A Father First: How My Life Became Bigger Than Basketball (24 page)

But why not dream?

Oh, and then there were the beautiful Italian women. Okay, so I’m speaking of appreciation. Yes, Siohvaughn and I were still together, still serious and seeing each other during college breaks and on holidays when we stayed at her house. But I should repeat: I was nineteen and getting ready to come into my own as a college athlete; not to mention a red-blooded male who was raised to value and admire women in general.

Anyone would have agreed that I was nowhere near ready to be in a long-term committed relationship. I did care deeply for Siohvaughn. We’d grown up together and had the romance of first love that no one else could ever replace. Her home had become my second home, her mother a motherly figure in my life. None of that was in question. Maybe I assumed that we’d break things off naturally with her at Eastern Illinois and me at Marquette.

That assumption showed how naïve I was—and also how much I didn’t want to have a confrontation. Siohvaughn’s energy could be exciting and entertaining. She was a strong young woman and I had grown up around strong women so I liked that about her. But I was also seeing that she could be unpredictable; her temperamental, mean side came out every now and then, when she felt jealous or insecure, and that concerned me. Besides that, I could feel the dynamics of the relationship changing. Where I had been the one who needed her, once I arrived at Marquette that was no longer the case, and she was the one who was in the position of needing me more. As time went on, she would begin to grab for more control—especially the more I grew and wanted independence.

The changing balance of control had become clearer to me early in the summer before I left for training camp. To complicate matters, Siohvaughn’s last months at college hadn’t gone well and she was not returning. So I put thoughts of breaking up on the back burner and stayed put as the quiet, loyal boyfriend. By avoiding drama—yeah, she had a dramatic side—and deferring to her, my attitude became one of “why rock the boat?” Instead I focused on her loving, fun, exciting side.

Toward the end of my training camp in Florence, I woke up in the middle of the night after a dream that recalled some of our fun. In the dream, Siohvaughn reminded me of that night of pleasure by announcing she was pregnant. Unable to get back to sleep, all I thought about was—what if it is true? There had been that night after school let out when we decided against using birth control because the timing was safe. There was no way that I could be a dad at my age! Everything that I’d just spent the last year working toward would be in jeopardy. Again. I’d have to quit school and get a job to support a child and that would be the end of college, not to mention basketball.

By morning, without much sleep at all, I calmed down, finally convincing myself that this was only a dream and my worry was ridiculous.

A couple of days later, I went to a pay phone in the residence hall to call her at a prearranged time.

When Siohvaughn picked up, she sounded nervous and excited at the same time as she greeted me by saying something like, “I wanted to tell you before you got home . . .”

I stopped her there, saying, “I already know. You’re pregnant.”

She was mystified. How could I have possibly known?

I told her about the dream and admitted my fear that a baby in our lives at our ages, nineteen and twenty, was as bad as the timing could get. Not just for me. Siohvaughn had decided to transfer to Marquette and had her education to complete, her career goals to explore. We both cried, resolving to figure things out once I returned.

During the trip home, I kept to myself, trying to come up with solutions in my head. To little avail. All my years of vowing to break the cycle of babies having babies, one that ran in my family and community, had gone down the drain. So, too, were all those promises to myself to be different as a father and to be able to welcome my children into a life less uncertain than mine had been.

Yet, with all of those thoughts tearing me up inside, I was still also in awe. Nothing could have prepared me for that moment of revelation, of knowing—
Oh, my God, me a father!

As soon as I returned, I had to report to Marquette for preseason training with the team and with Coach Crean.

After about an hour of watching us go through drills, Coach C blew his whistle and called for a break. “Let’s go, Wade,” he barked, pointing toward the exit, meaning he was not happy with me.

I was a mess. Whatever he’d been yelling at us for the last half hour, I hadn’t heard. My mind was racing, my heart slamming against my chest, my stomach tied up in knots, as it had been for days. I had so much respect for Tom Crean and he had risked so much to have me on the team. How could I tell him that my days on the court were about to be numbered?

Coach C answered that question as he led me out into the hallway next to the gym. Looking much more concerned than mad, he peered through his glasses into my eyes, asking, “What the hell’s going on, Dwyane?”

