"I remember seeing him once but it is a very vague memory. For a long time, I had this vision of our family being reunited the way they do it on Maury or Montel," she says, referring to the television talk shows. "Of course, it didn't happen like that ... But what I dream for myself is getting married and having kids. I strongly believe in love because I didn't see a lot of it growing up. There are so many things, even now, I wish I could say to my mother but cannot. I feel, with my own kids, that I can change things."
Colon expresses a similar sentiment. And his mother backs him up on that.
"It's courageous what he is doing but I wished something very different for him and my beautiful granddaughter," Malone-Colon says.
"Hampton's new marriage center is a pro-good marriage program to the extent that we know children do best when they are raised in healthy, married families. We're not trying to push someone into marriage if that's not what their heart desires, and I want no child to feel less than if they're born into a single-parent home. But there's a myth out there ... that marriage is not what Black people desire when, in fact, most of us want it very much. The problem is that we're having a hard time getting there."
