I get a phone call every once in a while from single mother friends whose kids don’t want to go to their father’s house… not for the weekend, not for the holidays, not for Christmas. I honestly don’t know how to make it all better, and I understand the pain the moms go through.
Because the kids have to go, or the law might come down on you. It’s his turn, right? He’s their father, no matter what, right?
Maybe.
I’m packing up, consolidating my house and my heart for yet another iteration of self in this transformation from married woman to single mother; sifting through what to keep, what to sell, what to give away. I remember the faces of each of the women who came to my rented, crumbling home in those first weeks with pots and pans, towels, books for the kid and books for me, a cup of coffee, a glass of wine. I remember them all, and remember what they gave to me in those first, frightening days.
This diatribe will go just as well towards vindictive, angry mothers as it will fathers but, as I’ve just gotten done with a tour of the Blogosphere and read some of the nasty, crappy things some fathers have done to their children to get back at their ex’es… this post will address revenge-seeking fathers.
You suck.
there are things that still make the bottom of my stomach drop out into a pit of despair… like accidentally stumbling across old emails from the ex from the bad times. When you have lived with pain for years, when you have shifted and accommodated yourself to it, twisted and contorted like the Elephant Man to encompass it… and then suddenly, that pain ends… your body and heart and mind don’t know what to do with themselves. We’ve all become accustomed to our pain, you see. Its absence feels aberrant. The we that is my heart mind soul …read more
Thoughts have been swirling around in my brain all weekend. We don’t live in the best neighborhood, though it’s ‘up and coming’ and ‘transitional’ and its name has been cobbled together from a classier zip code… with a qualification tacked on at the end. A 33 year old woman was raped not far from here. In broad daylight. While another man held her three year old daughter.
I wish I could help that woman. I wish I could make it all go away, or tell her that everything’s going to be alright. But I can’t. The thing about violent crimes? They divide …read more
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