A Father First: How My Life Became Bigger Than Basketball (7 page)

On the minus side, I’ve also built up a high tolerance for the causes of distress and, unfortunately, learned to tolerate toxic situations much longer than I ever should have.

But standing in the locker room after announcing “The court has awarded me full custody of Zaire Blessing Dwyane Wade and Zion Malachi Aramis Wade,” I’m starting to think that can change. At twenty-nine years old, I get to unlearn some of those old coping mechanisms and write a new chapter.

Even if most of the guys didn’t know the details, as I listen to the cheers coming from an entire locker room of NBA players and coaching staff, I know they share the sense that justice has prevailed. After all, as a team we share the value that family comes first, something that our team president, the legendary Pat Riley, often reminds us right before he emphasizes what comes next: the will to win.

If the game today was any indication, no one will have to worry that the weight now lifted from me means that I’ll play with any less intensity.

For one thing, having my boys there with us courtside to watch the game had given me added fuel—and that’s an understatement. For another, that intensity is a fact of who I am—bred into me not just from the childhood I lived but from the history of what came before me.

MY MOTHER NEVER USED TO TALK MUCH ABOUT WHAT HER younger life had been like, growing up as one of nine children, raised by a single mother. From time to time, she’d answer questions. But not at length. Mostly, I felt robbed of getting to experience her true personality or how smart she really was, or even how beautiful she was before being in her madness.

Jolinda Morris had been a natural beauty. Tragil and I would study pictures of Mom in her teens—and compliment her soft, pretty features, with her big, soulful eyes, mysterious smile, and a fine complexion someone once compared to milk chocolate.

“Well,” she’d laugh and admit in her smoky voice, “you know the thing I always wanted to be first was a model.”

A great dream! Was it a stretch? Not to me. Yeah, I was biased because I was a boy and she was my mother and we were so closely connected. And still are. But in those old pictures you could see the sparkle in her eyes of someone who was going places, someone who believed she was marked by destiny. Then, after she traveled the world as a fashion model and achieved independence, her plan was to find a good man and they’d have twelve children together. Mom had it all mapped out—complete with a storybook house and a white picket fence.

What happened?

Only later, after we became adults, did Tragil and I start to ask that question of Mom and began to piece together the puzzle. Without blame or self-pity, my mother went back to where the dreams originated, growing up with eight siblings, the daughter of two country kids from Mississippi who’d come up to Chicago without the skills needed to thrive in the labor force or for raising children.

“All they knew,” Mom would say, “was how to make babies.”

“Did you know your father?”

“We knew Dad but he wasn’t around.”

That left her mother—our grandma—not much time except for work. Willie Mae kept three jobs at a time. “Your grandma was a workaholic who made sure that we had the necessities we needed to survive. I always appreciated that. And her independence.”

Grandma also liked to have something to drink at the end of the day. Mom explained: “That was her way of releasing her cares and enjoying herself, being able to party a little bit and have a good time.” As a little girl, my mom looked up to her mother very much. “More than once, I made the statement that when I grew up I wanted to be just like my mom. Your grandma was the prettiest woman in the world back then. She had this long beautiful hair that was a showstopper, and when she dressed to go out with her face made up, I’d look at her and think life would be magic if I could grow up to be like her.”

Mom later wondered if, by trying to follow her mom’s ways, she’d brought a curse upon herself without knowing it—that one day she’d turn too much to drinking and partying to escape the hardships of her life. But there was another more important puzzle piece, I guess you could say, and that came from her feeling different from everyone else.

This was how she put it, looking back: “I was that kid who was used to going off to be by myself. The ‘special’ one with a vivid imagination full of stories I could make up. I would talk to shoes, bunny rabbits, kind of like a schoolteacher.” Not happy in the circumstances she was living, Jolinda used to do a lot of writing “to get out of the real world.” Even though people told her how cute she was, she recalled, “I didn’t think that I was cute at all.” Then, fighting low self-esteem, she began to write stories of her Cinderella dreams and share them with her siblings on special occasions like Christmas and Easter.

Everyone encouraged her writing. Her being special and being different soon became a powerful thing. That is, until one day when her dad stopped by and he heard her reading one of her stories. He said she was crazy and in fact told Willie Mae that she needed to put that child away. “I was so angry with him,” my mother remembered. “He didn’t know me. And what did he mean, ‘put me away’?”

On the one hand, that left a young Jolinda Morris to feel like she needed to find herself a man who would value all she had to offer. On the other, her mother was raising her to be strong and independent, with the familiar refrain: “You don’t need a man, you can take care of yourself.”

