Taraji P. Henson Talks Choosing To Be A Single Mother

Taraji P. Henson was only a teenager when she met Mark Johnson in the lobby of a movie theater.

In her new book “Around the Way Girl,” the “Empire” star details their immediate connection and how they dated on and off throughout her college years at Howard University — but their instant chemistry quickly faded into fights and then something far more violent after the birth of their son Marcel in 1994.

“The next thing I knew, Mark’s balled-up fist was coming straight for my face,” Henson wrote. “I fell onto the couch crying and holding my mouth; blood seeped off my lips and across my teeth...”

The 46-year-old Golden Globe winner said she immediately called her father, who handled her abusive partner with an even, but authoritative keel.

“I expected my father to rip Mark limb from limb,” Henson admitted. “Daddy later told me that he’d had a sixth sense that Mark had hit me and, despite his newly minted Christian ways, had actually plotted a way to kill Mark in the moments it took him to get to my place.”

Instead the men had an emotional heart-to-heart, in which Henson’s father admitted he once hit his wife and has been working to make up for it ever since.

“I didn’t want an apology from Mark, though,” Henson said. “I knew that if it happened once it would happen again and again.”

Just like her mother, Henson opted to leave her abuser in spite of the critique she knew she’d be opening herself up to.

“In so many judgmental eyes, I’d become another statistic: a baby mama,” she explained. “But my becoming a single mother was about making a sound parenting decision that would ultimately save our lives.”

The “Person of Interest” actress has since been fighting the stigma surrounding the decision she made to protect her son.

“Hell, even the President of the United States — four of them, in fact — were raised by single mothers,” she wrote. “Nevertheless, mention that you’re a single mom, and all-too-many of us still have to cut through a thick, gristly layer of stigma before we’re given our proper due.

“The grace and understand for the familial choices of married women is a given. The humanity of single moms comes with asterisks, ridicule and judgemental questions.”

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