SEVEN

Try, Try Again

Ray Picardi is a thirty-six-year-old clean-shaven Irish American of average weight and height. He lives in Fishtown, next door to his mother in a small row home filled with carefully preserved furnishings he inherited from his grandmother. The neighborhood has been solidly white and working class since the American Revolution, but its residents’ fortunes have changed quite dramatically over time.

Ray is the son of a machinist who pulled down quite a decent family wage when Ray was a boy. But by the time Ray came of age, only a trickle of young Fishtown males could follow their fathers into semiskilled labor on the factory floor. These days virtually the only employers willing to hire men like Ray are filling slots in low-skilled, low-paying occupations. A decade prior to our conversation—at about the time his son Johnny was conceived—Ray was camped out in an abandoned Kensington row home that his uncle owned, handy because it was right next to the vacant lot where the construction company that employed him parked its trucks. It wasn’t as bad as it sounds—he had made the place habitable by stocking each room with a kerosene heater and by hooking up the electricity and water illegally, valuable know-how in a neighborhood where 25 percent of the real estate lies abandoned, a haven for squatters.1

Ray had met Jill on New Year’s Eve when she was tending bar at Dempsey’s and he was there celebrating with friends. Jill had asked to go back to his place that night, but because his quarters weren’t quite suitable for company, “I came over to her apartment, and I just stayed over.” When we ask Ray to reflect on how an overnight encounter led so quickly to the conception and birth of a child, he shrugs. “You know, shit happens.”

Johnny is now nine, and Ray pays his share of the boy’s keep out of the ninety-six dollars a day he makes as an under-the-table roofer when the weather is OK for outdoor work. Jill is still working at the bar, keeping the neighborhood drunks at bay, but she also spends much of her free time there, which poses a problem. Seven years sober, Ray is “done with the bar scene” and while the two still “talk,” Ray says they aren’t really together. In fact, Jill maintains her own apartment and Johnny lives mostly with Ray. Jill, whose bar-scene lifestyle leaves little time for parenting, has more or less surrendered Johnny to his care, though since the two never married, Jill holds legal custody.

Like a reenactment of the classic 1979 movie Kramer vs. Kramer, Johnny has become Ray’s world since Jill has begun to fade from the scene, and being a father consumes nearly all his free time. Each morning he wakes the boy at 5:00 a.m., gets him dressed, and deposits him next door to eat breakfast with his grandmother while Ray catches a 6:00 a.m. ride to the construction site. After school Johnny knows to go straight to Grandma’s, where he plays with his cousins—Ray’s sister and her two children live with his mother—until Ray comes home from work. Father and son nearly always eat in, and after washing the dishes Ray takes the radio outside to sit on the stoop and unwind while he supervises his son’s play. Then it’s homework, a bath, and early bedtime.

But Ray is still not quite the father that Ritchie Weber and Holloway Middleton have proven to be. He has an older child he hasn’t seen for years. We ask Ray to recall his time at Kensington’s Mastbaum High, where he met that child’s mother, Regina Walker, in their junior year. Ray says it was not exactly love that brought them together. He describes her as “one of the school hos” and says he was just one of the boys who “got laid in the abandoned building across the street from the school,” thanks to Regina. When this extracurricular activity resulted in the birth of their son, David, Ray says he decided to “do the right thing”: drop out of school, find a job, and move in with Regina and her family. “I was living with her and her mother and her brothers and two dogs,” he recalls, “all in a small row house in Fishtown.”

Ray found a job with his uncle’s roofing business and proved to be a quick study; however, he not only deftly aced the skills of the roofing trade but also quickly mastered the lifestyle. “We’d go to work, go bang a roof out, coat it, and go home—go home and get drunk!” It was this last part of the daily ritual that eventually got him in trouble. By the time David turned four, “Regina and I were battling all the time because I would be drinking. I was still roofing and still staying with her, but one night I drank a whole bottle of blackberry brandy, and I got pretty rowdy and radical with her. Her brother threw me out.”

After the blackberry brandy mayhem brought an end to the relationship with Regina, Ray came by occasionally to see his son, but the visits always managed to end in discord. He recalls one visit in particular: “I drove by her house and David—who was five at the time—was outside, and I stopped to talk to him. Regina got pretty indignant and upset about one thing or another. I still remember leaving because driving away brought tears to my eyes.” Why does this day stand out in his memory? Ray says simply, “That is the last day I seen him.”

Now David is just about to turn eighteen. To excuse the fact that he hasn’t seen his son for more than a decade, Ray says, “Regina moved out of the area and until this day I still don’t know where they moved to. I try to think what David looks like now. Somebody seen him and said he is about six foot two and that he weighs about three hundred pounds. They say he is a big bad boy.” It is fairly clear from our conversation, however, that Ray could have found David if he had tried—after all, Regina’s family still lives in the area, and the “somebody” who tells Ray he’s seen the boy is a local. Does Ray simply lack the desire? Does he find the prospect of confronting Regina’s strident tongue just too overwhelming? Or is his own past behavior—the drinking and mayhem that led to the breakup—simply too humiliating to recall? In circumstances like these, the path of perseverance can seem long.

