MOTHER’S DAY THREAD: About half of all mothers of color in the US are single mothers. That failure is caused by a crisis of chronic boyhood in our communities. Most of us who were raised by single mothers grew up angry (whether we knew it or not). But we often misplace our blame.

Our mothers are who we saw daily, so we saw all of their mistakes. It was easier to blame those mistakes than it was to understand (1) the very real pressure that they were under and (2) that they’re doing the best that they can with the hand that they were dealt by our fathers.

To look at that reality with open eyes as a child is to see that you aren’t in full control of your own destiny. And that’s a truly terrifying thing for a child. So we armor up to that reality by doing all we can to maintain the illusion of full control in our lives.

We come to believe that we can only trust ourselves, because we see that nobody around us is perfect and everybody is suffering in some way, shape, or form. Most importantly, we see our mothers struggling to raise us and it’s easy to tell that the burden they carry is too much.

So we try to become the “man of the house” because there just isn’t one. We see the things most children expect as luxuries we can’t afford. 8 hours a day in school? That could be a job. They call it ADHD, but really we’re just checked out of class because we’re locked in on life

Everytime a young black man needs help, there’s often a woman of color offering it. But we don’t know how to accept help because we haven’t yet allowed ourselves to admit that we need it. And how could we? Moms is still struggling. She needs it, not us. Plus, we *are* the help.

Oftentimes, it comes full circle when we meet young women of color who are strong like our mothers are because they also lived without a real man in the house. In essence, they survived just like our mothers did—and just like we did.

So we’re *all* really just surviving, but we all trick ourselves into believing that we’re thriving. In a lot of ways, black and brown poverty is like social media: everybody puts on their best face for the world while suffering internally.

It only stops, for any of us, when we begin to realize that our real face *is* our best face. But when you wear a mask 24/7, nobody can help you see that. In our minds, every interaction risks the mask being taken off and our weakness—our vulnerability—being revealed to all.

So we repel *anything* that causes us to believe that our mask—our armor—is in danger. And we do so aggressively if necessary. For example, when an unexpected pregnancy makes us feel like we might do as our fathers did, we repel that feeling one way or another.

We either run from that feeling or we fight it. Both options risk creating another single-mother situation. If we run, it’s a certainty, and if we fight it by trying to get what we need in order to provide for our families, the end result is all too often either prison or death.

That’s the reality that our mothers knew all too well—and they knew it before we were born. It’s the reality that caused us to armor up in the first place. And it’s the reality that we as men perpetuate if we fail to take our masks off in adulthood.

In short, us men of color raised by single mothers need our masks when we are boys, but they become our greatest weakness as we become men. It’s fear that keeps them on, and it takes courage to remove them. But once we do, all we see is that we are, in fact, the survivors.

And here’s the kicker: the reason we survived is because our mothers donned the same mask, but did so for a different reason. Our masks are borne out of fear, theirs are borne out of the love they have for us. It is our *moral duty* as men to return the favor to our mothers.

But even more than that, it is also our moral duty to return the favor to women of color more generally, as their masks are indistinguishable from our mother’s, we just view them differently. They are *all* the mothers of our communities, and it’s time they had some real help.

After all, it was our attempt to help our mothers that gave us our masks in the first place. But we got it wrong. Mother’s Day is a perfect time to admit that mistake, remove the mask, and just be who we are. The women of our communities have made sure that there’s a space for us

Let’s just be grateful and begin to create a space for them that truly and appropriately honors the suffering they have long borne for us.

/endthread