Issue link: http://maconmagazine.uberflip.com/i/1534028
42 maconmagazine.com | April/May 2025 LEFT Karen and her son Oscar play, travel, advocate, and more. rewards of parenting • Allowing both parents to establish an emotional bond with the child Paternity Helps Children Financially By: • Allowing the child to qualify for benefits, such as the father's health insurance, Social Security or military benefits • Allowing the child to receive financial support from both parents The suggestion that my child does not already have a surname that reflects his identity and heritage is the comic/tragic assumption that legitimacy can only be passed through the father. This is a political treatise. It is a treatise in concert with a long history of racist public policies—a la the Moynihan report—that created stereotypes of "illegitimate" Black single mothers and "broken" Black families. This paternalism is one in which the father-state simultaneously imposes his authority in the absence of a "proper" father while rejecting the father's financial responsibility. I have been tempted to demand our propriety—to prove just how good our family is. But instead, I've chosen illegitimacy. I reject the respectability on (but never really on) offer. I want kinship that makes such respectability nonsensical. For decades, theorists have shown how moral panic over marriage (and I might add single cat ladies) reveals the ways in which traditional coupledom acts as the foundation of the United States. Not we the people, but we the (straight) couple. Be coupled, we are commanded by politicians, reality tv, chastisements from family, and tax codes. But, once you are coupled, you are on your own; for you the couple must become for one another alpha and omega–each other's best friend, partner, lover, nursemaid, social worker, and financial backer. This is why single mothering (along with myriad other forms of "illegitimate" caretaking) is so threatening. There is no way to caretake alone. There must be daycares, babysitters, and aunties. There must be screentime, playdates, and money, often borrowed. Single mothering is where the illusion of independence cannot reside, even as we are assumed to exist in isolation. For years during the pandemic I struggled with why I hadn't called anyone to help me clean up the pee and get my meds. And why, in our times of greatest need, many friends and colleagues had pulled away. Perhaps to be close to dependency is too strong a reminder of how precarious the couple form is. How much two is also not enough. How quickly two might become one. How needy we all actually are. But later, there was my public "oversharing," on social media. Later, mothers told me privately of their struggles. Later, dozens of people raised thousands for my medical debt. Later, friends made the need for