Let’s turn to another serial dad, Marty Holmes, the black father of three. He sits at the table in the always-chaotic McDonald’s on Lehigh Avenue as he recounts his past in a calm and deliberate way, his contemplative manner out of sync with the scratchy, insistent pop music in the air and the nearby commotion of scraping chairs and overexcited children. When we ask about his own family background, his tone hardens. “I came from a dysfunctional family,” he says tersely. “My mom used drugs. My dad wasn’t around—he died of cirrhosis of the liver when I was fifteen.” Marty then quickly adds, “But it really didn’t have no effect on me because he was not around in my life. So I really didn’t know him. . . . But I always wanted a father figure.”

Marty seems fixated on resurrecting his role as a father figure to Rahmere, his two-year-old son by Michelle—a role he had involuntarily abdicated by landing in prison just before the boy was born. Marty is in a halfway house at present, serving out the remainder of a sentence for yet another parole violation. As part of the program, he spends part of each day searching for work, and he plans to use his first paychecks to secure an apartment where he, Rahmere, Michelle, and her two older boys can live together; “then I can see my son every day.”

To explain what went wrong with his two older kids, Marty takes us back to his own childhood and tells us that his mother was only fifteen when she had him. Due to her age the two stayed with his grandmother in Tasker Homes, the predominately black housing project marooned in the middle of white Grays Ferry. Though Marty’s parents parted when he was an infant, his mother found a steady boyfriend a few years later, and Marty looked up to the man as a role model until he succumbed to drugs and Marty “lost all respect for him.”

Despite struggles at home, Marty enjoyed school and graduated on time from Bok Vocational High, where he had taken up welding. He found his first job through the school counselor, a minimum-wage position in maintenance at the Philadelphia airport. But Marty soon realized that the slow money from the legal labor market wouldn’t be enough to get him what he really desired: the wardrobe that many other young men in the neighborhood were displaying. “Everybody in my neighborhood was dressed nice, and I wanted to be dressed nice too. I knew there was two ways of getting it: either you work for it or you stole for it. I did both; I worked and I stole.”

While Marty was working both “jobs,” he met Clarissa. “My best friend was dealing with a young lady, and I went with them one evening. We went to her house, and she had a sister—a nice looking, dark-skinned girl. I liked her and started talking to her, and we hit it off. As time went on she eventually got pregnant.” But when he and a friend were caught in the act of committing a burglary, Marty was sentenced to four and a half years in jail. His daughter Nikka was born while he was locked up, but he was able to spend a little bit of time with her and her mother after his release when she was four years old. By the time she turned six, just after Marty and Clarissa conceived their second child, Marty was charged with violating his parole—he couldn’t keep his urine clean—and was locked up again. After that, repeat parole violations made prison a revolving door. “I have an issue with authority,” he explains.

Marty was incarcerated again when Clarissa gave birth to Sterling, and it is the history of his relationship with this son that shames him the most. By the time the boy was in grade school, Marty was so deep into drugs that he had taken to living on the street and had broken off all contact with his children. One day, by chance, “my son seen me out there like that. That was a hurting thing. He said, ‘Dad, what you see in that stuff? Why would you mess with that stuff, Dad? I know that you better than that.’ I didn’t want my son to see me like that because I seen my mom use drugs. She used to shoot drugs intravenously.”

When we meet Marty he is forty and already a grandfather—Nikka, who now lives on her own, has recently had a baby, but he hasn’t seen the child yet. Since his release Marty has been attempting to mend his relationship with his daughter—his status as the grandfather has given him the courage to try and claim a role in her life—but she has made it clear that he has a lot of history to overcome. “In the beginning we were close, but after me keep getting myself in trouble going back and forth to prison, I guess she kind of gave up on me. I was never around, and I guess it hurted her. We just recently had a conversation on the phone, and I had to explain to her that I loved her dearly, and we had a little rapport. She cried and she explained why she feel that she didn’t have no dad.”

“It hurted me to hear that, but it was the truth. I don’t blame her in a way because I wasn’t there,” Marty continues. “I have been trying to incorporate myself into her life again and in her daughter’s life. She is coming around now; she is coming to accept me more. But I don’t think she is putting her all in it, because she maybe feels as though she don’t know if I am going to disappear again.” Marty has also just gotten in touch with Nikka’s eleven-year-old brother, Sterling, and last weekend the two saw each other face-to-face and spent “a little quality time.” But overall his efforts with Sterling have been tentative. Marty says this is because he is determined not to make any more promises that he can’t keep. And the boy seems uncertain too; just the other day on the phone, Sterling told his father, “losers make promises, winners make commitments.”

