I first met Daniel Carmickle on a Saturday morning in April 2001 just before dawn. Almost as a dare, he invited me to meet him at a 24-hour McDonald’s restaurant in the Englewood neighborhood.
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When I entered the restaurant, about a half dozen people were sitting at tables scattered around the dining area. They were chugging coffee or reading the newspaper. Because our only contact had been on the telephone, Carmickle (pronounced Carmichael) described himself to me.
“I look like a thug,” he said menacingly. He told me he was medium height, muscular with dark brown skin and short hair.
A man fitting that description was standing with his back to me and staring out of a window that overlooked a parking lot. I walked up to him and introduced myself.
“What’s up?” he said to my reflection, because he didn’t turn around. He looked down at his watch. “You’re a couple of minutes late.”
I thought: Certainly I don’t get paid enough for this …
But that was Daniel Carmickle. He was everything the social workers at the Ada S. McKinley foster care agency had warned me he’d be: surly, recalcitrant, often rude.
But Carmickle was also a father who just recently had regained custody of his 3-year-old daughter, Alexis. Born to a drug-addicted mother, she was put into Illinois Department of Children and Family Services custody when she was just 6 weeks old.
Carmickle, who was not married to Alexis’ mother, had won his daughter back while fighting a child welfare system so unaccustomed to reuniting children with their fathers that it often summarily dismisses these men.
Carmickle’s struggle meant he had to change his attitude and his demeanor. The system demanded that he submit to random drug tests, and he never tested positive. He had to take parenting classes and undergo routine psychological tests.
Soon it became apparent to the staff at Ada S. McKinley–the foster care agency that placed little Alexis–that the man they’d contemplated telling on several occasions to leave their premises was also big-hearted, determined and one of the most devoted fathers they’d ever met.
My story about Carmickle ran on the front page of this newspaper on Father’s Day 2001. Every Father’s Day since then, I’ve wondered: How have he and Alexis fared? Was fatherhood what he expected? Did he ever learn to comb her hair?
I tried to contact Carmickle a couple of years ago and wasn’t successful. Last week, we finally connected. He had moved from a rental apartment in South Shore to a house he bought in the Roseland community.
Carmickle, a 47-year-old construction worker, is now married and jokingly attributes a host of new gray hairs to his expanding family. In addition to Alexis, now 8, he has a 7-year-old stepdaughter, a 5-year-old son and a 15-month-old daughter.
Carmickle and I got a chance to catch up over a few days, but only briefly because his youngest daughter is in the hospital. Her illness has weighed heavily on the family.
Sitting in his front yard, I asked him what he has learned in the five years since he became a full-time dad. “You’ve got to feed [children] everyday,” he said smiling. “You’ve got to clothe them. And be real patient. You’ve got to give them a lot of love, even when they try you, and they will try you.”
He said that although he has been married for four years, merging the families continues to be challenging. Pointing around the spacious yard, he added that he loves his house, but he wishes his block were safer and that the young men in the neighborhood had bigger dreams and more direction.
Carmickle said that while he once worried about minor things like who would comb Alexis’ hair–he still takes her to the salon–he’s now concerned about her getting a good education and making it through the rough patches of puberty.
And although Alexis is surrounded by women who love her, including his mother and sister, he’s concerned she still feels the void left by her birth mother.
“Alexis wrote a letter to her a while back that said, `Mom I want to see you,'” he said. “We tried to meet up with her and we waited and waited and she never showed up. I hate to see Alexis hurt like that.”
Still, he said Alexis is thriving. That appeared to be the case as I watched her play with her brother in the yard. She told me she had recently read the caption of the photo that appeared on the first story from years ago.
“It said I was giggly,” she said.
“Are you still?” I asked her.
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She smiled coyly. “Just a little.”
By Sunday she said she still wasn’t sure what gift she’d give her father. But I think it’s pretty clear the gift he continues to give her.
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