nothing seems to work the way it should. It is not so surprising, then, that this order of events is often turned upside down. Here, once a young “couple” becomes pregnant and decides to take the pregnancy to term (a decision generally ceded to the woman), the bond between the two typically coalesces into more of a “relationship,” though often in dramatic fits and starts.27
While pregnancy often serves as a galvanizing force that transforms “togetherness” into more of a “real relationship,” the birth of a baby can solidify a disadvantaged young man’s dedication to his partner even more, at least in the short term. Take the story of David Williams, a black thirty-year-old father of five, as an illustration. David grew up in Hunting Park, just one mile north of Will’s Fairhill home, across the street from the park the neighborhood is named for. Because his parents were still teenagers when he was born and were soon overwhelmed with the responsibilities of raising him and his three younger sisters, all close in age, David was brought up in his paternal grandmother’s home on Lycoming. This tidy row home built of native sparkly granite “shist” on the first level and with pristine aluminum siding on the second was further embellished by a two-story bay window on the side. The property was secured by a chain-link fence and the pincushion front lawn was filled with freshly trimmed shrubs and well-tended flowers. “My grandmother had a nice house,” he recalls. The neighborhood, now half-black and half-Hispanic, centers on the park, which is its jewel.
Hunting Park was still a desirable residential neighborhood when David was a child—a far cry from the industrial neighborhoods of Fairhill and West Kensington just to the south, known colloquially as the “Badlands” because of the drug activity there. But by the mid-1990s, when David hit his teens, the Badlands had clearly crept north and the jewel of a park had become little more than a haven for drug dealers. Its western boundary, Old York Road, with its imposing three-story Victorian twins and occasional grand stone singles, began to draw prostitutes, pimps, and street hustlers like a magnet.
The father of five children by three different women, David describes his current girlfriend, Winnie, as the “best” of his children’s mothers and refers to her as his common-law wife. Yet their relationship and entry into joint parenthood also had a haphazard quality. “When I was first with Winnie I had a girlfriend on the side too, Kathy,” David explains. “She’s somebody that I met at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting. We got close and we were helping each other with our addictions. One thing led to another, and we got intimate. Me and Winnie would get into an argument; she’d tell me to leave; I’d go stay with Kathy.” “So how did you end it with Kathy?” we ask. “Winnie got pregnant, and I had to do what was right, stand by Winnie.”
David may have been “together” with Winnie at the time his son Julian was conceived, but the relationship was hardly ideal—why else did he find himself so often with Kathy? It took a pregnancy to resolve the dilemma of which woman David should choose. Suddenly, because of an unplanned conception, his course was clear; he “did the right thing” and chose Winnie. The two then began to form a family around the promise of a shared child. As evidence of this decision, David left Hunting Park for South Philly, where Winnie had secured a unit in the Wilson Park Homes, a newly renovated mix of two-story family townhouses and high-rise buildings for the elderly just a stone’s throw south of Tasker Homes (from which Amin and his mother had escaped), where the two now live. He views the Wilson Park location as a big step downward in the local prestige hierarchy from his grandmother’s semidetached Hunting Park residence.
Nonetheless, “each month of the pregnancy, you know, we got closer and closer. I wanted to be with her more. And then like two or three o’clock in the morning, she had me running to a Pathmark grocery store buying different foods. So that brought us a lot closer too. And then, watching him born brought us even closer. On her last push he came spinning out like a bullet!” David recounts, beaming at the memory. “Nothing was more beautiful than Julian. The way he came out of his mother, that was amazing. And I held him, I didn’t want to let him go.”
The child has become David’s obsession, despite the fact that he sees his daughters, now in their teens, only once a month or so and has no contact with his sons, who are ten and twelve. And Julian’s birth has further stoked David’s desire to stay with Winnie, whom he now professes to love. Despite the lack of a marital tie, the two have begun to “go for” husband and wife. The way he sees it, his new job description is “being there for her. Um, ah, um, helping her, when things is rough you got to be in her corner, sharing, compassion, closeness, communication. That’s what I’m trying to say: communication.”
There are many things David says he loves about Winnie. Her culinary skills get first mention: “What’s the saying, ‘the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach’? She’s a good cook. That’s the truth.” And besides, he adds, “She’s a good housecleaner—she keeps the house clean. We work our problems out together. Most of the time she’s pretty cool.” But what quality does he treasure even more? “She takes care of the kids—she’s very firm—she’s there for them. That’s what I love about her the most.”28
David is making what he views as a bold attempt to form a family that can withstand the test of time. Yet his background, his current circumstances, and the fragile relational context into which his child is born all dramatically reduce the probability that he will succeed. When we last speak with David he is still together with Winnie—Julian has just turned one—but by the time Julian celebrates his fifth birthday, a father like David has less than a one in three chance of still being together with the mother of his child.29
The experiences of Amin, John, Tim, Byron, Will, and Jack all bear these statistics out. Things between Antoinette and Amin grew impossibly strained when Antoine turned three. Not only had the “retaliation-type situation”—both of them cheating to get back at the other—become unbearable, Amin had also been laid off from his job. Due to his felony convictions, he had had a hard time finding another. Now, a year later, the two still haven’t spoken; though he sees his son at Antoinette’s mother’s home, Amin doesn’t even know his son’s address.
John’s girlfriend left him during the pregnancy, infected by her mother’s downright hatred of John. And Tim’s relationship blew up when Mazie found him on the couch having sex with Andrea—only one in a string of poorly disguised infidelities. Byron hung on for thirteen years and enjoyed a fairly good relationship with Shari, but then lost his city job due to drinking, and she put him out of the house. He blames her actions on the fact that he was suddenly unable to contribute financially, not on the drinking that cost him the job. He also blames her for “cheating”—though her so-called infidelities occurred after she had broken up with him and kicked him out.
Will went on to have three more children with Lori, who then became an addict and left Will to move in with her drug-dealer boyfriend, trading the children back and forth every other day. Finally, the mother of Jack’s two children, ages nine and eleven, moved out after twelve years together—she could no longer deal with his outbursts of anger. He is hoping to reconcile. In the meantime, he lost his job when a judge ordered him into a residential rehabilitation program: just after the breakup Jack was charged three times in a single week for driving under the influence.
Through the life stories of these men, whose backgrounds and circumstances are fairly typical of the range of fathers we spoke with, some of the seeds of relationship destruction—the first deadly strike against those who wish to stay involved with their children and father them well—are revealed. Tenuous relationships and a lack of sufficient desire to avoid pregnancy produce unplanned conceptions and births. Drawn by the possibility of a profound connection to another human being, a child of one’s own, future fathers and mothers—young people who may barely know each other—often work fairly hard to forge a significant relationship around the impending birth. The new baby often spurs these efforts further, at least for a time. But the conditions under which these conceptions occur make the odds of success very low. Next, we explore in greater detail how these so-called
