a father's love BY RAMONA ROBERTS
T
here’s always a conversation to be had when it comes to fatherhood in the black community. 24-Year-Old Kyshon Johnson used her story with her father to make that conversation more common and comfortable. Through her platform, The Other Halfs, Johnson created a safe space for black women and men to openly discuss the impact of a father’s love or the lack thereof. “Whether your relationship was positive negative or non-existent, this is a safe space for you to self-reflect, connect with likehearted people, and learn more about yourself.” Kyshon explains that her father was incarcerated on and off for a total of 14 years of her life. “So we used to talk through the phone a lot. We wrote letters, and outside of our relationships in my environment I never really saw positive fatherchild relationships. My closest girlfriends, none of us had fathers that were really active in our lives, so it was almost as if I didn’t feel like I was missing anything by not having my father’s love present, because no one around me saw it...our mothers had given us everything we needed.” As a result, Johnson didn’t always realize this space was needed, especially for her specifically... until she did. “It wasn’t until I studied abroad in 2012 in Spain, and I had to live with a host family, and that’s where I met my host father. For the first time in my life I lived in a two-parent household and I got to see a positive father-child relationship between my host father and my two host sisters. They didn’t have a lot of cares in the world because they knew that they had this father that was a protector. Their personalities were solidified, they were so goofy with their dads so when they would go out into the world, they weren’t trying to be other people, they already knew who they were because their father had cultivated this personality in the household. They didn’t really seek or put too much emphasis on romantic relationships or their value and worth
10
on these romantic relationships because they had this super-strong bond with their father.” After returning to the U.S., Johnson was motivated to learn how her relationship with her father was impacting her. In the process of doing research, she struggled to find resources that catered to the black community and the topic of absent fathers. This was what pushed her to create her own resource. Through The Other Halfs platform, Kyshon has interviewed 100 different women and 50 different men all around the country. She described a few things that stood out to her throughout her interview series. “The overall thing I would say I have learned is that children remember everything. One of the first questions that I ask in my interview is “what are your first memories with your father” and I think of the, I’ll say 150 people that interview initially, that everyone’s answer started at about two to fiveyears-old. And the things that they remembered, they may not have remembered all the details, but they remembered how their father made [them] feel.” When talking to men specifically Johnson explains the word abandonment came out a lot. “They felt abandoned by their father. One if he wasn’t present, but also if he was present but he wasn’t emotionally present.” She continued to explain how this abandonment would show in their romantic lives. “A lot of them said that as they started to date they started to use women to fill voids, and they started to fear that the women would leave them or that people close to them would leave them. So one of the strategies they would have is that they would try and leave people before they leave them, or leave any relationship that in any way triggered or reflected what they saw growing up in relation to their father.”
THE SQUEEZE
