The unsung loneliness, love and labor of single parenting is at the heart of “Grandma and Me: An Ode to Single Parents,” Brian Copeland’s new one-man show at The Marsh in San Francisco. The production alternates between his experiences growing up in a single-parent household and, upon his divorce, becoming a single parent himself.
Copeland, a former KTVU and KGO television host and former KGO radio host, is perhaps best known as the author and star of “Not a Genuine Black Man,” a one-man show that premiered in 2004 and is billed as ”the longest running solo show in San Francisco theater history.” “Grandma and Me” picks up in 1979, not long after the central plot point in “Genuine”: his mother’s successful lawsuit against a racist property management company that didn’t want a Black family living in a San Leandro apartment complex.
A few years ago, while going through his late grandmother’s belongings, he found the guardianship paperwork she had signed when she assumed legal custody of him and his four younger sisters after their mother died. He describes the show as an attempt to do an “emotional autopsy” on her experiences.
“God, how hard that must have been for her, you know, to be a 57-year-old African American grandmother with all these kids, including a baby,” Copeland said. “And being Black on top of all that in this society, how incredibly hard it was to do that and it makes me respect what she did even more.”
As someone raised by my widowed mother of six and the grandmother who lived with us, I recognized and appreciated how Copeland captures the loneliness and anxiety of single parenthood — for the parent and the child. That and the enormous gratitude we both feel for the love, sacrifices and determination of the women who brought us up. If you are or have had a single parent in your life, you need to see this show.
Parenting is hard and single parenting is especially hard. According to a 2019 Pew Research report, our country, which has some of the world’s weakest public support for families, leads all nations in the percentage of children being raised in single parent homes: 23%. This is compared to 15% in Canada, 7% in Japan, 7% in Mexico, 5% in India and 4% in Nigeria. According to U.S. census data, since 1968, the percentage of U.S. children being raised in two-parent homes has dropped from 85% to 70%. According to state figures, as of April, 22.4% of California children were living in single parent homes.
While Black children are the most likely of all American children to be raised by single parents, 46.3% by mothers and 4.5% by fathers, white women make up the largest number of single parents in America,7.01 million as of 2020. Asian children are the most likely to be raised in two-parent households with Asian single mothers accounting for about 577,000 in 2020. Between 1990 and 2020, the number of Latino single mothers tripled from 1.2 million to 3.4 million. One bright spot is that the poverty rate for Black single mother households has declined from 48.1% in 1990 to 28.1% in 2020.
Copeland’s father wasn’t in the picture when his mother died and so his grandmother, Lena Mae Arbee, who had raised her only daughter on her own, became a single mother for the second time as she was nearing 60. She had migrated from Birmingham, Alabama to Akron, Ohio, then moved with her daughter and grandkids throughout Texas and California before they finally settled in San Leandro. In our interview, Copeland described his mother and grandmother as “best friends.” His grandmother’s predicament, after her daughter’s death, is palpable in an early scene when she turns to him and says, “What we gone do, Brian?”
A couple of decades later he would be wondering the same thing, after his marriage ends and he is left raising his own three deeply stressed young children.
“Prior to that I was a dad, but that year I became a father,” he said. “I was not an uninvolved parent. But I (had not been) involved in the nuts and bolts and rolling up the sleeves and the daily: making the lunches and arranging the play dates and cooking breakfast and dinner every night and all that stuff.”
Copeland told me that by the time he was in fifth grade, he had attended seven different schools because his mother moved the family so often. It was of paramount importance to him that his children have the security of remaining in their home and at their school.
In our conversation, Copeland got deeper about something that’s played for laughs in the show — the real significance of the many years he spent walking his kids to and from school. This began because in the early days he only had a two-seater Mazda Miata but the practice continued for eight years, long after he’d sized up to a minivan.
“It was a really good bonding time for us, that 15-20 minute walk, door to door,” he said. “To have that time every day and nobody’s on their phone — because there were no phones to get on at that time, and we would talk and I would hear what’s going on or we would practice spelling or quiz them on history and get caught up. That’s why I did it.”
Recognizing that men make up a tiny fraction of single parents, he rails at the outsized praise guys receive for doing small things for their kids, like taking a kid out to lunch or showing up for a game.
”So what have we done in society to make the bar so low for men?” he asked me. “Maybe I’m being hypocritical. Because before I had that experience, I was involved but not super involved.”
What galls him even more is the disparate value American society places on married mothers and single mothers.
“Why is it that if you are a married woman with the means to be a stay at home mom — and generally when you hear that, you’re thinking of a white family, why is it that you will hear from society that this woman has ‘the toughest job there is’?” he said during our interview. “But if it’s a single mother staying at home — and an awful lot of the time she’s staying home for the same reason Grandma stayed at home — was because any money she made working would just go to pay for child care. So why is it that this woman, this mother, needs what they say is ‘the dignity of work’? So, if you’re married and your husband makes a lot of money and you can stay at home, you’ve got the toughest job there is but if you’re single and you’re trying to raise a child and you have to stay at home, then somehow that’s a character flaw? I think about women like Grandma and it really makes me angry.”
“Grandma and Me: An Ode to Single Parents”
Where: The Marsh San Francisco, 1063 Valencia St., S.F.
When: 7:30 p.m Fridays and 5 p.m. Saturdays through Oct. 22. Opening night is Saturday, Oct. 8.
Copeland reprises “Not A Genuine Black Man” this weekend at the Presidio Theater: 7 p.m. Friday and Saturday. For more information: presidiotheater.org.
Teresa Moore is a columnist for The Examiner who reports on race and equity.
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Teresa Moore is a columnist for The Examiner who reports on race and equity.