With a Push, Teen-Age Dads Can Be Parents

Little Imani was born Jan. 17. For those who have forgotten, that was the same day that the earth shook in Southern California and the houses, walls and freeways came tumbling down. For me, the timing of the two events seemed quite appropriate.

Imani is my granddaughter, born to a 17-year-old girl, fathered by my 18-year-old son. Babies making babies.

Actually, the first shock came some seven months earlier when I got a call from the girl’s mother.

“Mr. Harris, I’ve been meaning to call you for some time,” she said. I knew what was coming because my parents had been on the receiving end of that phone call when I was only 19.

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Every day in Southern California, about 40 babies are born to teen-age girls. That’s the way it is usually noted in the various publications and agencies describing the plight of children. It is a curious notation to me, as though these girls conceived these children alone and now they alone must bear full responsibility for them.

I have two sons, who, all praises due their mothers, have lived with me about half their lives in Memphis, Chicago and Los Angeles.

Far too often, people (usually women) praised me for raising my sons alone. It is undeserved. Their comments imply that what I am doing is something extraordinary. Obviously, it isn’t. Millions of women do it every day.

Or there is the unspoken sentiment that I am inherently more responsible, more sensitive than most men because my sons are with me. I’m not that, either. I am a father because from Day 1 my parents, James and Geraldine Harris, insisted that I be one.

Like most teen-agers, the last thing on my mind when my first son was born was being a parent. I was more interested in basketball, girls and just hanging with the fellas. But that wasn’t my mother’s plan. Invariably, two or three times a week, she would say, “Ronnie, go get the baby.”

I didn’t want to do it, but since I was living in my parents’ house, I had no choice. Barely minutes after placing my son in her arms, I would prepare to bolt for the door. Her voice would pull me back.

“Where are you going?” she would ask.

“Going to play some basketball,” I’d say.

“Who’s going to take care of the baby?” she’d ask.

“You’re here,” I would say.

“You didn’t ask me,” she’d say.

“Well, can you take care of the baby?”

“No, I’ve got things to do, and you’re the baby’s father,” came the reply.

“Well, you’re the one that wanted the baby here,” I’d huff.

“Yeah, so you could take care of him,” she would say sternly.

So there I was, stuck changing diapers, bathing the baby, feeding the baby and otherwise fretting over something I didn’t want in the first place. I resented it.

At night, he would sleep in a crib assigned to my bedroom, and like babies do, he would wake around 3 a.m. It was my job to play with him or feed him or do whatever until he went back to sleep.

I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t like doing it. I had to do it. But somewhere along the way, something unexpected happened. I fell in love with my son and found myself making decisions based on the fact that he was my son. I missed him when I was away in school. When I graduated, I turned down jobs in other cities to accept one in my hometown, a city I loathed, because that’s where my son was.

Don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t smooth sailing from then on. When my second son was born, my parents literally drove from Memphis to Atlanta, picked him up, brought him back to my apartment and put him in my arms. Growing into fatherhood, especially as a single man, is a process, and not always an easy one.

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Because of my parents, my sons have two parents and not just a mother and a man who impregnated her and disappeared. And because they have both, their mothers have been able to pursue their lives more fully, and possibly my children’s lives are better than they would have been otherwise.

As I have watched other parents of teen-age boys and young fathers, I am amazed more of them didn’t do what my parents did, particularly single mothers. How could they let their sons do to their children and their children’s mothers what their own fathers had done to them?

I am adamant that it won’t happen.

My son will tend to his daughter, and not just with money. He will bathe her, and feed her, and change her, and burp her, and shop for baby shoes, and enroll her in school, and read to her, and fret over her teeth and nurse her through chicken pox. Initially, he won’t like it.

But he will do it because I insist, and because ultimately, he will fall in love with his daughter, just as I did with him.