Born Into Gossip
Actress and designer Draya Michele waited until her last trimester to publicly announce that she’ll give birth to a girl in May. After she posted about it on Instagram, she turned the comments off. She’s limited comments on every post since. Less than two weeks after Draya’s announcement, Houston Rockets’ guard Jalen Green credited his family and baby as motivation to score a career-high 42 points that helped defeat the Washington Wizards. His post-game interview seemed to confirm the rumor that Jalen is the father of Draya’s baby.
Pregnancy reveals and maternity photo shoots are commonplace among celebrities and regular folk these days. But what’s supposed to be a joyous occasion for Draya and Jalen has only fed a firestorm from naysayers directed toward Draya who some have called a “predator.”
Jalen is 22 and Draya is 39.
Their daughter will be Jalen’s first child and Draya’s third. She has two sons, one of whom is a year younger than Jalen which is another point of contention for critics of the relationship. Despite both of them being consenting adults, heteronormativity is bound to certain expectations–one of them being that it’s acceptable for the man to be the senior partner. When the woman is older, she often receives the brunt of the backlash.
It’s true now and it was true when my father fell in love with my mother in the late 1970s. Mom was 42 and Dad was 19–just over three years older than Mom’s first-born son. Mom was also still legally married when she met Dad which only fed more grain to the gossip mill.
“With age appropriateness, people feel comfortable that there’s someone the same age as you even though that doesn’t determine the success or failure of a relationship,” my Dad said recently while reflecting on his relationship with Mom. “In my relationship with your mom, age never really was an issue. I never really thought about it until I saw that people were responding to it.”
My parents met at Dad’s childhood church. Mom had been hired as Minister of Music while Dad was away at college. When he attended a worship service and saw Mom sitting at the piano, it was love at first sight. Dad never really dwells on Mom being married when their love affair began. In fact, I’ve never heard him use the word “affair” to describe it.
Mom felt a bit differently, though. She passed away in 2005, but she was always open to answering my questions about her relationship with Dad. My parents got married in their pastor’s office when I was four years old. Mom, Dad, and I were in our jeans and my maternal aunt Janice joined us at the church to be the witness. Their breakup lasted the entire duration of my college years until their marriage officially ended in divorce. Mom would later say, “I didn’t have to marry him. You were already here.”
Mom was sometimes conflicted about what she felt was a moral failure. She had three teenage children and a husband when her relationship with Dad started. It was also her second marriage to the same man. Her remarriage to him was twofold. First, she felt obligated to stay with the father of her children even in a loveless marriage which was the way of the world then. Second, if it was nearly impossible for women to even get a line of credit without a male cosigner back then, imagine what other obstacles she faced.
But Dad’s youthful sense of adventure and abandon spoke to those parts of Mom that were still alive in her. She once told me about her first kiss with Dad and the look on her face as she told me was one of euphoric teleportation. She said it was the best kiss she’d ever had in her life.
“If I had experienced being 19 and in love with somebody who was 19, that would have been fine, it just didn’t happen that way,” Dad said. “So sometimes when things happen and they just happen in a natural way, you go with it and you find out this is really great! This is beyond what I thought it was going to be. This person happens to be older than me, but that really doesn’t matter because the connection is more important.”
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As is probably the case with Draya Michele and Jalen Green, my parents created a safe bubble for themselves, away from their skeptics. They could just focus on being together. They had to be especially vigilant when Mom got pregnant with me. Their mental and physical safety and my care in utero were priorities they took drastic steps to maintain. Dad is aware those kinds of provisions are more challenging to have in place now when so much of what is private becomes public.
“I had a nervous breakdown behind it all because the weight of the people who said they loved us, you become overcome by that reality that this is what people are saying but this is the reality,” Dad said of his mental state as his relationship with Mom became known. “We’re still in that now. In an age where social media has multiplied it, it makes your relationship less personal. We got away, but now you can’t get away from [the scrutiny].”
Phrases like “she already has a 21-year-old son” have been used to critique Draya’s relationship with Jalen. A gargantuan onus is always placed on the woman when she is the older one. Dad thinks part of that comes from a school of thought that the older woman is “taking” the young man away from women his age. Or, “he didn’t have a mother…he’s missing his mother.’ I’m like, ‘this ain’t no mama kind of relationship!’”
It’s alarming that very little has changed in this perspective, decades after my birth. Dad attributed that to generations of people still being unsure of what love looks like for them.
“It was that way 46 years ago and it’s the same now because people aren’t sure what a relationship is. See? We’re still struggling with, ‘What is a relationship? What makes a relationship? They have to look a certain way or they have to be this way…,’” Dad offered. “We’re still struggling with that, which just robs us of any kind of authentic relationship. So, here’s [Jalen] who I’m sure in his own mind maybe has experiences with relationships but being a professional player, met this person. I’m sure he wasn’t saying, ‘I only like older women.’”
Based on his relationship with Mom, Dad thinks Jalen is probably experiencing a certain freedom in being with Draya.
“I don’t think these guys view this as older/younger relationships. I think they have the courage to live out just ‘this is the person I enjoy being with. It’s great, it’s comfortable where I can be myself.’ That’s how I felt. [Your mom and I] genuinely liked each other. When you like a person, a lot of stuff doesn’t really matter.
“My relationship with your mom, there was a freedom that was very empowering as a man. She gave me my manhood in many ways. She gave me the sense that I don’t have an expectation from you that you would be my age numerically. I didn’t feel less of a man because she was older than me, like I didn’t have to walk around being macho. Sometimes it’s just that I’m with the person I want to be with and it’s great, it’s fun. We’ve lost sight of that.”
In the Instagram caption for Draya’s maternity photos, she expressed that she’s “excited to speak words to the daughter I thought I’d never have.” Regardless of how long her romantic connection with Jalen lasts, their daughter will be the physical proof it existed. Once their daughter is born, they’ll have to work even harder to manage her exposure to the spotlight and the negative commentary about her very existence from adults.
My parents certainly did that with me. One of the greatest pieces of armor they gave me was being honest about how I came to be. I always knew my origin story in its entirety. No one other than my parents ever told me something about them I didn’t already know. And they tried! Even as a middle aged woman, some of the people from that time will stare at me in wonder when they run into me. I remind them of a time and a couple that exposed every fallacy about what they believed should be an exemplary relationship or love story.
“When I look back on it, I think, ‘Man, that was some real courage we had to stand in that.’ But if you asked us, we didn’t really think about it because we were living it,” Dad explained. “We lived it out in front of people. For us, we already felt like the best thing that we had done was you being born. [Your mom] wasn’t expecting to have any more babies. We both knew, this is gonna be a special kid. When you were born, we were like, ‘Wow! This is beyond what we thought!’ We felt like this was God’s child.”
As Dad sees it, the success of any relationship shouldn’t be its longevity or even what’s accomplished within it. What’s most important is being fully invested the whole time.
“The relationship I had with your mom is the greatest of all time,” Dad concluded. “We had a lot of fun together, we laughed a lot. With this whole age thing, we miss what we’re really supposed to get because we’re so busy setting standards and setting barriers. I didn’t think about how long it would last or those sorts of things. When you’re present, there’s a fulfillment that you get out of it.”
