9812290184
DETROIT FREE PRESS
981229
Tuesday, December 29, 1998
METRO FINAL
1E
Photo WILLIAM ARCHIE/Detroit Free Press
Safiyyah Bibbins is right at home with a basketball in hand. But the
junior point guard from Southfield High has no home to truly call her own.
Safiyyah Bibbins, right, and Jennifer Kelso have a little Christmas cheer on
the basketball court. Safiyyah, a junior at Southfield High, has moved in with
Jennifer's family. Ben Kelso coaches the basketball team at Southfield.
MITCH ALBOM
DREAMS DEFERRED
Copyright (c) 1998, Detroit Free Press
IT'S ALL TOO COMMON: A CHILD FORSAKEN BY MOM AND DAD,
FACING THE WORLD ... ON HER OWN
Second in a series on heartbreaks and hopes from the sports world.
She came into this world with a mother and father, and for a short while, they
were all together. She remembers a baseball game when she was small, sitting
on her daddy's shoulders, hearing the crack of bats and the roar of a crowd.
She remembers feeling happy and secure, the way a child needs to feel. That
was a long time ago.
Then her parents split up. Her father moved to Chicago. Her mother had another
baby with another absent man. By the time she was in junior high, they were
living in cramped quarters in Detroit, and her mother had grown weary of the
whole single-parent thing. They fought. They argued. One day her mother said
that's it, I can't handle it, go to your father and live with him.
That's when Safiyyah Bibbins joined the ranks of the disenfranchised, another
kid bounced around like a basketball. She tried living with her father in
Chicago. That didn't work out. She moved back with him to Michigan. That
didn't last. She returned to her mother. Then back to her father. Then she
lived with friends. Then she went to an aunt's. She was her own private moving
company, toting with her, wherever she went, the same three items: a large bag
of clothes, a teddy bear and a Bible.
She was 15 years old.
There is a difference between "living" somewhere and "staying" somewhere --
the difference between being watched and being nurtured -- and that difference
is what this story is about. Safiyyah Bibbins, a few inches shy of 6 feet,
wearing a
T-shirt and sweatpants, her hair flipped up, is sitting now at a dining room
table in Southfield. This is where she stays. Not lives. Stays. It is a cozy
home with a Christmas tree. There are family pictures on the walls. But she is
not in any of the pictures, because it is not her family, and it is not her
home.
Whose child is this?
"My mom can't handle me, and my dad doesn't think I'm his responsibility," she
says, matter-of-factly, as if talking about the weather. "I don't have any
anger towards them. I still love them. They're still my parents. But I've
learned to depend on myself."
Now, let's be clear: This is not your typical problem child. Headstrong,
perhaps, the way most teenagers are headstrong. But she doesn't do drugs.
There's no violence. No pregnancies. No expulsions. She is bright and
determined, she gets good grades, she plays point guard on Southfield High's
basketball team and dreams of a scholarship to college. But besides all that
-- more important than all that -- she has two healthy parents who seem fully
capable of taking care of her.
Except for their own justifications.
So her mother explains her absence by saying, "I may not be there physically,
but I give her what she needs spiritually."
And her father explains his absence by saying, "People get divorced and split
up all the time. It's not that unusual."
Whose child is this?
Her meager possessions
"This bear has gone with me wherever I go," Safiyyah says, smiling. She holds
out a plain brown teddy bear, with black plastic eyes, a gift from her
grandfather many years ago. She is standing in her current domicile -- a spare
bedroom in the house of her Southfield High basketball coach, Ben Kelso, where
she has been staying since the summer. Kelso and his family offered their
place, he says, only after Safiyyah called one night distraught, saying "she
had nowhere else to go." This year alone, she has called at least four places
home.
Here, in her latest bedroom, Safiyyah -- a high school junior who does not
want sympathy, does not want to be perceived as "some poor little kid" --
seems the very intersection of childhood and adulthood: a strong young woman,
on her own. With a teddy bear.
How she got here is both unusual and sadly common. According to statistics,
Detroit is the worst city in the nation for single-parent homes. Sixty percent
of our city's kids -- almost twice the national big-city average -- are
missing at least one parent in the house. Many are being raised by
grandparents, uncles, aunts, even neighbors.
In that way, Safiyyah, 16, is part of an urban epidemic that is as crippling
as drugs, gangs or guns. It is the absence of consistent parental influence,
being able to rely on the same person to be there after school, or waiting in
the car, or at home for meals. As the years pass, it seems that making a
stable home for a child has become, increasingly, too much to ask.
How does that happen?
Everybody has a story.
The mother's story
Safiyyah's mother, Fatimah Lewis, now lives in Southfield, just a few miles
from the Kelsos. This is how she explains Safiyyah's situation:
Lewis and her ex-husband got married young, had their daughter, and split up
before her sixth birthday. Lewis did all the child-rearing for the eight years
that followed, living in Detroit while her ex-husband avoided his
responsibilities by moving to Chicago.
"He didn't pay child support, and his family wouldn't even tell me where he
was," she says. "That's how he is. If he doesn't want to do something, he'll
just move. He'll even quit a job to keep from living up to his
responsibilities."
Lewis says she reached a breaking point when Safiyyah was in junior high. They
were fighting over little things. What she would eat. What she could wear. Her
curfew. You might say these are typical teenage sticking points. No matter.
Lewis, a religious woman, says she caught Safiyyah smoking once and was
"devastated." She felt herself losing control and, having located her
ex-husband, demanded that he take his daughter before she lost it completely.
