When a Family Man Thinks Twice
Joshua Coleman, Ph.D.
San Francisco Chronicle
June 18, 2000 (Father's Day)


You get married. And at some point you don't know if the marriage is going
to work. And since it's your first marriage, you feel discouraged and
hopeless and start believing that your marriage looks nothing like the ones
on TV or in US magazine. And you think how nice it would be to have a
marriage like that, built on friendship, hiking, and an active sex life.
And since it's a marriage with children, you don't know what it feels like
to be divorced with children, and figure it might not be that bad. It's a
tradeoff. And people say everything in life is a tradeoff, so there must be
something worthwhile about tradeoffs.

And you start thinking about it after you leave the movie theater because
your marriage once looked like the movie marriage, at least when you were
first dating. Or, maybe the movie is realistic, with lots of alienated,
confused adults, but, even those movies feature somebody who's falling in
love, like the two teenagers in American Beauty. And so you compare your
marriage to the teenagers in American Beauty and wonder how you got as far
off the track as Kevin Spacey, and do you need to get a GTO and start
smoking pot again to find yourself, even if you're smart enough to date
somebody your own age instead of your daughter's friend?

And maybe you realize that the same actors you're comparing your marriage to
on the screen, are having as much trouble in their marriages off the screen
as you are having in yours, at home. And so you stop comparing yourself to
their happy on screen marriages, and compare yourself to them as happy
divorced actors who have their kids part-time and live in LA or New York or
on their ranches in Montana.

And at the playground, watching your kids go down the slide with your spouse,
you end up sitting by a divorced spouse. And if you've never been divorced,
you won't see his/her loneliness as he/she stretches his/her legs and watches and waves
at his/her children because he/she looks like you, when you wave and smile at yours
playing on the swings, or that circular spinning thing that makes you
nauseous when you have the poor judgment to get on it. And you don't see
that this very same child on the swing set saying look at me look at me will
have to be returned to her mother's/father's house like a videotape by six because
that was the time agreed to in the agreement. And you may not know the
sadness he feels returning that child to her mother/father as she closes the door
to him/her like a vault while his/her kid waves, sad, bewildered or worse, happy to
be back with her mom/dad and now oblivious of him/her, her father/mother.

And you, who walk in and out of your home every day with your spouse and kids,
can't know what it's like to sit in your car and watch the place you lived
in as family, knowing your child is in there, laughing, talking loudly, or
waving briefly at you from the window like she does when her uncle leaves.
And since you are married, and wake up every day to your child's loud
laughter and endless questions and requests and frustrations and hurts, you
can't contemplate the deadwood barrenness of a house deprived of that sound.
And you wouldn't know that going home to that silence, a silence you craved
many times while married, is a silence found more often on hillsides, after
a large-scale fire.

And being married, you and your spouse may have just put your child to bed
with Harry Potter or the Little Engine That Could or other magical
children's stories that teach the value of never giving up and struggling
against the odds. And as the evening goes on, you end up in one of those god
awful fights with her/him that leave you feeling alone and why should you have
to put up with this as hard as you work and try. And it's hard to feel like
nobody else has it as bad or understands what you feel except perhaps the
woman/man you've begun to have an affair with who always says the right thing
and makes you feel good about yourself, which, of course, you deserve. And
the sex with the woman/man you're having an affair with is unbelievable because
sex is always unbelievable in affairs or else why would anybody bother?

And since you're a married father/mother, who goes on vacations with his kids and
helps them with their soccer, homework or playground politics, you may
underestimate the feelings of seeing your child walk out of the house you
once lived in as family, holding the hand of your ex-wife's new husband/ex-husband's new wife.
Perhaps you're surprised by the stab of betrayal when you hear your child
refer to your ex-spouse's new husband/wife as "my other daddy/mommy." And even though
you've had enough psychotherapy to start a clinic on both coasts, you watch
yourself get mad and hurt and state that she/he Does not, Can not and Will not
have another daddy/mommy because that is a position only you can fill and if she
ever brings up that phrase again, something really bad is going to happen to
somebody, you're just not sure who.

And you begin to wonder if anything is worth this kind of pain. Is anything
worth having your baby, your child, your self, handed to you and ripped back
out like an assembly line robot on a killing spree, week after week after
week after week? And friends and family and professionals say it will get
better over time and it does get better because you eventually get better at
finding new and improved ways to blind and numb yourself. And people will
tell you this change is called growth. And you know that must mean growth is
highly overrated.

And you always swore you would be a great dad/mom and you have been but you
better set your sorry [censored] down with divorce and give thanks for every other
weekend or summer visitation or some other version of fatherhood/motherhood that has
nothing to do with family and everything to do with an arrangement so
dubious only a court can invent it. And maybe when your kids grow up and go
off to college or move out you'll feel better. But then maybe you won't.
Maybe their new independence will just free them up to see your limitations
even more clearly.

And though you would never do it, you come to understand those lost fathers/mothers,
marginalized through their own mistakes or a lousy arrangement, moving miles
away and rarely calling, leaving their kids bobbing and drifting like toys
thrown from the back of a moving boat. And how these fathers/mothers get struck
dead and dumb years later when there's an angry and betrayed call from a
child who's now a teenager or an adult. And how these dads/moms stumble out an
excuse that tries to be an apology but ends up blaming the child and the
ex-spouse, and leaves the kid glad the father/mother wasn't around in the first place
no wonder mom/dad wanted out.

