background vocals to our double-Dutch anthems, kind of like the barely heard baby yelps in Aaliyah’s song “Are You That Somebody?” In addition to the baby girl, I saw stray dogs and crack vials on my way to school. But crack’s reach went beyond those vials we skipped over. When Maddy’s mom, who would beg the boys on the corner for “some stuff,” passed away of AIDS complications, I hugged my friend good-bye: Maddy and Aisha moved to San José to begin a better life with their mother’s sister.
    An overwhelming feeling of envy spoiled my friendship with Maddy and Aisha because they spent all their lives with their mother. Even if she was flawed, at least she chose to be there with them. I yearned for mine, but Mom existed only in scant memories and dreams of her saving us from the dark cloud that hovered over us. These ideals of my mother contrasted with the reality of Dad, who was an anomaly, a single black father amid a gaggle of equally struggling single black moms. I was not able to recognize how unjust our circumstances were until I was well into adulthood and compared them with the experiences of friends who had relatively minimal exposure to trauma. My first sight of “normal” parent-child relations didn’t come until I moved to New York in my early twenties. Both of my roommates had parents in town to set them up, to buy them underbed storage, and to assemble their Ikea desks. I came alone with a thousand dollars or so in savings, student loan checks on the way, luggage bought by Auntie Lisa as a graduation gift, and $150 in pocket money that Mom held for me.
    I saw one of my roommates’ father slip her a wad of cash; she said, “Thanks, Daddy,” while her mom looked on with moist, swollen eyes. I had never felt so lonely as I did that first day in my tiny room in theEast Village with a bed I bought on Craigslist and a Kmart dresser I assembled alone with my iPod buds in my ears. My normal was loneliness and isolation and independence. I depended on myself. I had a family, people I came from, shared experiences with, and checked in on. But they could do nothing for me beyond the love and care and good wishes they sent my way. I grew resentful in adulthood about my parents’ lack of planning. I became so used to being alone and depending on myself that I didn’t know how to ask for help.
    As a kid, I had no idea that we were poor because our friends looked like us. We were all outside playing while our parents were inside smoking their pipes. We all had about three outfits, dingy shirts, high-water jeans, and matted hair. I didn’t have a subscription to Highlights , wasn’t able to order books from the Scholastic catalog, and never bought school photos. I don’t have a single image of myself from the second grade to the sixth, the years we lived with Dad. If not for Janine, I don’t know how we would’ve survived those Oakland years. She was a single mother who took us on when we needed her most, when she had little to give herself or her own son. She was the one who gave us candy money, who mended our wounds when we fell or fought, who took us to Payless to replace our shoes when the soles began flapping.
    No matter how much I adored and appreciated Janine, I couldn’t make her better. Her body was too weak to continue fighting, and Dad was unapologetic about his lack of care. “You know your dad is selfish,” he chanted with a dissonant chord of defeat and defiance, completely at ease with his shortcomings. I disliked his lack of reciprocation.
    Dad was charming and energetic. He was the kind of