Marty says he deeply regrets the years away from both of his older children, especially since he had made a vow never to abandon them like his own father did. “Growing up, I was wondering what it was like to always have your dad around. I always told myself that I would be around for them. But I found myself doing to them what happened to me by me being incarcerated and not there for other reasons in the years when they were growing up and their little personality starting to develop.”

Marty’s current privileges allow him to leave the halfway house campus from 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays. He spends most of this time on outings with Michelle and their two-year-old—they can’t go over to Michelle’s mother’s house because she doesn’t want her daughter associating with Marty.2 But Rahmere isn’t responding the way Marty thinks he should. The boy is shy around him and treats him as if he is a visitor, not a dad. Michelle tells Marty to be patient, as he is still a virtual stranger to his son—yet he finds the situation deeply distressing. He blames Rahmere’s behavior on the fact that “I am not there all the time, though I want to be, and it hurts me and it upsets me.”

Marty’s efforts with Rahmere may be admirable, but what about his relationship with Nikka, whom he’s called only a couple of times, and then only recently, or with Sterling, who he has seen only once since the chance encounter on the street about four years ago? Our story is based on fathers, and not on their partners or children.³ But one might wonder what children like Ray’s son, David, and Marty’s children think about the situations their fathers subject them to. While we cannot answer this question in full, Marty’s phone call with Nikka hints at the devastation that father absence can cause in a child’s life. When Marty first contacted Sterling by phone, the boy told him, “Dad, I don’t want your money. I just want a little of your time.” Yet shortly after offering this touching statement, he made it clear he wanted a commitment, and not a mere promise, from his dad. Two-year-old Rahmere’s reluctance to treat Marty as more than a visitor, even after four months of spending weekends together, suggests hesitation as well. Is it safe to put one’s trust in a father like Marty Holmes?

What men say about the absence of their own fathers, a story we’ve told in other chapters, offers additional clues to how fatherless children may feel. These accounts can be summed up quite simply—few discount the pain of their own father’s absence and, in fact, often cite this as the source of their own father thirst. They often see unplanned pregnancy as an opportunity to take the first step toward repairing the past, vowing to become the father they wished their own had been. Marty is one of many who swore that he wouldn’t be like his own absent dad and yet has still managed to replicate his behavior.

Ray and Marty are only two of many of the fathers we met who have failed with an older child but have then tried again. Amin Jenkins, from chapter 1, welcomed the news of his oldest son’s conception, only to deny paternity once the child was born—a fateful act that led to years of separation. By the time the boy’s mother had relented and let him see his son it was too late; by then the boy was too unruly to listen to his fatherly wisdom and seemed unwilling to bond. But we might wonder how hard Amin really tried, given the potent distraction of another son—Antoine, the baby boy he had just had with his coworker Antoinette. Could it be that beyond the barriers listed in the last chapter, a new baby—with a new woman—crowds out men’s sense of obligation to the kids he already has? And even if such a man wants to perform the fatherhood role equally well with all of his children, would his limited resources allow it?

One consequence of the high rate of partner churning among disadvantaged urban men is that they are at high risk of what social scientists call “multiple partner fertility.” In fact, for couples having children outside of marriage, children by multiple partners is now the statistical norm.4 Yet almost no father in our study spread his time or financial resources equally across his kids unless they all lived in the same household.

Recall from prior chapters that men’s father thirst is strong and that they ultimately seem to want the “whole fatherhood experience”—to live with a child, observe the developmental milestones firsthand, and have a strong hand in their upbringing—rather than the part-time fatherhood, or the attenuated father-child relationships, that often result from their initial efforts. It is this unfulfilled desire that puts them at risk of repeating the series of nondecisions that will bring yet another child into the world with a new partner. But once a father gets another try at “real” fatherhood, how much time, energy, and finances will he have to devote to that new role? How much will be left over for the kids he already has, when he’s desperately trying to fulfill all the mandates of the new familylike relationship that has suddenly come into being? For a serial dad, is it better to be a great dad to one kid, particularly one he hasn’t failed yet, rather than a so-so dad to all of his kids?

For David Williams, whom we met at the end of chapter 1, the choice is clear. He is a four-time failure as a father by the time he conceives his fifth child: he has lost contact completely with his two middle children, both sons, and is now making no effort to reconnect. He only occasionally sees his daughters, now in their late teens. But he is clearly over the moon about his youngest, Julian, the boy who comes out of Winnie’s womb “spinning like a bullet.”5 The story is the same for Lacey Jones. In his youth he conceived two children just a few months apart by two different women who lived on his block: “It was back and forth. I’d mess with her for a minute. I’d go mess with the other one for a minute.” He was barely involved in the lives of his son and daughter, now seventeen and eighteen, when they were growing up, though since leaving prison last year he has managed to make a fairly strong connection with both. But he devotes nearly all of his time, energy, and financial resources to his nine-year-old, who is his heart. Now that he is living with that child, he says she has given him the precious gift of “seeing at least one of my children grow up.” “Now I’m trying to do the right things, like a law-abiding citizen.”