In broken thoughts and half sentences, I told him everything: that I wasn’t ready, that my girlfriend and I were high school sweethearts, how I’d made a promise to be different from fathers who bring children into the world and then aren’t there to raise them, how having a baby now would make it impossible for me to play basketball at the level the team deserved and still be able to support a family.

Coach Crean let me go on without saying a word. Then finally, when I finished spilling my guts, he took a deep breath and just said, “Whatever happens, whatever you decide, I’m here and we’ll get through this together.” Didn’t tell me what to do or how to do it. Just that he’d be there to go through it with me.

Coach C hugged me, felt for me, helped me weather the storm of uncertainty, and provided the steadying hand of belief in me that I would come to the right decision on my own. After that, I accepted that God had a plan and that my job was to live up to it as a man and a father first.

Since that moment, not a day goes by that I don’t look at both my sons and say silent words of gratitude for Tom Crean and the leap of faith he helped me to take that day in the college preseason of 2001.

“YOU HAVE THE SPIRIT OF MIRIAM ON YOU” WAS A COMMENT made to Tragil by a stranger who approached her following a church service in Florida. This was not long ago, years after many of our family struggles. Tragil wasn’t sure what he meant until the stranger reminded her that Miriam was one of the most well-known women of the Old Testament. Being the curious person that she is, my sister immediately decided to find out more about why someone who had never met her or knew her life would have made that remark.

Her reading then took her to Exodus, where she found the story of Miriam, who saved her brother at the request of their mother, Jochebed, at a time when the Pharaoh had decreed that all male children of Israelites be killed. Miriam took Moses and put him in a hand-woven basket their mother had made and placed it in the river Nile—where the water was shallow and the baby could be hidden in the reeds. The Bible story tells of how Miriam stayed with the basket until the daughter of the Pharaoh discovered the basket and decided to adopt the baby. Miriam stepped forward from where she had been hiding and volunteered to bring a wet nurse, their mother, for him.

Tragil more or less knew that part of the story of one of the Bible’s most famous sisters. There was more that she didn’t know, however. In the main events of Exodus, when Moses is placed in the unlikely role of leading the Israelites out of bondage and toward the Promised Land, Miriam helps give him counsel and rises to become a leader in her own right. Together, sister and brother famously develop a model for leadership that is radically different from the way rulers had led back then. The three guiding principles: to lead by example, to serve the people rather than command them, and to act upon what they believe is being asked of them by the Lord, rather than for their own ambition.

I would never draw too many parallels from those stories to ours. Even so, I could only think that the stranger’s observations about Tragil were right on the mark. There was no way he could have known about the bus ride she had taken me on at age eight to deliver me to safety or the other times when my sister played a role in the deliverance of others.

Actually, one of those times had to do with another instance of taking a family member for “the ride”—as my mother would eventually refer to it. This event happened to coincide with my trip to Italy, around the same time when I had learned from Siohvaughn of our news.

Before I’d left for Italy, Tragil and I had a conversation we had avoided up until that point. To even express our fears in words or admit to losing hope for the possibility of Mom being saved would have been to question Jesus. We never doubted that. But we now had to ask ourselves, out loud, whether she wanted to be saved.

This was in a period when we learned that Mom had resorted to working as a tester in return for free drugs. The tester gets paid to take the drugs to make sure they’re pure and they’re what the dealer claims they are. If they’re not pure, a terrible reaction to the drug could occur. If they’re not mixed right or bad, the tester can die. As we understood it, Mom had injected herself with what she thought was heroin but turned out to be PCP. An ambulance was called and she was rushed to the hospital before she started having potentially life-threatening seizures and hallucinations. Tragil said that God pulled her through but it had been touch and go.

At the same tiny storefront church at 5921½ Prairie where T.J. and I had grown up and where she continued to volunteer, Pastor Darryl Gibson had taken over after Pastor Box passed away. He and the small group of members there had been praying all this time for our mother. Mom still came to church when she could, either by herself or sometimes bringing in her group of friends. With the encouragement of Pastor Darryl, she had gone through a series of rehab programs that had gotten her through detox. But time and again, once back on the outside, she’d start using within a couple of days.