And maybe you'd never let it get to that point and you do need to leave your
marriage. Maybe the smoking stacked years of hurt and resentment are sooting
the air you and your family breathe and no priest or rabbi or therapist can
ever reverse it because you already tried all that. And you end up falling
in love with someone new because she/he reminds you of all the qualities you
love best; those of your children, your closest friends and you hate to
admit it but - yeah, those of your ex-spouse's.

And then, whether it's the right thing or the wrong thing, better or worse,
you look back. And at some point, your kids ask when you and mom/dad are going
to live together again. And though they eventually stop asking, they won't
stop hoping. And they carry that hope the way you carry your love for
them - soft, constant, and close to the surface. And no matter how awful it
was to be married and how grateful you are to be out, and how much getting
out was the right decision, some part of you may always wonder, was there
something else I could have done? Something?

<small>[ February 07, 2005, 05:10 PM: Message edited by: TreeReich* ]</small>

wow, way to intense to even finish.

I got the point some where around P 2-3.

Careful reading this one!

Oh my gosh, I wish my WH would read that....I really do, he is under the impression that "Ahhhh DD10 will be alright" he never thinks...is he going to be alright. He goes home to that empty house...only the dogs and the bird there....and he sees those pictures of his beautiful little girl, that I gave him as a housewarming gift.......I wonder if he ever feels like he's trapped......

-Caren

Caren,
I did send it to my WH a while back. He never said a word about it to me.

<small>[ February 07, 2005, 01:39 PM: Message edited by: TreeReich* ]</small>

Words don't work on a WS. It's crazy-making! They have no effect. At least I haven't seen it.

GC

F'k me, talk about launching a nuke.

Wow. Very intense.

I am glad I am a FBS.

Tree, if your man didn;t cry in his french Onion Soup and criossants for breakfast at that he's abnormal.

Wow. I wonder if theres a female version ?

GC....You are probably right! It's a shame they don't see the lives they are wrecking!

WOW

What sucks is you don't have to cheat to live through this hell, your wife can leave you and you go through many of the same things, only it wasn't what you wanted.

Your family was taken away from you by your WW.

Far be it from me to compare hurts, but I know having your wife leave you and take the kid hurts a lot too.

Every weekend I have my DD, it hurts it hurts a great deal, and I don't know how to fix it.

People tell me I should move on, but then I read a story like this and ask how can I.

It's not only dads who walk away, sometimes moms walk away and take the kids with her.

And society lets this happen.

TB

OM told my Squid that divorce wa sgoo dfor his three estranged kids ( from three mothers). It gave the a resilience they would never get from a "boring" father.

I would like to smash his face with a wrench right now, although since he lost an estranged son, tragically at 21, who was a complete stranger to him, he may have changed his mind.

This is one of the major reasons I decided to try and work things out. My D-day was right before two of my daughter's b-days and xmas. All Christmas morning, I thought, I do not care how tough this is for me now, I NEVER want to be a divorced mom who can not spend a holiday without her kids. I never want my H to be a divorced father who someday will be blamed for destroying his family.
Thanks! I needed a new reminder, and will keep that to remind me everytime I am in one of my down moods!

</font><blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr /><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">Originally posted by b0b pure*:
<strong>I wonder if theres a female version ? </strong></font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">I'm with Bob on this.

Yea, yea, yea - I could read it from a gender neutral standpoint - but when a father is portrayed as the bad guy, it doesn't hit home for me. Exactly the opposite - it's borderline insulting.

Glad I can switch the roles. But what about the story where the wife is the bad guy and the father - despite heroic efforts to keep the family together - is in the same position as this Dad?

</font><blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr /><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">Originally posted by worthatry:
<strong> </font><blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr /><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">Originally posted by b0b pure*:
<strong>I wonder if theres a female version ? </strong></font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">I'm with Bob on this.

Yea, yea, yea - I could read it from a gender neutral standpoint - but when a father is portrayed as the bad guy, it doesn't hit home for me. Exactly the opposite - it's borderline insulting.

Glad I can switch the roles. But what about the story where the wife is the bad guy and the father - despite heroic efforts to keep the family together - is in the same position as this Dad? </strong></font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">Yeah, what he said!

</font><blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr /><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">Originally posted by javaSansContour:
<strong> What sucks is you don't have to cheat to live through this hell, your wife can leave you and you go through many of the same things, only it wasn't what you wanted.... but I know having your wife leave you and take the kid hurts a lot too....

TB </strong></font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">Itdoesn't hurt any less when your wife leaves you, and you have the kids, and you have to watch them getting into & out of her car in the driveway for a couple of hours with her once a week.

It hurts just as much knowing that even though she told them she would call tonight, that in all likelihood she won't.

It hurts just as much knowing that she has 2 new step-kids living with her that are the same ages as your kids, and she has basically "replaced" her own kids with OM's.

I guess we all would agree that a ruined marriage HURTS on every situation

Hosea

I'm sure there is a female version but this is the only one I saw. Maybe we could change it to WS instead of husband or wife. No matter who leaves it's the same pain all the way around.

anyone care toemail this to cindy since i am not allowed to contact her....

and ww cause the same pain and destruction to men...i miss my babies that i never knew

You never knew your babies???? <img border="0" title="" alt="[Frown]" src="images/icons/frown.gif" />

That is so true and so well written. I agree that it should be changed to WS not H and W.
Thank you for posting that.

no i never got to meet my 3 baby boys <img border="0" alt="[Teary]" title="" src="graemlins/teary.gif" /> <img border="0" alt="[Teary]" title="" src="graemlins/teary.gif" /> ...cindy miscarried them late and this is what has started all this mess <img border="0" alt="[Teary]" title="" src="graemlins/teary.gif" />