No matter how bad the problem
is, according to Iyanla Vanzant it can be fixed. Even if that problem consists
of 34 biological children, 9 adopted children, and 17 baby mamas. The idea of a
man creating this many children may be unbelievable, but Jay Williams did that
and he volunteered to broadcast his crazy life as a father to the world on
Iyanla’s Fix My Life.
How can a man create this many children? Why would so many
women sign up to give one man so many children? Where does a problem like this
stem from? According to the first episode of a three part series, the problem
started with Jay’s parents. His father was abusive to his mom and that in turn
gave him permission to physically and mentally abuse 17 women, 43 children, and
continue the cycle for as long as he wants.
While www.searchingformystar.com
had many questions after watching, there was no way to contact Jay for a quick
interview. Some of the questions that ran rampant were what kind of job he has
that provides him with enough to financially support so many children, why he
is so comfortable creating so many children that he can’t even give time
to, and how many more women he will get
involved with before his search for love is over. However, Writer Reginald
Alceus was kind enough to do an interview in his place.
Disclaimer: Reginald is a 27 year old with no kids.
How many children are too many children for you?
For me personally, I would have to say three, and even that
is cutting it close. I'm single at the moment, though, I could see myself being
a family-oriented kind of guy in the future. Somehow, one would just be too few
kids for the kind of household I would envision. At the same time, anything
more than three would feel like chaos, and given my introverted nature, I don't
think I could handle having to manage so many little lives even with the
assistance of my wife.
The thing
is, I grew up as part of a simple family of four composed of my parents, my
brother, and myself. It's a nice, balanced number, and probably beneficial to
the children themselves in the long run. My mother's mother had eight children
in total back in her day right up until she was in her forties and my father's
mother had nine kids. Of course, that was a different time and women of that
era were raised according to traditional values and expectations. Large families
were valued and hardly the norm, especially in certain countries where having a
small family was likely considered unusual. In the modern age, it's insanely
expensive just to rear one child, let alone any more, so having multiple
children just seems impractical unless you're especially secure in your
finances.
More than
that, however, I feel as though having so many kids forces you to divide your
attention among them too thinly. Parents always claim they love all of their
children equally, and while I believe they want to believe that, it stands to
reason that the more kids you have to mind, the less individual attention each
one is going to get. That winds up impacting all of the kids in turn and it's
not something I would want to do to my children. I want to love them with all
my heart, not concern myself with how best to divide up my time and energy
between all of them in between work, my wife, daily responsibilities, etc.
How many women
would you consider making the mother of your child?
Simply put, just one, ideally. Obviously, circumstances
arise wherein a man might get remarried or his wife might pass away due to some
tragedy. In either of those specific cases, God forbid, I might consider having
a child with another woman other than the mother of my first child/children.
However , once I'm married, she's the only woman I'm interested in sharing my
genes with. I've never been very fond of that whole " sow your wild
oats" concept. Just seems like a lousy, flimsy justification to be an irresponsible
man to me. If you don't want children but feel the need to have "sexual
conquests," then take extra precautions to make sure nobody ends up
pregnant. That, or don't have sex at all if you're not prepared for the
potential repercussions.
When you first heard The Temptations Papa Was A Rolling
Stone, what kind of lifestyle did you imagine the man in the song living?
Lol. It's not
a song I'm terribly familiar with, but I suppose the general idea I received
was that the man is likely an absentee father. Just the title alone conjures up
the idea of a man who probably had a family with a woman and then decided to
leave them behind to chase after some wayward dream or some other excuse not to
be tied down to family life. Some guys (and women) really aren't suited for
family life. They have no trouble doing the deed that creates children, but
that doesn't mean they were ever ready or willing to be a parent themselves.
Have you known men that created babies with women, but then
disappeared from the lives of the women and children?
I've never
been acquainted with such an individual matching that exact description. I am,
however, acquainted with people who admittedly do not spend as much time as they
should or would like to with their kids due to various circumstances (I'm not t
liberty to name names, obviously). With half of all marriages in the U.S.
ending in divorce (I have no verifiable source to cite this), many
relationships wherein children are produced don't wind up structured like
traditional homes, regardless.
The idea of a
married man running out on his wife and kids is an antiquated concept by
today's standards. It's much more realistic to picture a young couple who wound
up having children out of wedlock with the relationship between the boyfriend
and girlfriend dissolving due to a lack of maturity and/or solidarity. Many
women end up single mothers that way, and it's really a shame since it's
ultimately the children who end up losing out the most.
