Divorced Dads

In more pain than they show

Photo by Bruno Aguirre on Unsplash

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 People 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 trade-off. And people say everything in life is a trade-off, so there must be something worthwhile about trade-offs.

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. 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. So you stop comparing yourself to their happy onscreen marriages and instead compare yourself to them as happy divorced actors who have their kids part-time and live in Los Angeles or New York or on their ranches in Montana.

And at the playground, watching your kids go down the slide with your wife, you end up sitting by a divorced father. And if you've never been divorced, you won't see his loneliness as he stretches his legs and watches and waves at his children, because he looks like you when you wave and smile at yours.

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 house like a library book 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 as she closes the door to him like a vault while his kid waves, sad and bewildered, or worse, happy to be back with her mom and now oblivious to him, her father.

And you, who walk freely in and out of your home every day with your wife and kids, can't know what it's like to sit in your car and watch the place you lived in as a 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 dead barrenness of a house deprived of that sound. And you don'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 wife 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 that leave you feeling alone and wondering why you should 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 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 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, 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 a family, holding the hand of your ex-wife's new husband. Perhaps you're surprised by the stab of betrayal you feel when you hear your child refer to your ex-wife's new husband as "my other daddy." 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 Does Not, Can Not, and Will Not have another daddy 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, yourself, handed to you and ripped back out 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, and you have been, but you better set your sorry ass down with divorce and give thanks for every other weekend or summer visitation or some other version of fatherhood 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 yourself would never abandon your child, you come to understand those lost fathers, 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 get struck 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 stammer out an excuse that tries to be an apology but ends up blaming the child and the ex-wife, leaving the kid glad the father wasn't around in the first place and no wonder Mom 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 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-wife.

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 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, 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?

This essay originally appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle on Father’s Day, 2000 with the title: When a Family Man Thinks Twice.

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