In light of David’s and Lacey’s stories the reader might be asking whether one, two, or even four failures aren’t enough; why are men willing to risk failure again and again, especially since unqualified success is so unlikely? But men at the bottom believe they have little to lose by playing the Russian roulette of unprotected sex once again, because even for those who will ultimately fail utterly at fatherhood and end up having no enduring connection to any biological child, the mere act of procreation ensures they will still come out ahead. Trevor, the son of a convicted bank robber and a heroin addict, is a seemingly hopeless addict himself by the age of twenty-four. This white cab driver hasn’t seen his one-year-old daughter in three months. Yet he tells us that by fathering a child, “I have done something good for the first time ever.” It is hard to imagine a life so devoid of good news that an unplanned pregnancy and the birth of a baby—a child one can’t possibly support—is viewed as a blessing, but that is precisely Trevor’s claim. Albert, a twenty-three-year-old black father of a seven-year-old child whom he finds himself visiting less and less often, sees an even greater benefit—he plans to live through his child, and in this way achieve a vicarious form of upward mobility: “My child is a better image of me, you know. What I accomplished I feel she could do twice as better. Fatherhood is like making a duplicate of yourself but just making it better.”6 Thirty-four-year-old Edwin, of black and Latino descent, has spent much of his adulthood in prison and forcibly separated from his children but now sees them occasionally. He says childbearing offers immortality. “When I first found out I was going to be a father I felt very special. I was really happy that I had something I could leave behind when I leave this planet.”⁷

At minimum, then, fathering a child is still proof that one can accomplish something of value; it still offers the opportunity to see one’s potential expressed in another, less damaged individual. And even those who see their children rarely can still usually say they are better than the “deadbeat” who has simply walked away from his children and—most important—doesn’t seem to care. Even among those who have had no contact with their kids for some time, the fact that they have not disengaged emotionally can allow them to salvage some measure of self-regard. Apple, a twenty-seven-year-old African American father of four who does janitorial work and cuts meat at the famed Pat’s Steaks in South Philly, hasn’t seen his three older children for almost four months, yet he still considers himself to be a good dad, “because I care, and I’m still willing to try.”

Yet it is vital to note that most fathers who have grown disconnected from their children are seldom satisfied with the scrap ends of fatherhood. For most, the desire to father actively—and claim the “whole father experience”—is strong. Apple, in fact, went on to father a fourth child with a new partner when the mother of his older children suddenly married another man and then began to push Apple out of the kids’ lives. Apple is not alone in his determination to engage in fatherhood in some way, even if he ends up fulfilling his goal through another child in a new relationship.

This is not to say that Apple—or hardly any man that we spoke with—intended to conceive a new child to replace the old; one does not need to be intentional to end up as a serial father. What requires intent is the feat of not producing a subsequent child in a new relationship; given the allure of children, men in Apple’s straits often seem unable to muster the willpower to do what it takes to avoid another accidental conception. And once that conception results in a birth, a new set of dynamics is set in motion that may considerably weaken a father’s commitment to prior children.

In 2009 sociologist Andrew Cherlin coined the term “marriage-go-round” to connote the predilection among Americans to marry, divorce, and remarry at such high rates.8 Men at the bottom are less likely to get married, but they are far more likely than those in the middle class to have children across multiple partnerships.⁹ These men are on a family-go-round, where good fatherhood is accomplished by moving from one child to another—by trying and trying again. As fathers fail in one romantic relationship, they usually move quickly to a new one.¹⁰ Then they find that maintaining a strong connection with children from a previous partnership is remarkably hard. When the new liaison produces a pregnancy—often “unplanned”—there is an easier option at hand and an opportunity to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

Starting in 1979 a national random sample interviewed male youth ages fourteen to twenty-two and has followed them ever since. This study, the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, gave social scientists the first reliable, representative data on the family formation behaviors of young unwed men. Economist Robert Lerman and his collaborators were the first to seize on the value of this study for exploring the lives of young unwed fathers. Lerman and Elaine Sorensen asked a particularly interesting question of these data that other scholars had not: for men in the prime family-building years who have ever had a nonmarital birth, what proportion are involved with at least one of their nonmarital children at any given time? This question was of interest to us because it represents the perspective our men take when assessing their success as fathers—they focus less on whether all their children have an engaged father and more on whether they are successfully accomplishing fatherhood in some manner with any child at a given time. In fact, it may be that the only way many can truly feel successful as fathers is to marshal nearly all their scarce resources in service of the relationship with their youngest child, especially if they are still in a relationship with the child’s mother and must also perform the role of romantic partner and sustain a household together. While fathers do circle back to reestablish relationships with older children sometimes—take Marty Holmes as an example—they seldom redeploy their financial resources in service of the restored bond, though they may devote time.

