T A B L E++T A L K

Do you look away when other parents seem to neglect or mismanage their children? Discuss the thin line between intervention and interfering in Table Talk

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R E C E N T L Y

Peep show
By Kate Moses
A passion for Peeps led to my loss of innocence
(04/10/98)

Not waiting to inhale
By Dawn MacKeen
Joycelyn Elders on why teens are going up in smoke
(04/09/98)

Dear Daughter: Go to jail. Love, Mom
By Lori Leibovich and Dawn MacKeen
Pro-family advocates would rather pass judgment on Monica Lewinsky's mom than on the government forcing her to testify against her child
(04/08/98)

The water lilies look splotchy up close
By Polly Shulman
The artist is the hero in these sensuous children's books
(04/07/98)

The fun police
By Diane Lore
Being your kid's killjoy isn't as fun as it's cracked up to be
(04/06/98)

ARCHIVES

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Mamafesto
By Camille Peri
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

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BOYS WITHOUT MEN | PAGE 2 OF 3

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When I first began investigating gang life, I recognized right away that, although there are many causal threads leading to the tragedy of gang warfare, one thread is most consistently present: The majority of gang members are boys raised without fathers. Without male role models, they turn to each other and the street in order to fabricate their manhood. The results are chronicled each night on the evening news.

In the beginning of my research, I failed to connect the homeboys' problems with the kind of issues my own son was likely to encounter. After all, they were born into grinding poverty, raised by overwhelmed mothers who found themselves trapped in a permanent underclass. Will, on the other hand, was being brought up in an enlightened, affluent neighborhood, with a caring extended family and a mother who attempted daily to open to him a myriad of possibilities. Looking back, I think my inability to see obvious points of similarity was partly denial. It was also partly a result of the fact that Will was still young, and the no-father crisis had yet to reach gale force.

Following the bully incident I began to see a different picture. Surely, my son was in no danger of becoming a gang member. But what of more subtle threats to his soul and psyche that were looming outside the periphery of my gender-specific vision? After all, most of these homeboys had caring mothers too. Yet each spoke of the loss of the primary male in their life as an unhealable wound that caused pain beyond reckoning. How could I be so naive as to believe that the pain -- although acted out differently -- was any less for my kid?

Will's dad and I divorced when Will was 4. Even then, my ex was alcoholic, undependable, not the kind of guy who was ever going to coach the neighborhood softball team. I hoped, after the divorce, I'd remarry in a few years. Then Will would have a new male role model in the terrific husband/stepfather I'd no doubt soon meet. In the meantime, I made sure he had plenty of contact with his grandpa, my own dad and my brother. But then the years came and went. My dad died. My ex had the aneurysm. And I didn't remarry.

After the bullying, it began to occur to me that remarriage might be an ever-receding mirage that would come after Will's most crucial need for a father had already passed, if it came at all. Suddenly each interview I conducted with a gang member felt unnervingly instructive. "By the time I was 12," one homeboy told me, "I thought I was the man a' the house, an' ain't nobody gonna tell me what to do. If you the only vato in the house, you grow up thinkin' you the man. An' you don't know a damn thing about being a man."

I cried as I drove home from that particular conversation, frightened because I already saw inklings of the pattern in Will -- a dislike of teamwork, the hard-headed desire to do things only as he saw fit, a visible well of loneliness that I often couldn't penetrate -- and I dreaded what such signs might imply. In the early years of childhood, a male child can cling to his mother. During the pre-pubescent years, he must push away and look to his father. But what about the boys who have no dads to turn to? Some become mama's boys. Others spend a lifetime proving that they are not. When a boy is at that age when he should be identifying with the father, and there is no one, who does he understand himself to be? If he isn't mama's boy, he must be nobody's boy.

Of course, I knew that plenty of guys grow up without fathers and turn out perfectly fine and happy. When I ran across their profiles or biographies, I'd try to squirrel away each new example as a hedge against my worry. But, in truth, the successes of far-away men seemed too abstract. I needed to see some happy endings at closer range before I could believe they had any real significance for me or for Will.

N E X T__P A G E: Can ex-gangsters become role models?