Emotional Pro

I don’t even know if most people do it any more: marry with the intention of staying married for life. I did. Yet, I was only 19 years old when I married, with much to learn. My marriage did fine for nearly 8 years, until we added our first child. Though we consciously conceived our daughter together, my husband “realized” when she was 5 months old that he wasn’t ready to be a father. By the time she was 10 months old, he moved out. I was very angry; and felt most abandoned. It took me 6 years to fully forgive him, when he called and apologized, asking for forgiveness. It took courage for him to do that. He had also been fully responsible to pay the child support to which we had agreed, and spent time with our child on a regular basis. In that call, he said he felt so guilty he sometimes couldn’t look our daughter in the eye. I told him the condition for my forgiveness was his–if he didn’t forgive himself, she wouldn’t have had him when she was young, and she wouldn’t have him when she was older, either.
Why did I want my child to have her father? Because I knew how important both parents are to a child. My own father was absent for the first three years of my life, due to the Second World War. When he returned, he took me away from my birth mother (the conditions were horrible and unworkable for me there). I never saw her again in my life. To my knowledge, both are now deceased.
So, while I was angry with my first husband for his abandonment of us, I still worked hard for him and our daughter to have every opportunity to have a relationship together. It worked. She’s in her mid-thirties; and they have a relationship. She also has a good relationship with her husband, which is part of that same issue.
I remember being upset with her father about the time our daughter was 10 years old. She looked me sternly in the eye and said: “I’m going to tell you the same thing I told my Dad. I know you feel angry toward him, but he’s my Dad. I love him. When you say not-nice things about this person I love, it hurts me. Please stop doing that!” It was a powerful lesson, for which I am most grateful.
In recent years there has been a strong emphasis during divorce of one parent being the “custodial parent,” and the other the “non-custodial.” In a great majority of cases, mothers have been the “custodials” and father’s the “non-custodials,” usually meaning that fathers are given “visitation” on weekends and dinner dates once during the week. In the words of our daughter, “not having fathers has hurt” the children involved.
Now PBS has come out with a program we all need to watch. It had its first showing in Boston this week. Kids & Divorce: For Better or Worse was created and aired in response to a strong campaign mounted by the so-called “Father’s Rights” groups. It was created to “balance” a film aired by PBS last October, Breaking the Silence: Children of Divorce, it placed strong emphasis on the issues of domestic violence. The Father’s groups complained because the mother most focused on in the film herself had convictions for child abuse, yet was portrayed in the film as beleagured and deserving as a custodial parent. With Kids and Divorce, PBS made good on its promise to present the views “opposing” those of the first film.
This is a big step for fathers in this country, who are too often portrayed as “deadbeat,” “absent,” and “uninvolved.” Most fathers want to be none of those things; most do whatever they can to stay involved and love their children, now knowing what our daughter knew 25 years ago: “When you are not-nice to someone I love, it hurts me.”