The latest effort had been a halfway house that was less about getting Mom drug-free and more about protecting her from living in the abandoned buildings that smelled of human waste and were overrun by rats the size of cats. The program at the halfway house offered classes to educate users about what the drugs they were using actually were and about the long-term effects. Tragil went though classes offered to family members, becoming informed about what heroin did to the brain and the body over time.

When my sister and I had our conversation before I’d left for Italy, Mom hadn’t been seen in a while at church, by the people at the halfway house, or by our older sisters. Even Dad didn’t know where to find her.

My sister thought Mom was ready to get sober. Her reason? Too many of Mom’s friends were dying. She herself had said that death seemed to be following her. Tragil suggested that this could be a sign that Mom was scared enough to find the strength to change. T.J. calmed me down with those thoughts and reassured me that nothing terrible was going to happen over the next two weeks while I was out of the country.

That was Tragil’s firm belief. Or it was, until a late August day in Chicago while I was away and she got a call from a friend who alerted her to a news report of a body being pulled out of the abandoned buildings where Mom had been known to stay. The body was said to be that of a woman bearing a description horrifyingly close to Jolinda Wade.

In a panic, Tragil jumped into her car and drove to the building, where she spotted police cars next to a transport van sent from the county morgue. A group of people had gathered around so she couldn’t see anything. Sure now that this was our mother, Tragil pushed her way to the front and still couldn’t get any answers.

Almost an hour passed before she was able to speak to someone in authority who then connected her to someone else who was able to verify that the woman in the body bag was
not
Jolinda Morris Wade.

By then, Tragil, twenty-four years old that summer, decided the time had come. As she told me later, she watched the van from the morgue cart away the body that wasn’t Mom—that was somebody else’s loved one, somebody else whose life was cut short—and started to breathe fire. Tragil marched back to her Toyota Tercel, the same little trusty steed that had brought her back to Chicago from San Diego, and she went and searched every known location where our mother might have been.

Tragil found her on the street not far from a park. Though the August day was warm and humid, Mom was shivering when Tragil approached. She even told my sister, “I’m so cold.” Then Mom asked my sister if she had any money. She was trying to get a bus to our aunt Bebe’s.

Tragil gave her some cash and told Mom, “I’ll drive you.”

That’s when “the ride” took place. As it was later revealed, that afternoon our mother was dope sick—needing a fix not just to battle withdrawal from the drug but in fact to live. Addicts can die from dope sickness as easily as from overdosing.

Tragil might have postponed the conversation she had been needing to have for all these years. But not after being at the abandoned building and watching a body bag pulled out and believing our worst fears had been confirmed. Once behind the wheel, still shaking and crying as she spoke, Tragil began, “We have to talk about death. That’s what the result is of how you been living. That’s what it’s going to be. But do you know what that means?” Before Mom could answer, my sister went on, “It means the pressure’s on me to bury you and I don’t have any money.”

Mom recalled that Tragil was crying uncontrollably by the time they got to Aunt Bebe’s place. She parked the car and the two sat there outside, with Tragil continuing. What more could she say? Well, she had saved so much up inside her, as she would tell me and others who don’t know how to speak to a loved one, that “the ride” led to “the talk.” And because Mom had come to us before to say she didn’t want us to be burdened with keeping our feelings inside, Tragil gave the oration of her life.

“I’m fed up! And you don’t get it,” she said. “You don’t understand. You want to keep doing what you are, stay like you’ve been living, blaming yourself for what you doing to
us
? No, that time has passed. Right now, I’m grown. Dwyane’s grown. All your children are grown and you can’t do anything for us or to hurt us. You can do something to help yourself. You can get yourself together so you can
live.
No longer is this fight for me or for Dwayne. You can’t fight this for nobody but yourself if you don’t love yourself enough to fight. This is
big,
this is
everything.
Because other than that, you fixing to be as dead as that lady in that abandoned building. We all love you, we all want you to stop. But that’s on you now. Let’s just talk about it. You say death is following you? You see your friends dropping dead? You is next and I don’t have a dime to bury you.”