While watching the first episode of the three part series it
was clear Jay blames his mother and father for his problems. When you look back
on your mistakes, who do you blame?
A less
mature version of myself would have looked to everyone but myself to blame for
my mistakes. A slightly more mature version would have pointed the finger at
myself. These days, I don't really see the value in blaming anyone or anything
unless doing so serves a constructive purpose. The point of blaming anybody for
anything is to hold them accountable for a mistake and encourage them through
shaming to acknowledge and fix their fault. Problems are always bound to arise
and mistakes will always be made. It's best to be solution-oriented in
approaching dilemmas which come up rather than waste energy trying to assign
blame.
If you were
really so concerned with a problem being rectified, wouldn't/shouldn't you step
up and try to correct it rather than wait for somebody else to? If I walked
into my house and saw a spilled carton of milk on the kitchen floor, I might
assume it was one of my children who did it. Some parents might be more
concerned with making their child clean up the mess he or she made. While I
agree that would be constructive in teaching them responsibility and
accountability, objectively speaking, the problem I'm looking at is a large
puddle of milk that's still sitting on my kitchen floor and needs to be
cleaned. If I can clean it right then and there, I'm going to do it. I'm not
going to purposely leave it just so I can vent a little anger and scream at my
child while I try to prove a point so I can feel like I'm right.
So far Jay has impregnated 17 women without marrying any of
them. Some of these women were pregnant at the same time. His reasoning is that
he loved them. As a man, do you think this is a situation of a man loving a lot
of women or could he have really been spreading his own pain amongst all of
them?
That's difficult to say since I don't know the man
personally or enough about him to determine why he does what he does. You would
think his actions alone would be enough of a clue to explain his mindset, but
people are complex creatures whose motivations, while appearing relatively
straight-forward, tend to have complex roots. I don't want o provide a
generalized statement, but I can guess that any person who felt the need to have so many kids without any intention of caring for any of them or
their mothers likely has some trauma that has since become a permanent part of
his character. Its possible he felt something for each woman, but it might not
be what most people would consider love.
I remember a college professor of mine once told her class
that she loved her husband, but that she was not "in love" with him.
She eventually clarified her statement, explaining the difference was that
loving somebody (I'm paraphrasing) is the emotion you feel for them after years
of familiarity and experience in growing together. Being in love, however, is
that whimsical, silly, butterflies in your stomach feeling you get when you're
initially enamored with somebody. Being "in love" with somebody is an
impulse that eventually burns out, and what you're left with is either a
substantial, loving relationship or the remnants of what you thought was going
to be something special, but which crumbled and fell apart because it was bound
to. In the case of this guy, I think every one of his relationships with these
women probably fell under the latter category, if they were anything real at
all.
Iyanla Vanzant said Jay’s problems started in his mother’s
womb when his father was physically abusing her. Do you think what happens
before a man is born can determine the outcome of his future?
I'm not a medical professional, so I can't say whether
physical abuse somehow impacts a child psychologically before they are even born.
If you're asking my opinion, I doubt it. Behaviors are typically learned
through experiences, and though children appear to have an innate temperament at
the core of their personalities, I don't necessarily think it can be influenced
or altered in the womb or otherwise.
There are things which can drastically alter how a child
develops physically in the womb, such as smoking, alcohol, certain medicines,
even different kinds of food. I have heard people say things like the mood of
the mother during the pregnancy affects the health of the child. Something like
that substantiates the idea that women should not endure too much stress,
physically, emotionally, psychologically, etc. because it could adversely
impact the physical health of the child who is connected to her body. I don't
see how abuse of the mother would effect the child's developing mind since it's
a separate entity. What the mother thinks or feels probably isn't picked up
upon by the child, but I suppose hormones released by her body during intense
periods of stress could influence the physical development of her baby.
Other than that, I don't believe a person can be "born
bad." Antisocial and psychopathic behavior is typically an ideal mixture
of both nature and nurture. Had this man had a better upbringing, even if he was
somehow genetically predisposed to demonstrating antisocial tendencies, he
would not have necessarily acted on them. Likewise, people who endure horrific
circumstances early on in life or even later in life don't always find themselves
ruined by the experience. Were that the case, we would be overrun with
psychopaths and the mentally perturbed. You only hear about individuals like this
who do extreme things because some perfect balance of nature and nurture
contributed to making them into who and what they are.
The next part of this Fix My Life special introduces the 17 baby mamas that Jay has. Tune in with me.
Reginald Alceus can be found on Facebook.
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