Unlike studies using children’s experiences as the denominator, which show rapidly declining rates of involvement as a child grows older (such as the figures we provided in chapter 6), a measure of what Lerman and Sorensen called “maximum involvement” revealed that for men who had ever had a nonmarital birth and were in their late twenties and early thirties (twenty-seven to thirty-four) at the time they were surveyed, fully two-thirds were seeing at least one of their nonmarital children at least weekly, while nearly three-quarters were visiting at least once a month, if not more. A substantial proportion—about half of the remaining quarter—were married and living with a child who had been born within the marriage.11

Still, these data offer only a snapshot of father involvement, which our narratives show is, in fact, highly dynamic. Longitudinal surveys should allow us to calculate what portion of time a man spends actively engaged in parenting each of his children. Yet we know of no analysis of this kind. Nor are the data that Lerman and Sorensen cite very current—their analysis ends in the early 1990s. We aren’t aware of any study that updates their figures, but there is evidence that as unwed childbearing has become more common, unmarried fathers’ rates of engagement have increased.12 The information we do have gives weight to our observation that among unmarried, disadvantaged fathers living in inner-city communities, many spend a significant portion of their family-building years actively engaged in some form of fatherhood activity.

The way Lerman and Sorensen posed their question thus turns out to be vital, since it shows that disadvantaged men’s desire to father can be satisfied, at least in part, through selective fathering, even though most children still spend much of their childhood without a father actively engaged in their lives. And it is the mismatch between these two points of view—the child’s versus the father’s—that reveals the answer to the central question that we pose in this chapter: when their good intentions aren’t fully realized, how do fathers cope with failure, and how do so many still manage to conceive of themselves as good fathers nonetheless?

Recall that Ray’s ongoing contact with Regina produced nothing but conflict—which proved too much for Ray to handle; he didn’t have the psychological resources to cope with her anger. But while Ray almost casually abandoned any attempt to stay connected with his older child, his bond with his nine-year-old is strong. As we’ve said, echoes of Ray’s story are repeated again and again in this book—with Amin Jenkins, David Williams, Lacey Jones, and Marty Holmes, to name just a few. All essentially shrug off their obligations to their older children while forging a close connection to a younger child.

This behavior is possible only because the mother is the presumed custodial parent of the child in all but the most extreme cases. Unless they utterly fail in the mother role—by becoming a drug addict, for example—women accumulate all the children they bear. The men can be more discriminating regarding which children they actively parent, but only because they have these children serially, across multiple partners. Each new partner offers a man a tantalizing opportunity for a do-over, a fresh start. The physical distance from children of past relationships is precisely what allows the “out of sight, out of mind” mentality necessary to optimistically seize the opportunity to father again, with a new partner. Why expose oneself to the trials and tribulations that Ritchie and Holloway have subjected themselves to when one can still manage to enjoy the thrill of fatherhood with a clean slate by focusing one’s efforts on a new child?

We have little direct evidence that unfulfilled father thirst prompts a conscious desire for more children with a new partner. More likely, a mere continuation of past practices—relationships that move at lightning speed, where forgoing contraception is a signal of commitment—is the cause. When fathers can’t satisfy their desire to be a fully engaged father to one child their motivation to avoid fathering another child with a new partner may be diminished. What we can show, however, is that fathers who enter into new partnerships and have more children are subsequently less likely to marshal their time and money in service of older children, a pattern also documented in analysis of longitudinal representative survey data.13 As we have noted, for men with limited means, adequate role performance in one father-child relationship seems to virtually require placing all of one’s eggs in a single basket.

It is also true that men need not have failed with one child to feel a strong pull for another. Even a relatively good relationship with a child might not fully satisfy a man’s desire for “the whole fatherhood experience.” It might be that he doesn’t get to live with his child—for some men, even regular visitation isn’t enough, and they want a 24–7 experience. It might be that they have a child of one gender but want a child of another—especially a boy. Given the conventional wisdom, one of this study’s biggest surprises is how many low-income, inner-city men seem to find children immensely attractive, and how eagerly many embrace new opportunities to father—either socially, biologically, or both, even when they already have close ties to another child.

To illustrate this point, we turn to the story of Mark Brooks. We first ran across this well-muscled sandwich maker at the Three Sisters Grocery in the Fairmount section of the city. Mark treats every hoagie he makes for his customers—mostly kids from Vaux High—as a work of art. “This is my profession right now; this is an art to me,” he says. “I am going to take pride in what I do.” The convenience store inhabits the first floor of a three-story brick building on the corner of Master and Twenty-Fifth, in a rougher part of the neighborhood. There is only a hint of graffiti tarnishing its exterior—probably because of the fresh coat of lime-green paint that envelops the bricks on the exterior of the ground floor. Mark works there each day from 8:00 to 1:00. After that he heads over to Center City to work out and play basketball—he plays point guard and swing guard in a local sports league. Fridays he coaches for the Sonny Hill Community Involvement League, founded by former star player, TV commentator, and radio personality Sonny Hill, who in 2010 was named Pennsylvania’s official “Mr. Basketball.” Hill founded the legendary youth league in the sixties to curb gang warfare in the city’s streets.

