Fiftieth birthday gift idea

One man examines what it means to be a father without his child

i wake up each morning and think about Aiesha, first thing. I haven't spoken to her in a month, but all her messages are still saved on my answering machine. There is a T-shirt in the exact spot she left it on her last visit three months ago. I still tell her that she is my favorite person. Aiesha is 8, spoiling for 9. She is my daughter, once removed.

In my wide-eyed youth I subscribed to such naive notions as love makes one a parent, and "23 chromosomes don't make you Daddy." I believed that fatherhood is created every morning at 6:00 A.M., when you creak out of bed to crack eggs, rattle pans and let yourself be hustled into granting your kid ten more minutes of sleep. I still believe that genes don't make the parent, but now I ask, what does a voided wedding vow make me?

If you listen to the running dialogue on talk radio, in barbershops and from pulpits, the American father has been dispatched, part of some planned obsolescence, done in by feminism and sperm banks. The old Dad model has been discontinued in favor of a newer, sleeker, single-parent alternative. I don't subscribe to that theory, but I do think we're in danger of becoming a society of temporary families. We're full of books and how-to guides that make it easier for people to survive the end of a marriage, but as a consequence, we run the risk of making divorce a cure-all for marital woe.

I know Aiesha because her mother, Shana, was my college girlfriend, and I broke up with her and then years later found myself wishing for her again. She was wild and beautiful, the opposite of my self-conscious, bookish ways. We were done in less than six months but stayed in touch with each other. Five years later I moved to New York for graduate school. When we threw a surprise party for my mother's fiftieth birthday, I invited Shana, and she showed up with a buoyant 2-year-old who had impossibly round cheeks and whose favorite word was no! As in "You are adorable." "No!"

Soon Shana and I were hanging out again, back to our old routines. When I occasionally spent the night, I slept on the couch so that Aiesha wouldn't get the wrong idea. The first night we slept together again, Shana told me that she wasn't looking for another short-term relationship. I understood; neither was I. At some point in those first months of being reunited, I realized that I loved Shana again and that Aiesha had already chosen me as her father. Shana and I got married.

I think men secretly want to raise their daughters to be the kind of women who were out of their league when they were young. And so it was with Aiesha. But really, it was about the words, teaching her the words to old classics like "Ain't No Sunshine" and giggling through the part where Bill Withers sings, "And I know, I know, I know, I know, I know ..." Kids dig repetition. She turned out volumes of poems, plays, songs and stories that were duly typed up and E-mailed to all my friends, coworkers and distant relatives as evidence of her burgeoning literary genius.

There were signs early on, now that I think of it, that the marriage was headed south. I saw in gradual degrees that my wife was less and less interested in our relationship and knew that I was at the point where many a man would've bailed. I chose to work harder. When the newspapers ranked Aiesha's public school in the bottom half of those in the city, I reduced my grad classes and worked part-time to send her to a private school. When Shana was stuck at work a few hours before her women's-group meeting was to be held in our apartment, I came home early and surprised her by cleaning up and preparing the food. I was like an outfielder who knows that the ball is headed for the bleachers, but smashes face first into the wall trying to catch it anyway. In my world, there was no such thing as a warning track.

A marital cliche: You're in the kitchen cooking dinner when your spouse returns home from a hard day at the office and announces that it's over. Just like that. It's a scenario that any writing instructor worth his salt would trash, but that's really how it went down. The exact words: "I don't love you the way a wife should love a husband, and I would like you to move out." Then silence. I was broken for a long time afterward. Shana had married me because I was the proverbial good catch, not out of a desire to build a lifelong connection. When Shana asked me to leave, I stared at her blankly for about five minutes. When she told Aiesha that I was leaving, Aiesha asked, "Does this mean I don't have a father anymore?"

There are easy answers. Friends (mainly female) tell me once a father, always a father. But experience tells me differently--that I could just as easily be evicted again, that Shana could remarry and leave me a parental second-string player. Experience has taught me that ex-stepfather does not exist as a census category. That I no longer qualify for a Father's Day card.

Looking at it now, I know that I deeply and profoundly love that little girl. I understand the weight of the bond between parent and child. I also know that I was trying to single-handedly undo the mythology directed at Black men, that I wanted a family that would laugh past the bleak statistics and damning indictments of Blackmale irresponsibility. When I married Shana, Aiesha had not seen her biological father in more than a year. As far as I know, she has not seen him since. I saw tragedy in her growing up as yet another fatherless Black girl, another child whose father abandoned her in favor of emptier pursuits. I wanted to be like my old man, quietly heroic in raising my brother and sister and never once letting on that they were not his biological kin. I wanted to be a keeper.

These days, I know that my relationship with Aeisha is unwieldy, that it is sagging under the weight of its own ambiguity. Fatherhood is all about watching the daily changes, the new word learned or noticing that now she doesn't have to stand on a stool to reach her toothbrush. But I know that in a year or two my work may require that I move to Texas or California or Alaska, and it's possible that I'll fade from her preadolescent memory.

Christmas is a hard, bright day, and I wake up alone with my head heavy from the previous night's bender. Aiesha has left me a message saying that she has a gift for me and could I please come today so she can give it to me. Her mother and I have lived apart for six months, and I don't know Aiesha as well as I did in June. In another six months, she'll be a different child altogether.

When I see her outside, riding her bike in the parking lot of her building, I think how she has grown tall and slender as a reed. I bought her a watch, yellow and red, but with no cartoon characters because Aiesha fancies herself a sophisticate. The note says, "Dear Aiesha: My father once told me that keeping track of time is the first step to becoming an adult. I hope you think of me when you wear this." She gives me a gift card, and written in her best 8-year-old scrawl it says simply, "I love you." She's telling me the plot points to her latest story, the one she wants to publish when she's 12. A moment later she wants me to toss her into the air and pleads "one more time" until my deltoids are burning. She still remembers most of the words to "Ain't No Sunshine." Today, she's my daughter. Today.

William Jelani Cobb is finishing his Ph.D. in history at Rutgers University in New Jersey. His first book, The Harold Cruse Reader, will be published by St. Martin's Press in February 2002.

"I don't think we can address any of the other issues confronting Black people if we can't devise ways to make our families work," says William Jelani Cobb, who writes about being an ex-stepdad in "Alone" (In Other Words, page 128).