In a recent interview Jay Z talks about the pain of growing up without a father and vows to never do the same thing to his own child...
From GQ
So now Jay's going to be a father, and he's thinking about his own father. He's thinking about his roots in a nonmythological way, what he's carried with him from Marcy to here, what he's escaped. What's relevant about Adnis Reeves, Jay's dad, is not so much that he left when Jay was 11 but that he was present up until that time, long enough that when he left, it was worse than not having a father at all.
"If your dad died before you were born, yeah, it hurts—but it's not like you had a connection with something that was real," Jay says. "Not to say it's any better—but to have that connection and then have it ripped away was, like, the worst. My dad was such a good dad that when he left, he left a huge scar. He was my superhero."
All that was part of why Jay wanted to wait to have kids. That promise, in "New Day," that fear of repeating his father's mistakes—it's real. He knows, intellectually, that he's not just going to spaz out and leave. "But I bet he didn't believe he'd spaz out and leave either," Jay shrugs.
He was rich enough to provide, years ago. But he wanted to be rich enough to be present—to leave rap alone for a while, if necessary, and not in a trumped-up pseudoretirement kind of way.
"Providing—that's not love," he says. "Being there—that's more important. I mean, we see that. We see that with all these rich socialites. They're crying out for attention; they're hurting for love. I'm not being judgmental—I'm just making an observation. They're crying out for the love that maybe they didn't get at home, and they got everything. All the material things that they need and want. So we know that's not the key."