Mark has held much better jobs than this one in the past—in fact, just ten months ago he resigned from a position as assistant athletic director at Girard College, a residential school for disadvantaged children not far from Three Sisters. But the $125 a week he draws tax free from the deli, plus weekend painting jobs that bring in an additional $50 to $200, is enough for now.

Currently, three things in Mark’s life bring him joy. Basketball is obviously one. Another is his daughter, Stefanie, age eleven, the child he sacrificed college and perhaps a basketball career for. The third is Dexter, a four-year-old boy who lives down in Chester, Pennsylvania, about thirty minutes away. He is the son of a female “friend,” whom Mark has been “talking to” for a while. “There is a little boy that I call my son,” he explains. “Biologically he is not mine, but I take care of him financially, and I go see him on the weekends that I don’t have my daughter.”

There is no hint of street in this fast-talker with a pleasant smile and an open face, though he was raised in a pretty tough neighborhood—West Kensington. His mother was strict, he says, so much so that she beat Mark and his brother Luke, the two oldest of five boys, on a regular basis. After a particularly bad beating, he relates, “we said to ourselves ‘we ain’t never going to do this.’ My brother said, ‘Mark, promise me that you will never hit your kids out of anger.’ And I said, ‘You promise me that you will never hit your kids out of anger.’ We was like twelve and thirteen at that time.”

That brother, a high school athlete of some note, was shot and killed in a drug bust when Mark was twenty-one. He’s lost a cousin to drug-related violence too. But at the beginning of high school, when he began seeing his friends—older boys—go wrong, Mark decided to go a different way. “I was so scared. I didn’t think I was going to make it to twenty-five. My family,” he says, referring to a close network of aunts, uncles, and cousins, “was excellent. It was just the surroundings, the neighborhood that I was in.” So Mark kept his head down, stayed away from drugs, ruled the basketball court for Kensington High, lived to play summers in the Sonny Hill League, and graduated at nineteen. Then, after seeing him play in a summer league game, a recruiter from Wake Forest University called.

But Mark had gotten a girl pregnant and decided that he needed a job. Rather than head off to North Carolina, Mark donned a McDonald’s uniform. He was living in his grandmother’s home and his room in an attic space was relatively private, so Desiree moved in. Then he swapped the fast-food job for work cleaning office buildings and started saving so they could move to an apartment of their own. Desiree began collecting welfare and stayed home with the baby, and Mark slept mornings, played basketball in the afternoon, spent time with his family in the evenings and on weekends, and pushed a mop at night. They got the apartment and began collecting furniture, dishes, and pots and pans. Two years into this idyll, the apartment building burned to the ground.

Losing everything broke Mark’s resolve. He quit the janitorial job and for the next twenty-two days, he dealt drugs. “Why I started selling was because of my daughter—that is an excuse, true, but my daughter didn’t have nothing for that Christmas. I didn’t buy my daughter nothing for that Christmas and it sent something inside and it just totally blew my mind. If a dad loves his kids, and if he can’t get them stuff for that special occasion, it sends something through him. That is why we see a lot of murders and robberies during the time of Christmas and holidays because you got a lot of people out there acting on impulse, and it is very emotional.”

On day twenty-three Mark was arrested and found himself facing a surprisingly stiff sentence, twelve to twenty-four months. He served just over a year. Desiree and Mark were still together, or at least he thought so, and he assumed that when he returned home he could pick up where he left off. He also began to fantasize about what it would be like to surprise her with an engagement ring and then plan a wedding. The future looked so bright. But he was home only for a few days when the rumors started; someone claimed to have seen her “creeping around” with another guy while he was away. Mark asked Desiree straight out if this was so, and she vehemently denied it. But then she discovered that she was pregnant—a little too pregnant. Mark says he tried to stick it out “for the sake of my daughter,” but the sting of Desiree’s betrayal was too biting, even though he believes his decision to sell drugs was ultimately to blame for the termination of their union. “If I wouldn’t have got locked up I would have still been with her, since then it would have never happened. She would have never meet no one else, so I can’t say that the blame was hers. The blame was me and myself. I put myself in that situation.”

Mark has abided by the law in the seven years since he served his sentence. Upon release he took a job with his cousin, who painted apartments in the huge Jacobean-style Alden Park Manor complex in the Germantown section of the city. When a basketball injury prevented him from climbing a ladder, Mark was able to get a job in Alden Park’s security department, monitoring entry to the campus. Then, he wanted to spread his wings, and through a fellow league player he was able to secure an assistant manager’s job at a jazz club. When the club lost its lease, a referral from a fellow coach in the Sonny Hill League yielded an invitation to apply for the position of assistant recreation director at Girard, the boarding school for disadvantaged youth, where he worked his way up to $8.49 an hour. And recently someone else associated with the Sonny Hill League has raised the prospect of a management job with a new nursing home he is opening in about a year. Meanwhile, Mark and his cousin are trying to start their own party-starting business, which they have tentatively named Party Starters, Inc.