Two years later, when Safiyyah came back to live with her mother, things were
even worse. They were now sharing a house with an elderly woman who was ill
and whom Lewis was taking care of as part of the living arrangement. The
arguing between mother and daughter continued. A confrontation arose over a
high school party -- one of those "I'm going"/"No, you're not" kinds of things
-- and afterward, when Safiyyah didn't come home, Lewis called her ex-husband,
who was now living back in Detroit, and told him to pick up his girl's
belongings. That was it.
Mother and daughter have not lived together since.
"I don't need stress in my life," Lewis says. "I don't do well with it....
These people Safiyyah is with now (the Kelsos) are decent people, and give her
a lot of what she needs as far as discipline, structure and order."
But isn't she your daughter?
"She's my daughter, she came to this world through me, but I don't try to
possess her. I try to step back and let her be who she is."
Oh.
The father's story
Safiyyah's father, Keith Bibbins, is a college-educated man who lives in
Detroit, and works "in computers." This is how he explains the story:
He and Safiyyah's mother did indeed marry young, had their daughter, and split
up. He went to Chicago for a job. He admits he was not around for much of the
next decade, but claims he wasn't ducking.
"That's a lie," Bibbins says. "Safiyyah spent summers with me. When her mother
tried to get in touch with my family, it was for money. That's not their
responsibility, it's hers."
Isn't it yours, too, he is asked?
"Well, it's mine," he says, "but legally it's hers."
The Chicago thing didn't work out, and father and daughter moved to Garden
City. A year and a half later, he says, Safiyyah went back to her mother's, at
her mother's insistence. Then came the party incident, when he was told to
take her again.
"Her mother abandoned her child at 15 years old," he says angrily.
Wait. Didn't he abandon her years earlier?
"People get divorced and split up all the time," he says. "It's not an unusual
situation. It only got weird when her mother said she couldn't live there
anymore."
Safiyyah stayed with her father only briefly the second time. One day, last
June, he found a note from her saying she didn't feel wanted, and was leaving
to stay with friends. From that point to today, Safiyyah has not lived with
any immediate family members.
"She got away from me," her father says.
She got away?
Bibbins now claims that he wants Safiyyah to live with him, even though he
admits, "I haven't always made her feel fully welcome." He says she shouldn't
be living with the Kelsos, but "I think she is where she wants to be right
now."
He is told that his daughter says, at times, she feels unloved.
"I understand why. Her mother put her out."
Oh.
The next chapter
On the basketball court, Safiyyah Bibbins is in control. As point guard for
Southfield, she averaged nearly 10 points and four assists this season, and
helped the team to a division championship. She had a highlight game against
Madison Heights Lamphere, playing tight defense, racing up and down the floor,
and scoring 21 points.
"Basketball is everything to me," she says. "It's my escape -- it's like my
life. Without it, I don't know what I'd do."
Ironically, her father comes to watch her play. On occasion, her mother does,
too. She speaks to her mother on the phone nearly every day, and each parent
periodically gives her money. In that way, they are more involved than many.
The goal here is not to overly embarrass either parent, nor to deny that every
family has its problems.
But at the end of the day, she goes home with neither mother nor father.
Which, for now, is the way she prefers it. Safiyyah and the Kelsos' daughter,
Jennifer, have become good friends. Safiyyah is doing well in school. She
hopes to go away to college -- "maybe Tennessee or UCLA, someplace far away,
where I don't have to depend on anybody."
Little wonder where that comes from.
Her mother insists she has not abandoned her daughter. "I don't have any
guilt. You don't see me with her physically, but that doesn't mean a whole
lot. That's external. I gave her what's important internally."
Meanwhile, her father points to her report card on his refrigerator, and says
he's always there for her, despite the years he wasn't.
Whose child is this? You keep asking that question and waiting for the answer,
waiting for the parents to raise their hands and say that is our child, we are
responsible, we have to do better than just making sure someone else is
feeding her and getting her to school.
Funny. It used to be you lived outside your family only if some catastrophe
happened, if your mother died or your father was too ill to take care of you.
Now it's a too-young mom, or a dad who isn't interested, or a bad marriage, or
a job, or simply the fact that parenting can be really stressful. Let someone
else do it.
Sixty percent? Whose children do we think we're having?
And somehow, Safiyyah Bibbins plows through. She has managed to steer clear of
serious problems, and while she may be demanding in typical teenage fashion,
her independent streak may prove to be her best friend. Then again, you ask
where she will stay next -- stay, not live -- and she isn't sure.
"As far as my mother, I wouldn't want to go back there. And my father, he's
got a girlfriend there. So I guess I'll be here until ...I don't know."
She is not angry. She says she understands, and still loves her parents.
"It's like we were talking about the other day in school." She rises,
stretching her long frame. "We were talking about adoption, and how children
think, 'Why don't my parents want me?'
"But eventually you learn it's not your fault. You didn't do it. It's not my
problem, it's theirs."
She heads up the stairs, to her Bible, her clothes, and her faithful stuffed
companion, and you honestly wonder who is the parent in this story and who is
the child.
The last part of this series will appear in Thursday's Free Press.
To leave a message for Mitch Albom, call 1-313-223-4581 or E-mail
albom@freepress.com
THIS ELECTRONIC VERSION MAY DIFFER SLIGHTLY FROM THE PRINTED ARTICLE.
COLUMN;SAFIYYAH BIBBINS;BIOGRAPHY;BASKETBALL;SERIES