Last fall, the week before Thanksgiving, I was at home preparing for a flight when Nia called: she had been practicing after school for choir and both of us were under the impression that her older brother Darius was picking her up. Nia said she was still waiting and for some reason, Darius wasn’t reachable by phone or text. “I am in the middle of packing,” I told her. “I will pick you up if you need me to, but let me try to reach him first before I leave.”

“Okay Mom,” she answered, and then said something that made me see red: “Maybe he’ll pick up if you call, he won’t answer if it’s my number.”

What? “Excuse me? Nia, are you serious?”

“Yeah Mom, he says he doesn’t like answering texts when he’s driving.”

I told her to expect me if I couldn’t get ahold of Darius, then texted him about Nia needing a ride. He quickly responded that he was on the way, which was good, but still proved her point that he seemed to willfully ignore her number, which wasn’t cool at all.

To insure that this incident wouldn’t repeat itself, I had a talk with Darius when they returned home. “Nia told me that you don’t always answer her calls or texts.” I said. “Is that true?”

Appearing shocked, Darius lowered his head and was about to say something when I told him to hold on. I said that emergencies can happen at anytime and that unless he was working, he was never to ignore texting or calling family members. I said that it was one thing to be busy and send a text that you’ll call back later, but to not respond at all is unacceptable. I asked him: What if I had blown a tire and needed a ride? What if Layla or Nia needed help, heaven forbid, and he was the only one nearby?

He nodded in agreement.
I told him that I knew his sisters could be a handful, but he was still their big brother, and they needed to be able to rely on him. “I expect more from you going forward and I don’t want to have this conversation again. Are we clear?”

He told me he understood and that it wouldn’t happen again. Then he apologized.

I accepted his apology: after all, anyone can experience occasional lapses of judgement, and Darius is, usually, a wonderful and dependable son that any parent would be proud of. But we needed him to realize that family is a priority and that adulthood is about freedoms and extra responsibilities. Some folks would’ve chalked it up to “boys being boys,” but in my opinion, we owe it to our children to keep standards high and mediocrity tolerance low: otherwise, collective excellence drops to just ‘a’ight,’ the floor becomes the ceiling and then you end up practically applauding fish for swimming. Like comedian Chris Rock once exclaimed, only the marginal “will brag about some [expletive] a normal man just does… ‘I ain’t never been to jail.’ What do you want, a cookie?”

I recently had a conversation with a girlfriend about the consequences of celebrating the basic: her sister’s recent social media post wrote of literally praising the Lord, thanking the ancestors and all but turning flips because the brother-in-law—-drum roll please—
kept their daughter so his wife could attend a party *insert hard eye roll here*.

Is this what people are doing now? The husband spending time with his child is what parents do, period: why gush over something that is literally his job? If women are parenting, it’s status quo, but when it’s Dad putting in work, he’s special?

“Lowered Expectations” is funny as MADTv skits, but in real life, they can become tragic. ‘Magical’ and ‘mediocre’ should always mean two different things.