But Mark sees fatherhood as his primary job. He sees Stefanie every chance he gets—usually a couple of days each week and every other weekend. But he can manage the weeknight contact only if he catches her after school on her way home. Desiree is now married to the man she was seeing while Mark was in prison, and Mark doesn’t like to stop by the house for this reason. He emphasizes that when he and his daughter do meet, they spend “quality time.” As Mark shares his views with her about various things, he is careful to show Stefanie respect by treating her as his equal rather than talking down to her. They also do schoolwork; just last week the two headed to the public library, where they worked on a book report together. Mark enjoyed this outing immensely. But he still feels like he doesn’t get enough time with his daughter.

Meanwhile, he delights in “taking care of” Dexter as well, buying him gifts, outfits, and other things he needs. We note that Mark refers to the boy repeatedly as “mine” or “my son,” though he gives the boy’s mother, Kelly, the far less intimate title of “friend.” He is obviously enchanted with the boy and raves about Dexter at several points in our conversations: “He is a fun guy! He is very athletic, energetic. We just like doing things together. We get out there and be having a ball together!” he says, grinning. While visiting them down in Chester, he immerses himself in the role of surrogate father. And the four-year-old, who rarely sees his biological dad, has taken to Mark like bread to butter.

Mark is not the only one who was eager to seize the opportunity for second-chance fatherhood via another man’s child. Close relationships with social children—as Mark’s story illustrates—were quite common. And in a few exceptional cases—which prove the rule—men insisted on claiming children who weren’t actually biologically theirs, though they might have initially thought they were. Not even a negative blood test could put to rest these stubborn claims. For example, Kanye, a twenty-eight-year-old African American who is unemployed and looking for work, had his first child when he was sixteen. He says that the girl he was with wanted to have a baby for her own reasons (“just to have something, but I wasn’t thinking about having one!”). Crystal’s birth stoked the impulse to father in Kanye, but he could see his daughter only every once in a while, as her mother lived in Bensalem, a suburb northeast of the city and a fair distance from Hunting Park, where she and Kanye had met.

Several years later, when Kanye needed a place to stay, he moved into a house with Diana, a woman he met through a mutual friend. Kanye and Diana were never “together,” as Kanye recalls—“we just lived like roommates.” But the two were still “intimate” when one, the other, or both were between relationships. When Diana became pregnant, she named Kanye as the father of the child because he had a steady job and was thus more stable than the drug dealer she was seeing on and off. But when baby Sequoia turned six months old, “Suddenly this dude pop up. He was like, ‘Sequoia is mines,’ and I am like, ‘What? Get out of here!’ And he was like, ‘Diana, tell him.’ And she was like, ‘I don’t know whose it is.’ I was fighting for Sequoia. I was like, ‘No! She is mines!’ I couldn’t believe it, and we went to court and had a blood test done and come to find out she was his. But I been there raising her. That is why I feel she is mine, and I still see her today.” Sequoia is now nine years old and still carries Kanye’s last name.

Montay is a black twenty-nine-year-old father of a nine-year-old son with his former girlfriend Quetta. He has spent years trying to convince himself that Quetta’s fourteen-year-old son is also his biologically, though he admits he has no recollection of the one-night stand that supposedly produced the boy. Montay first remembers meeting Quetta when he was sixteen and she was eighteen and her oldest son was an infant. Montay was attracted to the pair, and even brought by Pampers for the baby from time to time. After drifting apart Montay saw Quetta at a party two years later and next thing he knew, they had moved in together. This is when she made her claim that Montay was actually responsible for her child. “It was when we started living together, and her baby was two, that’s when we started picking up all these back-in-the-back-in-the-back-in-the-days stuff that went on, like when we supposedly had sex that one time.”

What is most striking about Montay’s story is his eagerness to credit Quetta’s claim. “My family kept saying, ‘Don’t listen to her,’ but I was just so happy that I had a kid,” he explains. Montay’s family refused to believe the story, even after she gave birth to another son who was undisputedly Montay’s. Quetta’s mother didn’t believe it either, but Quetta kept making the claim until she decided to relocate to Florida with the kids last year. Now, she’s changed her story. “Now she all telling me that I only have one son and everything.” How does Montay respond? “I ignore it ’cause whether he’s mines or not, I’m the only father he knew growing up. And you know, Dante, he’s still like my son in my heart, whether he is or not.”

