We Dream
Too
By Rachel
Miller-Bradshaw
 |
| www.michonnemicheaux.com |
I was an 11-year-old girl
caught up in the matrix. Self-conscious about my looks and deeply
melanin-infused skin. My appreciation for my beauty came soon when my
sixth-grade teacher Ms. Price teacher — on our first day of class — pulled out
a book on Ancient Egypt and told all the African-American and Dominican kids in
the class that we would learn about our real history.
I spent a lot of my young
years as a dreamer—obsessed with cartoons and writing poetry. I liked dolls but
I never played house. I never envisioned myself as Molly the homemaker. I
witnessed dysfunction in my home for many years, which eventually made the
difficult transition to a single-mother home. I didn’t know what a stable,
healthy, two-parent home looked like—something I rarely saw in Harlem, where I
lived as a child.
During my formative years, I
recognized that my self-esteem and would have been more solid if I had a loving
father around to dote on me. The large numbers of fatherless homes in our
community hurts the progress of Black folks in America. From its inception
during slavery, the Black Family in America morphed into a traumatic and
unstable structure.
This MLK season, I dream of an
American society in which little Black girls and Black boys don’t suffer
abandonment issues because they lack the loving and positive presence of both
their parents. I want them to grow up to be more psychologically sound than the
generations before, devoid of family baggage. In a trying world, family must be
our safe haven—a foundation to prepare and to protect us.
My dream requires a serious
national discussion, more fatherhood/single motherhood organizations, and an
effort by our entire American society to restore the importance of two-parent
households. As adults, we must work to provide better environments for our
children than the ones that we knew.
I hold great hope for the future because
many of us do our best to better the family experience for our young people—a
powerful contribution to the future of our nation.
