Promises I Can Keep by Kathryn Edin

Author:Kathryn Edin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520950689
Publisher: University of California Press

“BEING THERE”

While fathers often drift in and out of their children’s lives, Dominique Watkins and her peers believe that for a mother to do so violates the natural order of things. “A woman can’t help but love a child,” declares Carol, a forty-year-old white mother with three children, ages twenty-one, nineteen, and seven. When we ask Dominique, Carol, and other mothers—across the eight neighborhoods—to describe their views of what constitutes good parenting, almost all speak about the importance of being there, a philosophy that, by definition, morally condemns many of the neighborhood’s fathers, who tend eventually to become absent and uninvolved.2 For Dominique, the essence of a good mother is someone “who pays attention to her children, someone who’s there for their children, supportive of them, does her best to provide for them.” But, she says, in essence, good mothering is really about being there. “You don’t have to be a super mom, just be there for them. . . . You don’t have to have a fancy this or a fancy that, just togetherness with your children.”3

Of course, poor single mothers in impoverished communities aren’t the only ones who talk about the importance of being there for their children. The phrase is as widely accepted in the American family lexicon as “quality time.” But what poor mothers mean by the phrase may differ radically from what middle-class mothers mean. All Americans understand that spending time with one’s children is an important feature of good parenting. Yet while poor mothers see keeping a child housed, fed, clothed, and safe as noteworthy accomplishments (and the difficulty of securing these basics does make doing so noteworthy), their middle-class counterparts often feel they must earn their parenting stripes by faithfully cheering at soccer league games, chaperoning boy scout camping trips, and attending ballet recitals or martial arts competitions.4

What constitutes being there for mothers like Dominique takes different forms over a child’s life course. For the mother of a newborn, being there means stolidly braving the sleepless nights, laying by an adequate supply of Pampers and formula, plus providing the crib, the “coach,” and the outfits. For the mother of a toddler, it involves seeing the child through the developmental milestones of walking, talking, and potty training. For a mother of a school-aged child, being there means getting the child to school on time, monitoring homework, stretching the family budget to its breaking point just to include new school clothes, supplies, and field trip fees, and preaching the message about the value of education. For the mother of an emerging adolescent, being there means doing what you can to keep your children at arm’s length from the tough and dangerous realities of the neighborhood, where even good kids with good mothers often fall prey to drugs, crime, school failure, and early pregnancy.

Being there begins at the moment the pregnancy is confirmed—as they make the choice to bring the pregnancy to term. Denise, an eighteen-year-old white mother, guiltily confides that she had an abortion before she gave birth to her twins, now two years old.

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