with others, especially with his mother. Observing and listening to his mother has given him clues of how to persist and thrive in the midst of ongoing adversity.
This year, Malcolm is not only dealing with a sister who has been given a limited time to live, but he has also recently become a father to a child born three months early. He says he is very happy to be a father, but he is unsure what it is going to be like since his child is still in the hospital. When I ask him if it was scary to have his child born prematurely, he says with a pained expression on his face, that while it was difficult, he was happy that his sister got to see his child before she died. His daughter, he says, is giving him the courage to carry on during this difficult period.
Over the past year Malcolm and his girlfriend have grown closer and, in a shift from the previous year, he “thinks” he loves her. He still wants to take things slowly with her, however, because he does not want anything to go wrong in their relationship, especially now that they have a child together. Although his girlfriend’s jealousy and possessiveness irritate him, he seems committed to her in his discussion of “loving her” and hopes their relationship will last a long time. Yet, he does not feel ready to marry her: “I wanna make sure that’s what we want because we’re going through so many stages now. Before we like move into the same house and stuff, I wanna make sure that we can happen.” Malcolm’s hesitation about marriage may be connected to his feeling that he was not cautious enough when he and his girlfriend had a child.
Although Malcolm’s thoughts and feelings about his girlfriend have changed from the previous year, they have not changed regarding his male peers. When I encourage him to tell me why he doesn’t discuss his troubles with his male peers, Malcolm says:
Like ’cause I feel that what I got to say, everybody can’t handle it or really wouldn’t understand it, you know. They’ll sit there—they’ll take it as if I’m talking about the sports game or something. Like, if I were to talk about my sister, and they’ll just change it up. Like, “Yeah, how are the Bulls doing?” You know?
Malcolm’s thoughts about communicating with his peers this year are more complicated than he had indicated to me earlier in his interview. He wants to talk to others about what is happening in his life, but only to those people who will listen and understand him. While he seems to believe that I, as his interviewer, can “handle it,” he doesn’t hold such faith in his male peers.
Malcolm states, as he did in previous interviews, that he doesn’t have a best or close friend this year:
I had a couple [of friends] like once when I was real young, around ten, and then when I lived out—and then me and this dude got real close, we was cool. But right now, nobody really ’cause it seems that as I’ve grown, you know, everybody just talk behind your back and stuff, you know. So I just let it go because it seems like no people that can hold—well, not no people, but the people that I’ve been meeting can hold up to their actions. Like you know … something might’ve happened like between me and a person where other people felt that we shouldn’t even be friends no more. So they sit there and talk about me to that person while I’m not around or something. And then that person will just talk about me too, you know, whatever, ’cause you know all throughout my neighborhood, I always hear, “He talks about you, he says this or he says that.” … So I just don’t really bother with it, you know, trying to make best friends.
Although he had a close friend when he was young, Malcolm currently believes, like most of the other boys in the study, that his male peers will betray his trust. He, consequently, does not have a close or best friend and has given up on trying to find one (chapter 5 is focused on this theme in the boys’ interviews).
Malcolm explicitly tells me that he does not tell his male peers when he is angry:
Why don’t you confront your friends when you are angry with them?
I don’t know. … I guess it’s sometimes like it could be just their family or something like they’re nice or something. You know, I don’t really wanna cause no conflict. I just leave it at that and just avoid them.
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