As a child I often wondered why my mother was single - was it because of her head strong take no prisoners attitude? Was it because she was a single mother of two? Or was it because she is African? Thoughts like that aren’t the ones any child should process before he even learned how to tie a shoe lace, but I’m sure many black men will find a way to relate to those opening lines.

My mother is a beautiful black woman, not just because she is my mother, she is beautiful because she is. Men came around but they left - as a child I never knew why? I can only imagine how hard it must have been for her, and by extent I understand how strong a person she truly is. Because no matter the hardship, no matter the weather, sunny, rainy or a pesky day of snow, hail and sleet she made sure to always have food on the table – we always had a roof over our heads.

My mother and I aren’t very close these days, our separation started off small, like an inch, eventually inches grew to meters, meters led to miles and right now there are no calls made during birthdays, holidays, Mother’s and Valentine’s Day – just the knowledge that she is out there somewhere. I can’t begin to grasp how bad I feel for the separation but it’s not about me, to her it must be a terrible feeling, as if she did something wrong.

Throughout my adult years I have lived with my father, growing up in the ghetto, my friends surely had their various family problems but in eachother we found solace, brotehrhood and friendship. We all started off naturally attracted to black women but as boys we all went through our fair share of dramatic episodes with black girls. We all found out different truths about dating black women, we all share our experiences but often were left to wonder, why? Today’s black women are the result of years upon years of having to be looked down on, brutally oppressed, depressed, dragged through the mud, vilified, beaten, stressed, raped, hung, sold, and then spat on.

In today’s society black women aren’t accepted unless they have something that makes them feel like they belong, weave, make-up to light up her skin, bloody cheekbones and even blue colored eye contacts for the less insecure ones. Traits she must add to tone down her own - imagine a life where we can’t go out unless we place a garbage bag over our heads? To further emphasize how bad that image is I ask you, how much is a garbage bag worth to you? Shouldn’t be much unless you need to throw the garbage out. The result of having to put on a garbage bag over her head definitely brings about its negative side-effects. As she grows older she first has to watch her mother put on that garbage bag daily, eventually she gets forced to do it herself. She resists it at first but eventually learns to accept it as the norm, and in that norm she often loses herself - Black Woman Gone. 

Now add the power of the media where black men like Tyler Perry strongly misrepresent her, add even MXyMAG.com where black women are under-represented, It’s sad to see that reality shows are the only medium she is acknowledged – as long as she is ripping another black woman’s weave out. She isn’t put in music videos unless she has a big butt and in most cases is scantily clad, shaking it while black men in positions of power are disrespecting her.

It doesn’t get much better from here - most of those men don’t really have power, they’re just high off tasting cash flow for their first times, but unfortunately to her the perception may not be that way. I’m sure some of them have children to feed with next to no support from their baby’s father. Other men are in jail for most of their prime time, have aids, are deadbeat, taken by women of different races, or are flat out gay.

To add more salt to the injury – there is an increasing number of black men who are giving up on her, saying she’s not worth the baggage.

Baggage? All these years of being down, oppressed, depressed, dragged through the mud, vilified, beaten, stressed, raped, hung, sold, and then spat on, that’s why mother is the way she is, black women are angry, others bitter and paranoid because they have something to prove. That doesn’t mean I’m a saint, no matter how much I try to respect her, I fear that I have contributed my fair share of mistakes to this ugliness, but how many of us are willing to bypass the thickness of our pride and take such a level of responsibility in a broken black society? 

The hardest thing in life is hearing friends tell me that she is not worth the trouble anymore. It hurts, it reminds me that a man should have been strong enough to step up to my mother, hold on to her tight, and tell her how much she is worth and how important she is, I know that as strong as she is, hearing that would have gone a long way and therein lies my shame – I am a black man and I haven’t done that enough for her, told her I love her, how much she means to me, that she is important.

In the original Black Woman Gone I compare relationships to a car – that the woman’s role as the passenger is equally important, because if he drives alone he may not know where to go and fatigue won’t carry him as far as he should. Two people can’t steer the same car, it wasn’t designed that way, but it’s all reaction, her responses to the stones this world throws at her.

Black woman gone, in order to maintain a level of control she has gone fiercely independent and therefore she must drive the car, but in my head I’m a man, it’s my role to drive and that’s where we collide – I guess I’m not as submissive as I would like to be.

Another black woman has gone away from me just recently – since she left I have sat here to reflect on that. I have concluded that she didn’t have to go, we could have worked things out, but why so stubborn?

I’m tired of crashing cars.

The seeds implanted in me by my peers are growing stronger – Inception.

Black women are going because being with them at times feels like marching on eggshells, their standards are impossible to deal with, it’s as if I have to leap skyscrapers in a single bound, be stronger than a locomotive just to get her attention - and though it’s true that I have to be a MAN to catch a woman I must remind her that the reason Superman was a superb man was because a woman anchored him down and the real reason she loved him and married him is because in Clark Kent he represents a sense of humble and humility.

He was more of a man because he had a woman worth fighting for, this woman understood how important it is to be the passagenger, guiding him through his highway of obstacles – she motivates him forward, the same way Michelle Obama motivated Barrack to become President Barrack Obama… the first black president.

I’m not saying for black women to push us all to become the first black presidents of the free world, I’m saying that her being there will push us to become, laborers, architects, engineers, designers, scientists, lawyers and doctors. Good men birth good children, like those kids by the Huxtables and black women derserve good men. In the name of those images I have tried to prove my friends wrong – but with another black woman gone I have failed again…

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