Jumping the Broom to the Nth Degree

Thursday's Thought Provoker

I remember when I first saw the movie Jumping the Broom.  It actually felt good to see that my problem was not an isolated incident.  I felt sad that it was obviously a large enough epidemic to warrant a fairly successful movie.  I personally feel that this problem, mothers unwilling and unable to 'release' their sons, stems from the lack of fathers in the Black community.  The absence of a father causes women to raise their sons to be their 'man' and after years of raising your 'little man' to be the type of man his father never was, they do not want to let some other woman have the fruits of their labor.  You also have an epidemic of women that choose to inflict all the anger and pain they feel towards the father of the child, out on the child, by berating and emasculating him to the point he never knows what it means or how to be a man or father.

While my father wasn't the absent father you usually hear about, he failed to meet my mothers expectations as a husband, father, and man on a fairly regular basis.  This lead to periodic 'breaks' in the relationship which made me the 'man' of the house often.  I must admit this lead me to hang on the tit much, much too long.  Kinda like the 'mama's boy' in Think Like a Man, I found myself in a situation where I let my mother run off women because of how close our relationship remained at my age.  When I finally got off the tit and on my own, my mother couldn't take it and this was the result after 7 years.


"My Mother-in-Law Believes I'm a Killer"


It is so important that we figure out how to get fathers back into the business of raising children.  The lack of fathers in the home is at the core of so many of the ills of our society.  As much as a appreciate those men out there serving as active daddies in baby mama situations, experiences like my own call attention to the need for active husbands in the home in order to allow the balanced raising of children.  Imagine a world where every child had an active and involved father in the home that rocked as a husband.