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I was born a Black girl in New York City in the 1980s. It was a time when graffiti graced walls, Lojacks secured steering wheels, unsheltered people with substance abuse problems roamed the streets, and flashy drug dealers ruled corners. Who was responsible for this sordid state of affairs? Well if you watched TV and read the newspapers, many were saying that single Black mothers were to blame. Pundits and politicians alike stereotyped single Black mothers as sexually irresponsible and lazy “welfare queens” who were abusing government resources while raising deviant children. With no father in their lives to discipline them it was no wonder these children were turning to drugs and crime, so they said.

As a young girl in the 1980s I could not have known much about life and love, but I sure knew that I did not want to grow up to be a crime-causing single mom. And although crime rates seemed to have gone down by the time I came of dating age in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the narrative about Black women and marriage had not improved. Essays and television programs bemoaned that there were not enough educated Black men for educated Black women to marry because after all, “there were more young Black men in prison than in college.” Upon entering college in the late 1990s older Black women were admonishing younger Black women to work on the Mrs. and not just their B.S. or B.A.

With all of this cultural baggage, it seemed like such good fortune when I, an upcoming triple Ivy-League degreed dark-skinned Black woman with 4C hair in sisterlocks, was introduced to an eligible bachelor by a business school classmate. Yes, actually introduced by a human being and not by a “sketchy” online dating website.

College Educated. Check. Gold Star for the Ivy League.

From a Two Parent Home. Check.

Gainfully Employed. Check. Gold Star for working in finance.

Black Man. Check. Gold Star for being from my parental homeland of Ghana.

Spiritual. Check. Gold Star for reading Deepak Chopra like me.

In addition to the checks and gold stars, I was elated because we got along. I felt loved and cared for during the courtship phase of the relationship. Wedding bells preceded graduation bells, and I was married with a BA, JD, and MBA by my twenty-ninth birthday. We would have two kids by the time I was thirty-two thereby avoiding a geriatric pregnancy. Hooray! What could go wrong?

Before the ink on the marriage certificate was dry, I realized this was no fairytale due to three words: the silent treatment. The silent treatment occurs when one person intentionally refuses to speak to another for a long period such as over twenty-four hours or more as retaliation for perceived disrespect or disagreement. It is generally accompanied by hostile energy and the perpetrator does not return to the situation to repair the issue. The silent treatment is different from a cooling period in which a person asks to take a break from a conversation to compose themselves, process emotions, and collect thoughts before resuming the discussion. It is also different when a person with a history of trauma shut-down in a flight or freeze response.

From the very beginning the silent treatment was part of the rhythm of my marriage. We would be fine for about two months and then due to some perceived disrespect I would receive the silent treatment for about two weeks. But the longest silent treatment lasted almost three months. The worst part was that when it would end, I was expected to act as if nothing happened and resume married life and physical intimacy without explanation. It was as torturous as it was confusing. Was I living in the twilight zone? The deafening silence was accompanied by a kind of energy that was so toxic I sometimes wanted to un-alive myself to avoid it. As a result, I was walking on eggshells and measuring every word in my own home. Very often I was afraid of what others around us might say because I did not want to experience silent wrath in private as punishment for the words of others. I virtually stopped speaking at home to keep the peace, but in my spirit I was feeling everything but peace.

I just knew I could figure out a solution for the problem. I’m a hard-working girl and most problems can be solved with hard work, so I thought. I read marriage book after marriage book in hopes of cracking the code. We went to couples counseling. I went to individual counseling, EMDR therapy, and reiki sessions. I even invested in a group wife coaching program. With two sons to raise I was desperate to not break up my home. I kept thinking that if I just prayed harder, went to church more, became more religious and spiritually enlightened, something would give, and I could have a happy marriage and an intact home. But when I got the silent treatment on our anniversary, fifteen years to the day after the first silent treatment during the honeymoon, every fiber in my body told me that I had to leave my marriage to save my life. In an instant, I gave up the illusion that what I had was actually a marriage and the delusion that anything would change.

After I left the marital home and the psychological and emotional fog began to clear, I learned that the silent treatment is abuse. No, it is not physical abuse. It does not fit the stereotype of a drunken working-class man in a wife beater punching his partner. People who weaponize silence may be male or female or intersex, rich or poor, highly educated or high-school dropouts. The abuse tactic is exceedingly equal opportunity. Moreover, there are no physical scars that can be photographed nor curse-laden words that can be recorded. However, the lack of documentation does not make the silent treatment any less real or any less abusive. Experts consider the silent treatment nervous-system assault because it triggers the same biological alarm bells as physical danger. Humans are wired for connection and therefore being intentionally ignored by someone you’re bonded to registers in the brain as rejection, abandonment, and threat which activates the fight, flight, freeze, or fawn response.

But the real question that I had to answer was this. Why on earth would I allow myself to live in such misery for so long? Why didn’t I free myself from the energetic torture earlier? If I have to be brutally honest, my fear of the single Black mother stereotype informed my reluctance to leave the marriage. The old wisdom of “staying for the kids” weighed heavily in my consciousness because I did not want my children’s life chances being harmed by the lack of a father in the home. Moreover, I recognized the potential societal repercussions of being unsuccessful at parenting.

Now, I know better. Just as I had been a scapegoat in my relationship and bore the punishment for issues that were unrelated to me, Black women have been society’s scapegoats for ills that we did not create. single Black mothers were never the true source of societal woes.

Did single Black mothers drop crack cocaine into urban communities to raise millions of dollars to support clandestine political operations in Central America? No. According to some sources, the U.S. CIA did that. Are single Black mothers responsible for the Rockefeller drug laws that imposed draconian minimum sentences that led to the mass incarceration of Black men? No. Are single Black mothers responsible for rampant racial bias in hiring in which white men with criminal records are more likely to receive callbacks than Black men without criminal records? No. Are Black women responsible for global patriarchal norms which teach indoctrinated men to value lust over love, control over care, punishment over partnership, manipulation over magnanimity, dominance over doting, and violence over virtue? No.

Black women have never been the source of the problem and more recent studies have demonstrated that the best indicator of a child’s future success is the mental and psychological wellbeing of the child’s mother, not whether she is married or cohabitating with the child’s father. If a woman has to romantically disengage from her child’s father in order to be well enough to attend to the psychological and emotional needs of her child, then so be it.

Single motherhood is rarely the first choice, but it is often the necessary choice. Let’s continue to debunk negative stereotypes about single moms, especially Black single moms. Such negative stereotypes may deter women from leaving abusive relationships and as we have seen through the losses of so many black women recently, abusive relationships can be deadly. Domestic violence damages families and communities. That said, let’s support all mothers in becoming physically, psychologically and spiritually healthy for their own sake and for the sake of their children.

Ama K. Karikari, Esq. is author of an empowerment workbook for mothers entitled ‘Silenced to Soaring: Heal from Chronic Silent Treatments, Toxic Relationships, and Abuse’ (https://tinyurl.com/2smbbkhj). She also runs Sister Soaring Circles, online peer group coaching programs for women overcoming abuse to live their most empowered lives. Learn more at amakkarikari.com.

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