For me, parenting is an amazing opportunity of discovering not only how I show up for my kids but what vision I have for their future as well. As a single parent, I call myself a decentralized parent, in that I have two girls with my ex-wife and a son from a previous situation. So with my daughters in the Virgin Islands, we are geographically separated, and I look at myself more as a facilitator between the relationships with my kids.
In my life, my father had children outside of his relationship with my mom—and I’ve seen this in other situations as well—so that the nature of the relationship amongst the siblings is in direct correlation with whichever parent they live with that similarly facilitates that relationship. So obviously if you’re in a household with your mom and your siblings may have different fathers, your mom may facilitate the relationship among you and your siblings. If you happen to be somewhere else, there has to be an active effort from the parents to facilitate relationships with and among the children. So I look at my role as a facilitator, and I continue to reinforce the love and connectedness between my son and his sisters. As a single dad and also as an attorney, when I had my son out of wedlock, and was not in a serious committed relationship with his amazing, fantastic mom at the time she was pregnant, I instantaneously thought that warranted a fifty-fifty custody, and looking at how much value society placed on fathers at that time, it was impactful to me. I think it actually impacted my desire to want to be married and have more children and to not only have the full fatherhood experience, which to me meant waking up with your kids, and so forth, but also being a stand (support) for other fathers who may be frustrated with the system and how much time and connectedness they’re allowed to have with their children.
All that being said, as a human being, I definitely identify right now as being a father who facilitates relationships with my children with multiple moms, and that pretty much runs a large part of my identity in terms of my commitment to expanding my business empire, so on and so forth, so I can fly back and forth between my kids with ease and show up one day and get on a plane and be here in the morning and just move in those types of ways and travel with them to where I want to go. Parenting requires teamwork. To fully integrate it is definitely a team experience and I definitely have my kids’ moms and their families on my team, and I’m committed to maintaining those relationships.
But co-parenting is a whole other topic, and that’s a huge part of the deal. I’ve seen many persons whose relationships with their children suffered because of their relationships with their co-parents. So the advice I’d give to fathers around co-parenting is based on my own experience as a co-parent. I have an ex-wife who is the mother of my two wonderful, beautiful daughters, and then there is the previous situation with my son’s mom. We didn’t really know each other when we first met—she’s great, she’s amazing, but there was a lot of drama in the beginning. I mean, you don’t know each other to a core in the beginning, and then when you add in the stress of the pregnancy and you’re still trying to discover how you’re going to work out not only the aftereffects of parenting but this kind of situation, this pregnancy, that’s another aspect, you know.
Richlyn Emanuel
Parenting on a whole is not easy. You do need a village. It doesn’t matter if you’re a single parent, or if you’re co-parenting, or if the father is in the home. You need more than that; you need a village; you need outside support. You need to expose your kids to other family, other individuals, because as a parent, you don’t know it all. But we’re not born, or we don’t grow up knowing, okay, this is how you parent. It’s trial and error. It’s asking for help, asking the right questions or the wrong questions. It’s making mistakes, because I’ve done that. The one thing that I’ve tried to do as a parent is to do all the things that my parents did not do, good, bad, or indifferent. I tried to do things that parents have not done, because how I was raised and how I wanted to raise my son were totally different. His dad said that from birth, I’ve raised a well-rounded child and he was jealous. He’s actually jealous of his son because of all the things that I’ve allowed him to experience—every sport, regardless of whether or not Giovanni wanted to do it—because that’s the only way you grow, when you come outside of your comfort zone. And you do that from the inception; you expose kids to everything so they don’t have a narrow view of the world. From the time he could understand words I didn’t do the baby talk thing with Giovanni. I didn’t do goo-goo, ga-ga—none of that. I remember his pediatrician walking into the examining room one day when Giovanni was maybe two, and she said, “I thought you were having a conversation with an adult.” That was because of how I was speaking to him.
Growing up around people and actually having conversations, I think, is very important. Exposure to the world is important; letting them know that they’re not privileged is very important. It’s also important to have a routine: Saturdays we clean house, Sundays we go to church, then we rest early to bed. Those things are important, and you can’t stray from them, because I’ve learned the hard way that once you break a routine, or you add things to a child’s routine, or there is a lot of confusion within the household, it drives your child crazy. We had a period of time in our lives when Giovanni was in the fifth or sixth grade and he went through the confusion of “this is what Mom said,” “these are Mom’s rules,” “this is what Dad says,” “this is what Nana says,” “this is what Grandma says,” and it was overwhelming because he had four adults plus school telling him what he could and could not do, what he should and should not do. So as a parent, you have to set the standard. I appreciate the fact that you think I should do things this way or that way, but you don’t bring it to the child. As a parent you need guidelines—yes, this is how other people think it should be done. That doesn’t mean that it’s right; that doesn’t mean that I’m right. I could be wrong, but be open enough to accept ideas and try different things.
Parenting is not easy, regardless of who is in the house, and it’s especially not easy in this day and time when kids are exposed to so much, and it’s hard to limit that. But you can’t truly limit what they want; you can’t limit the influences that they get outside of the home. All you can do is set the guidelines and lead by example and have faith that when they leave your home or when they leave the house that they’re putting on their best face and showing the world how it should be.
Yes, for me, parenting has been difficult, but I’ve had a village, and I appreciate my village. It seems small, but the amount of experience in that small village is remarkable. Giovanni has been exposed to his great-grandparents all the way down, up and down the line on both sides, everyone.
Raymond Fisher
Parenting is a journey that takes commitment, sacrifice, and a strong belief in shaping and molding lives to be productive. I take it as the ultimate responsibility, and being a spiritual person, I also take it as a gift. The greatest gift you can have in life is to cocreate another person and then nurture him and raise him in a positive way. For me it’s the driving force of who I am at this point in my life as an individual and as a person. The interesting thing about it is I’m coming to the point where my children don’t need that much effort on my part because of the foundation I laid early in their lives. I think it’s important that the responsibility of parenthood changes over time from less direction at age eighteen to more advice after age 21. It is ever evolving; that’s why I call it a journey. But the cornerstone of that, I think, is based on the foundation you lay with your children. The boundaries of respect, love and discipline come in many forms, and it’s an all-encompassing journey that constantly evolves.
Martine Gordon
My initial thought is just that it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done—the most rewarding and the hardest, simultaneously, thing I’ve ever done. For me it’s the knowledge that someone’s life and development is so heavily dependent on what you’re directly giving them at this young age. You know, my daughter is very young; it’s just the ultimate responsibility, and I really feel a lot of pressure to not mess it up. So it’s the hardest thing and simultaneously the most rewarding thing that
