The New Normal Run Amok

   I winced the other day when the main story on page one of the New York Times declared pretty much without equivocation that births out of wedlock are the “New Normal” in America.
   My initial reaction was one of sadness for the nation and for the mothers who either by choice or by pain of abandonment go it alone.  But mostly a personal pain for the children, primarily for the boys, who must grow up without a father.  You might call it, as does the Cleveland Plain 
Dealer, "Fatherless in America. A national tragedy.”  I was startled to learn the 76 % of children  born in Cleveland out of wedlock.  fatherless boys we are told are much more likely to end up in jail, to fail in school, to become jobless.
   A national tragedy you bet.  If we wnt to fix  America, here's a very good place to start.
   I drew partly on my own experience as I wrote this story about “LeBron and Me” a while ago touching on this subject.. This is a slightly expanded and updated version that tells it as it is, or, at least, as it is for me.…

LeBron and Me

I felt an eerie, uneasy kinship with LeBron the other night as I watched him slowly, painfully walk off the court in Miami, in defeat in game six with Dallas in the NBA playoffs.

I wondered how he really felt inside.  This huge boy in a man’s body, lifted by passion and athleticism to heights few mortals ever reach,

What are his inner resources? To whom can he turn as he feels the pain of loss? Not to the man who made his mother pregnant at age 16 and never returned.

I think I know something about that sense of loss. And the inability to deal with it likes a “man”, so to speak.

Like LeBron, I grew up without a father.  It was not good experience.  This devastating loss of the man in your life leaves a hole in you gut a mile wide. And it never really goes away.  No matter how hard you try, on the basketball court or on the courtyard of life.

Particularly when the man you came to depend on disappears, or in LeBron’s case, was never there at all.
I was enchanted when he told the journalists at a news conference after the playoff loss that it was truly up to “the Man upstairs” to determine when he would ultimately win that coveted championship ring. Something, he had indicated he wanted more than anything in this world.

Deep down I would wager he would give up that obsession over the loss of that ring right now if he could somehow know and caress the “man” down here who gave him life.  For a Dad who could turn to him and say, “Son, we’ll get through this together.”

A while ago I reflected on an imaginary conversation I might have had with my father as he lay dying in Peskin’s Hospital in Cleveland, when I was but four years old.

As much of a conversation, that is, as one can have with a son who was petrified at what he knew was happening to his father.

I had memories of an ugly scar on his stomach that I noticed the previous summer in the bath house at Twin Lakes... and now seeing him in the hospital bed with a thermometer in his mouth. My memory is silence. That was it, nothing but silence and fear of the unknown.
Wanting to know, but not really knowing. Silence.

In my deluded mind my dad was still the tall lanky, curly haired man that I loved more than any other human being on the face of the earth.  And I didn’t want to lose him.

I wanted to climb up on that bed, in the hospital room, throw my arms around him and whisper softly, “Daddy what’s the matter with you? What is happening? Why are you here?  What is Dr. Peskin doing to you?" (I always hated Dr. Peskin for what I thought he was doing to my dad.)

And after a long pause, I went on with my fantasy. “Are we going to go to a ball game next summer? Remember you promised to take me on to an Indians game at League Park?  And you know how much I like the water.  Will you take me to Twin Lakes again?”

But of course the painful reality is that there was nothing more than  an empty unfractured silence. Nothing. I didn’t ask and, of course, he didn’t answer.

Only the silence remains, leaving its unrelenting mark for a lifetime. No man in my life, no one to turn to in my adolescence to learn what it’s like to be a man.  What it’s like to have man-like feeling. Understand the curious levels of festering driven passion that young men have. Understand that these feelings are normal. Not to be afraid. Not to be angry. Not to spend young life demanding “respect” as so many must.   

That was my curse, and LeBron’s and God knows how many hundreds of thousands of fatherless boys seeking to learn who they are.  And somewhere deep down, I want to cry out to the powers that be in America and say 
“The New Normal" is not normal.

(Please note story in the Cleveland Plain Dealer on efforts to stem the tide of fatherlessness: Click here.)