Each week Montay calls to speak with Dante and to Quetta’s middle son, Roy, the child who is definitely his biologically, though Quetta and the kids don’t always pick up the phone. “He miss me and everything, and he’s telling me his mom talking bad about me. When I call to talk to him, I hear in the background, ‘It ain’t your damn dad. I don’t know why you want to talk to him anyway.’ Dante even said, ‘Even though you’re not my dad, I will always look at you as my daddy.’ I’m like, ‘You’ll always be my son.’”

Once men like Mark, Kanye, and Montay have had a taste of fatherhood, they often fight against relinquishing any subsequent opportunity to play that role. Social fatherhood is the most common form of substitute fatherhood, but the cases of “overclaiming” children—insisting the primacy of tie which they may have thought was biological for a time—are illustrative as well. One reason why these men seem unable to turn their backs on the opportunity to father these additional children is that their relational responsibilities in these circumstances are diminished in much the same way as their financial ones are, as we discussed in chapter 4. That is, they don’t have to be a father to their girlfriend’s kids or to a child whose biological tie has been disproven. Thus, anything they do in this regard—no matter how little—is credited to their moral worth because there is no standard of obligation to measure it against.

But while men are often decidedly keen to be fathers to nonbiological children, they still hold out for an even better outcome—the whole fatherhood experience.14 A year ago, shortly after they met, Dexter’s mother became pregnant by Mark “in her tubes” and eventually miscarried.¹⁵ Mark says the experience almost destroyed him—he couldn’t function well on the job and was cited for a number of outbursts of anger. He begged for time off to recover, but his boss refused, so he simply resigned. “She lost the baby and it was really hard because I wanted my boy. Even if it was a girl [I wanted it bad]. Yeah, it was a lot of emotion. Even though I may adopt children,” he says, referring to his role as Dexter’s father figure, “I see myself having another child in the future. I see my little guy—he is mine.” Kanye went on to have another child who is now five years old, and Montay has both a two-year-old son and an infant daughter with his current girlfriend.

Serial fatherhood, in which men bring children into the world across several partnerships, seems to be the almost inevitable conclusion to a story that begins with an accidental pregnancy between two economically disadvantaged young people who are usually merely “together” and not in a “real” relationship at the time. If that relationship fails, there is little to prevent them from repeating this cycle again. And no matter what their intentions, when things get tough with the first child, men find that the new partner and baby, relationships not yet tarnished by his mistakes, offer fewer challenges and more immediate rewards.

Yet even if all these subsequent chances fail, a man will still have gained something of immense value. Like Trevor, men can believe they’ve done something good just by procreating. Like Albert, they believe they can live vicariously through the “little version of me . . . who can do twice as better.” Like Edwin, a man who fathers a child has left at least some evidence that he was on the planet. And these benefits accrue to him even if he neither supports nor visits any of his children. Regardless of how challenging their personal circumstances or structural positions, many of our men insist that fatherhood is a no-lose proposition, and this is why. And it must be said that doing something—anything at all—is always better than zero; no one expects much of him anyway. Of course, the proposition is almost certainly no-win from the point of view of the child, the child’s mother, and society.

But as Lerman and Sorensen show, most can justly claim they are succeeding at some form of fathering during the prime family building years. Serial, selective fathering offers an alternative narrative to that of father failure, but it is a reactive one. It has been shaped by a social structure that increasingly excludes these men, especially those with few skills, families of origin that have often done them harm, their own bad choices, the attitudes and orientations of the women in their lives, and the approbation or contempt that their own children may show them. For men like Ray or Marty, who’ve failed their older children profoundly, it can seem like the only road to success is embracing the opportunity to try again with someone new—and perhaps to try over and over, as David Williams has done. When the traditional markers of making it in America—home ownership, marriage, and a career—seem hopelessly out of reach, what else is there but children? And what could be better, really? As Peter Lewinski says while gazing down at his little girl, Erin, “I really don’t think I could do any better than her.”

The processes that lead to multiple partner fertility are not ones that are deliberately chosen. No one we spoke with set out to become a serial father. Instead, nearly all the circumstances these men find themselves in just seem to “happen,” with little volition involved. And much of what ends up occurring goes against men’s own stated principles—they show widespread adherence to mainstream norms, such as the belief that a man should put off fatherhood until he has a career and is married. If the romance with the baby’s mother goes sour, he quickly begins “affiliating” with another woman he happens to meet on the stoop, outside the corner store, or down the block. And when one thing leads to another, he’ll likely once again leave the responsibility for birth control to her. He’ll fail once more to initiate the conversation that would provide the assurance that she’s on the patch or the pill. When “shit happens,” he’ll again find himself responding to the news of an accidental pregnancy with joy, or at least acceptance—he may even encourage her to have the baby when she is struggling over how to resolve the pregnancy. And if she decides to carry the pregnancy to term, he’ll view it as a chance to redeem the past, to accomplish something good. None of this is the right way to go about things, he’ll say, but as one father in this situation said, “You’ve got to make the best of what you’ve got.”16