An epidemic of bastards

I follow my forebears, full of love, into a legitimate trend of illegitimacy.

By Tracy Trefethen

May 18, 2001 | I have my own bastard -- a smart, handsome, fatherless boy. I love him more than can be said, and I'm not the only one who does: He is so adored by his friends at preschool that they all run to hug him every morning, and they spend the unstructured hours of class following him around on wild adventures with knights and pirates.

According to new census figures, single-parent families are growing five times faster than families headed by married couples. But even as our numbers grow, we elude a fond societal embrace. An analyst at the Family Research Council says, "This data shows we need to regain the importance of marriage as a social institution. People are disregarding the importance of marriage and the importance of having a mother and father who are married."

I've read of the hordes of children without fathers. But I only know a few. Several are children of a neighbor who is raising five kids on her own. And there are the adolescents in the juvenile penal institution where I teach -- most of them are missing either a mother or a father. But some of them are glad because the absent parent was so brutal that things are absolutely better now without that parent.

Then there are the famously illegitimate or the hybrid kind, like Jodie Foster's kids, who technically have an involved father -- but how that all works is kept secret from the public. And I don't know them.

What I do know is that illegitimacy doesn't matter much, unless you're poor. My son and I are poor.

I have stood in lines entire mornings in a roomful of women, our infants hollering and shitting, suckling, drooling and sleeping as we wait for our names to be called from the enormous list that grows, it seems, of its own volition on a high, dingy countertop.

We are in the Department of Economic Security. It's a run-down building in a bankrupt strip mall. The backrooms are filled with gray-flecked cubicles lined with files as thick as a man's forearm, files that document our financial ruin. We are down-and-out women with rummy-eyed children. We are looking for welfare and wait for the dark-haired woman to read our names off the list, "Rodriquez, Carols, Smith ..."

There are forms to fill out in triplicate and lines of people wrapping the room -- up the hallway and back. There is the time to wait, and the time to be told to come back again. When the forms are lost, there is more waiting. There is the handing over of every last bit of paperwork that could possibly document our poverty.

We submit to fingerprinting and oaths. We sit below posters of handcuffs and striped shirts -- reminders of the gifts we'll receive if we lie to get a much-needed $275 maximum for rent, utilities and diapers this month.

And the fathers? What of them? you may ask. Gone variously into the cracks of new lives, border crossings, other failed relationships. Their means of escape take the form of Chevy Impalas, shiny Broncos, used Hondas and job transfers.

Next Page: The child is born of the ass-worn leather of a saddle, the tool of escape

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