Read Online A Father First: How My Life Became Bigger Than Basketball by Dwyane Wade - Free Book Online

to hear. And meanwhile, when I became a father, my sons’ mother and I joyfully gave Zaire the middle names Blessing Dwyane and gave Zion the middle names Malachi Aramis. They love their names!
    From what I gather, Mom and Dad had issues before they broke up for good. When they were together, both were focused on the children. They were struggling, for sure, but there was stability. We had a roof over our heads and nobody had to go hungry. Life was not perfect, though. Both of them probably saw the fading of their dreams to make something important of themselves and to get out of the grind. Still in their twenties, they had four kids to support with no time to pursue fantasies of fame and fortune. And so reality boxed them in—reinforcing the likelihood that Jolinda wasn’t going to be a model or a writer and Big Dwyane wasn’t going to be the next Marvin Gaye or Reggie Jackson or the most interesting cool cat gliding through the neighborhood and turning the heads of all the beautiful women.
    Partying might have become the needed escape from disappointment, a way to feel good and have that taste of glamour and excitement that the dreams used to provide. Like Mom, Dad had grown up without a father in the household and had been raised by a single mom as one of eight children. His mother drank, and as he would say, “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” So he followed suit, picking alcohol as his drug of choice. And he was a hard-drinking man. He would dabble in drugs, though not like Mom, who besides drinking was regularly getting into other substances—weed, acid (occasionally), or “tac” (PCP), which was snorted. But nothing harder. Not yet.
    When Mom and Dad divorced, they may have consciously made a pact not to tell us kids why. Or it might have just seemed like the right thing to do. Whatever the reason, by not getting into a blaming contest over the breakup, they spared us the additional hurt that often comes to children of divorce.
    Reflecting on the truth of the matter years later, Mom explained that she controlled the relationship at the start, but when Big Dwyane began to grow up and have more control, even distancing himself, she was lost. “Without control in the marriage, well, I didn’t know what to do anymore,” she recalled. “My ground fell out. So now here’s this guy who I don’t know anymore and I thought if I had another baby it’d bring us together.” That baby turned out to be me. They did come together to celebrate my arrival. But by then they had grown too far apart, according to my mother. She felt that she was the one to blame, that she didn’t do enough to keep him from pulling away. She didn’t see any option but divorce.
    Daddy disagreed and even fought the breakup. Mom didn’t want to be the needy one, she would say. She wanted to be the independent woman her mother raised her to be, one who didn’t need a man. So she left with all four of us. Daddy tried to get her to come back and almost succeeded. But something stopped her, possibly pride, or just not wanting to have to put up with the challenges of his ways.
    Whatever it was, Mom remembered that “when I stepped back in the house again I said, ‘I can’t do this.’ There was a chance my marriage could have got back, but, no, I was selfish. I wasn’t thinking about y’all. That was your only father. I wasn’t thinking about my babies. I was thinking about me. And when I left, my life went to hell.”
    THE WORST OF THE NEXT FOUR YEARS OF OUR MOTHER’S DESCENT into addiction didn’t register as deeply with me as it did with Tragil. For one thing, I was a toddler and preschooler, protected from the specifics. For another, unlike my sister, who went from five years old to nine in this phase, I had no earlier memories of having that stable household, with enough to eat and two parents together at home at night.
    But Tragil had something that kept her going: the same intensity of purpose that our mother managed