by Eric Payne It's easy to love your cuddly, wuddly baby/toddler/lil' girl/lil' man. But once that gift from heaven becomes a teenager, oftentimes the game changes completely. Recently I was talking about teenage boys with a mother I met at a birthday party both our daughters were attending. We commiserated at length about our two boys', both of whom are fifteen. Their … [Read more...]
No Wedding, No Womb: Fear, The Fatherhood Killer
by Eric Payne Portions of this No Wedding No Womb Post have been excerpted from the forthcoming book, Bottom Line Fatherhood, by Eric Payne. A Baby Was Going To Ruin Everything I was hardly happy when I was told I was going to have a child. In fact, I nearly had a panic attack. My stomach tightened. My mouth dried out. My heart pounded out against my rib cage and … [Read more...]
Rejection of Correction
by Eric Payne Being Wrong Vs. Being Wrong When my daughter and I are alone together and she does something wrong, I correct her and for the most part, she takes the correction. When I'm with my son and I need to school him on a mistake he's made, more times than not he absorbs what I have to say, or at least he acts like he does. But a funny thing happens when if the … [Read more...]
Friends Of Your Marriage
by Eric Payne I recently had the pleasure of meeting the male mind behind Black And Married With Kids dot com, Mr. Lamar Tyler. During our lunchtime summit on all things Black, Married and Kids, he casually dropped a term that hit me like a bag of bricks: A Friend of Your Marriage. I didn't need any explanation from him to know exactly what he meant. There are times when … [Read more...]
Blended Families Week: Playing 2nd Fiddle To Another Man’s (or Woman’s) Child
By Eric Payne Those who follow my blog, MakesMeWannaHoller.com, know that I've got a 14 year old and a 4 year old and most days I'm up to my eyeballs with the two of them. Some days, my 4 year old girl shows me myself when I was a little boy growing up. Sometimes she does so with such accuracy, it's as if I'm looking into a mirror of my past. My son is a different story. I … [Read more...]
My Wife Is NOT My Friend (On Facebook)
by Eric Payne On Facebook, my wife is NOT my friend. I un-friended her about two months ago. Not only did I not tell her what I did, but once she discovered we were no longer connected, I ignored her request to become my friend once more. Like her, I sure many of you are SMH, or rather shaking your heads, thinking, How trifling is he? My wife's chief complaint was that she was … [Read more...]
Dating & Loving A Baby Mama
by Eric Payne Before I became a husband and a father of two, I was the boyfriend of a mother of one. Within five minutes of first meeting my wife she told me she dropped out of college five years earlier at nineteen to have her child. In that same five minutes she went on to tell me she was on the Dean's List at Fordham University where she was … [Read more...]