The social scene at school added another layer. At first, as one of the smartest kids in the classroom, Mom found a positive outlet in the world outside the house. But that started to change toward the end of elementary school. “I didn’t think of myself as one of the pretty girls so to me I became a nerd,” she said. “I wanted to hang with the popular people. So I got out of my lane and went into the lane with them. And they drank.” Those fifth- and sixth-grade kids would go to a place called the Chicken Shack and someone would pass around some sweet peppermint schnapps. “Yeah, that was my first little drink I drank, and after a few sips I could approach people and feel confident, like I was somebody else, and before long learned to be anyone I wanted to be.”

Teachers talked to Mom all along about her academic potential. But no one reinforced that message at home. At sixteen she gave birth to my oldest sister, Deanna. She told me, “I was a baby myself, having a baby. For a minute, though, I was happy. She was so very precious to me. My best little friend in the world.” About my sister’s daddy, Mom said, “First one to catch my eye and then break my heart. When I got pregnant by him, at least four or five other girls were pregnant by him, too.”

The next year, a friendship that turned into a relationship, but no real love, led to her getting pregnant with my sister Keisha. At seventeen, about to be the mother of two little girls, Mom dropped out of high school. “My life was going down at that point. But I was trying hard. I started working at a plant called Wilson and Jones. I was still home with mother, but I was taking care of my girls, being independent and responsible and thought that would take away how disappointed I was in myself. Except it didn’t. The shame set in because instead of making it out, I’d come to a place called failure. The big
F.
And I was the smart kid who had the promise.”

For the next year, she tumbled into the first downward spiral. No drugs but hard drinking. “Just drinking to drink” is how she described it. “I was embarrassed. I was miserable. I was really lonely.”

The dreams didn’t go away but they seemed to get shelved, from how I interpreted her past. Being an introvert—something I could understand—she had trouble starting up conversations. As a result, she just continued doing what she was doing, working, taking care of her babies, drinking, and feeling out of place.

But then, one day, she saw this interesting, cool cat go gliding down her sidewalk on a skateboard and everything changed. This was a story I heard many times whenever Tragil and I would ask, “How did you and Dad ever get together?”

“Big Dwyane went by on that skateboard and I thought he had the prettiest smile I’d ever seen in my life. I remember saying, mmm, he and I would make some pretty babies.”

As a seven-year-old I was shocked at that comment. But Tragil, twelve at the time, only laughed and said, “Well, you did!”

Mom later admitted the only reason she even approached Mr. Dwyane Tyrone Wade to introduce herself: “I was young and alcohol let me be outspoken, whereas if I was sober, I wouldn’t have said anything to him.”

Anyway, she was the one that started flirting. Dad never knew that part of the story about Mom spotting him. His version was that he saw her first. He was about fifteen years old then, a little younger than her, and to him Jolinda Morris was the prettiest, most witty, most intelligent girl on the block. “She had two kids already,” he said about the day she approached him, “and meeting the prettiest girl on the block made me the man.” At the time he and his friends worked part-time at McDonald’s and Burger King. So, Dad decided, “My dream was to feed her and her babies and then I would marry her.” He wanted to be the knight in shining armor for Jolinda.

Pretty soon they were boyfriend and girlfriend, and that was the ballad of how our parents met. Details of their married life together are hazy from this point on. But I know from the way they spoke of each other, even as the years passed, that there was always a lot of love in the bond they had.

Serving in the U.S. Army in the early years of their relationship, Dad was stationed in Panama when Mom was getting ready to give birth to their first baby together. He was upset not to be in Chicago for the birth, but he managed to call Mom in the hospital and was able to give my sister her name.

“Tragil,” Dad supposedly told her on the overseas phone call, and spelled it, explaining that each letter stood for something important that he cared about. As the story goes. He didn’t remember it that way. Dad said, “Well, I was looking to give her a beautiful name and I was in an airplane flying over the desert so I looked in the dictionary I had with me for a word related to the desert.
Tra
came up about desert and I flipped to another page and something about
gil
so I combined them to make Tragil” (pronounced “Trah-gill”).

That military side of Daddy wasn’t easy for my mom. As she also said, “Big Dwyane was not an angel.” At the same time, Mom was quick to mention that Dad was a very hard worker and was responsible for his family, not just supporting her and Tragil but also being a dad to my older sisters, as close to a father as they ever had.

Before I arrived on January 17, 1982, Mom and Dad had gone back and forth for months about what to name me. Mom was so excited after three girls to be having a boy that she wanted to name me Blessing.

Dad said simply, “Blessing? No way.” He wanted to name me Aramis.

“Aramis?” Mom asked. “No. If not Blessing, let’s call him Joe.”

“Joe? No.” Dad probably said, “Hell, no.” He wanted Aramis or nothing.

Where he came up with his names, we never knew. But in the end my parents couldn’t compromise on Blessing or Aramis or Joe. So they named me Dwyane Tyrone Wade Jr. Not the coolest, most distinctive name, I know. Even so, it’s been sturdy over the years and has served me well. Besides, I could tell in hearing the story many times that I was named with love from both parents—something every child should be blessed 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.