My biological father died recently.
Throughout our lives, we had only a few conversations, usually at family funerals. Once, he didn’t even recognize me. I was sitting behind him in a pew, and someone whispered, “You know, that’s Michelle, your daughter.”
Both my father and mother abandoned my four siblings and me to the care of my grandmother, Big Mama. I eventually had a relationship with my mother, albeit very fraught. She made too many promises that were never kept.
My father was a ghost.
When I found out he was going to die of cancer two months ago, I decided to have a conversation to ask him all the questions that an abandoned child wants to know.
Why did he and my mother frequently leave us alone, often without enough to eat?
As a reporter for the now-defunct Baltimore Evening Sun, I had searched the archives to verify the story of how we ended up with my grandmother. Family members said that my father had set our home on fire, thinking my mother, I and my four siblings were inside the house.
I found two clippings that seemed to corroborate that story. One said my father was sentenced to 90 days in jail for blocking and then hitting a policeman who tried to enter the house after noticing it was on fire.
“The officer identified himself and said he wanted to see if there was anyone else in the burning home,” the article said. “He and Singletary began to fight, and the policeman hit the laborer on the head with his nightstick.”
Another news brief indicated that a judge acquitted my father of arson, ruling that the state had been unable to prove that the fire was started deliberately.
When I asked him if he had set the fire, he said, “Why would I do that?”
During our conversation, he said he had been drunk and mistook the officer for a burglar.
What neither man knew at the time was that my grandmother, concerned for our well-being, had sent my grandfather to check on us the night before. Finding us alone, he took us home with him. We never returned to that house.
My father and I talked for three hours. Eventually, I asked the questions that cut the deepest: Why didn’t you ever come back for all of us? Why, after you remarried and found faith, didn’t you reconnect with the children you left behind?
“I thought you were better off,” he finally said.
My father’s passing, just two weeks before Mother’s Day, has forced me to reflect on his answer. In a way that is both painful and liberating, I realized he was right. He was acknowledging a truth I had lived but never fully reconciled. He was incapable of providing the stability, the fierce moral compass or the financial discipline I needed.
That legacy didn’t come from my parents; it was developed by the woman who stepped into the gap.
While my mother’s presence was intermittent and often complicated by her own struggles, Big Mama was constant. Despite our low-income household, my grandmother gave me a master class in money management.
I am passionate about teaching financial literacy because of the lessons I learned from Big Mama, who died two years before I started writing “The Color of Money” column.
As I wrote in my debut column 29 years ago, she was a great financial teacher. She paid every bill on time — often in person because she didn’t trust the mail.
She held just two credit cards her entire life — one from Sears and another from Montgomery Ward. They were used to finance just three purchases — a stove, refrigerator and washing machine. Big Mama wouldn’t buy the matching dryer, because she said, “That’s why God made sunlight.”
Once, she paid off her auto loan so early that a confused lender called to claim she was late on her monthly payments. I still feel sorry for the collector, who received a tongue lashing from my churchgoing grandmother that would make the devil flinch.
My grandmother taught me to hate debt, a lesson that led my husband and me to aggressively save so our three children could attend college debt-free.
Because of my grandmother, I became a homeowner in my early 20s. After graduating from college, I had lived with her for a year. But I wanted more independence from her strict house rules (in by 11 p.m. before the door chain was put on).
I found a one-bedroom apartment for $300 a month. But while I lived there, every time I called my grandmother, she would begin the conversation with a lecture about why renting wasn’t building wealth. Every. Single. Call. For a year!
By the end of that lease, I was so exhausted with her fussing that I found a first-time home-buying program and purchased a two-bedroom condo in West Baltimore. It would end up becoming the home I shared with my disabled brother, who I allowed to stay there rent-free after I got married and built a home with my husband. My home became my brother’s sanctuary until he died at 32 from a massive seizure.
I inherited my grandmother’s skill for saving and planning for unexpected expenses. From her, I learned to be satisfied with whatever income I was earning, because Big Mama never apologized for what she couldn’t buy. She was never ashamed of being low-income.
That final conversation with my father made me realize he would have been incapable of leaving the legacy my grandmother had given me.
This Mother’s Day, I have a greater appreciation for my grandmother because of my father.
My father’s gift to me for Mother’s Day was the honesty to admit his absence was a blessing. His best parenting decision was to leave me in the care of my grandmother. I am financially grounded and secure because of Big Mama.
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