Single Dads

A while ago, I wrote a post called A Fact And Forgiveness where I basically said that forgiveness is the key to being in a relationship with your children and your ex, and that accepting your ex as part of your family would eventually make your situation much better.

Well, I have a secret.

I didn’t know that for sure.

Sure, I can talk a good game, but in all honesty, I didn’t know for a fact that forgiveness was the key.  After all, I was in a situation where things were relatively contentious between myself and my daughter’s mother; we would argue or wouldn’t speak at all, and the relationship was strained, to say the least.

So.  It’s would great pleasure that I tell you that I was actually correct.  Tomorrow, with the blessing of the State of Colorado and Grace’s mother, my daughter will be having an extended, meaning weekend, stay over at my apartment.  I would jump for joy, but my legs are a bit sore from an rigorous workout today (ouch).

Sure, I’m quite sure that working hard, paying child support, providing health care, and participating in school events had something to do with it too.  But in the end, my head had to change - and once that it did, everything else fell into place.  And there it is - in the end, I did what needed to be done.

Forgiveness works, people.  Fight when (and if) you have to, but seriously, as the phrase goes, you catch more bees with honey than vinegar.

Scenario: You break up with your wife, who has your children. You see your kids and pay child support for years, then discover to your horror that one of the kids that you thought was yours in fact wasn’t yours at all. So, you seek to decrease child support payments. Seems like a no-brainer, right?

Wrong. Not in New Jersey.

TRENTON, N.J. - Paternity doesn’t count when it comes to a Hunterdon County man’s bid to lower child support payments for a child that’s not his.

An appeals court upheld a lower court which denied the man’s request in 2006 after he said he discovered he was not the father of the 10-year-old girl.

The appeals panel found the judge put the best interest of the child first.

Via Newsday.

So, wait. Married couple has a kid then another. Couple gets divorced. Man pays child support, then finds out that one of the children isn’t his. He wants his child support reduced, and they rule against him? Really? I would think that the ex-wife committed a crime in lying to the ex-husband in the first place, then his acting on that crime would nullify the child support responsibility.

This story is filled with so much wrong. Women should hate it too. Doesn’t this one individual basically make a bunch of women who deserve child support for their children look bad?

I’m quite sure that I don’t have the whole story, but my, that sounds ridiculous. I can’t imagine how screwed up that poor child is going to be as well.

What’s the lesson to learn here?

I would expect that one of the things that lots of divorcees with kids grapple with is relationships with the ex. Speaking from experience, I can say equivocally that this happens… everywhere. You broke up with your ex for a reason, be it infidelity, finances, emotional abuse, or whatever it is… and if you have kids, there is some sort of split relationship, most likely, involving them.

People. People. Let me enlighten you on one irrevocable fact.

You WILL be dealing with your ex for the rest of your life, unless you are in one of the extreme cases where it’s unsafe for you, or your children, to be near the ex. You can’t avoid, ignore, or otherwise shut them out. You may think that there is, but there is not, because the kids are involved, and will be forever.

What does this mean for you, the traumatized, or on the other hand, insufferable other parent?

It means that you will have to get over it. Deal with the other parent. When you have to, converse with the other parent. In fact, consider the other parent, as distasteful as it might be for you or them, part of your family, because when it comes down to it, that is exactly what they are. Not a conventional family in the way that you might like, but a family, nonetheless. Existing children will guarantee this fact. Surely, you will still recall what it is that made you so unhappy with them, fine. You can remember that if you like.

But the key emotion, and the hardest to learn, is this, with all apologies to Don Henely:

Forgiveness.

Even if you don’t love them anymore.

With quite a bit of interest, I read the article Expert Says That Poll Results Show “Crack”In Court System in Divorce360.com today, expecting to see some more disparaging remarks about dads not paying support. I wasn’t shocked. According to the poll, 43% of custodial parents don’t receive a dime of child support.

Sadly, my anecdotal evidence probably bears this out. I meet quite a few dads and moms, with and without “custodial” care of their kids, and probably close to half the single parents that I know with kids get little or no child support at all. However, there is a lot more to this statistic than meets the eye.

The first item that leaps to mind is the thought of “custodial”. By definition the custodial parent is that parent that has the child or children half time or more. By tradition, this means “mother” in this country. Even though the number of fathers that have the custodial tag applied to them is surely on the rise (ask Kevin Federline), still, Mom still rules the roost, and the courts, when it comes to parenting. In fact, I’ve seen a case where a father actually HAD his son living with him full time was still paying child support to his ex - at the same level he was when his son was staying with his ex-wife.

Hopefully that was an extreme case, but somehow, I don’t think so.

The realization, however, that I finally came to over some time is that the statistics are not the complete story, and that these individual stories are the most important facts of all. No stat can give you enough information, for either divorced men or women. Before you jump to conclusions based on the raw facts presented here, think critically about circumstances as well.

Many, many years ago, my father used to take me to the window of a place that I lived to look out on the city below at night. He would gesture at and talk about the seemingly endless number of lights that we saw, flickering on and off and tell me something along the lines of “there are millions of stories in the naked city…you are just one of them.” Years later, I was told that he was referring to a classic radio program from his youth, and I realized exactly the lesson that he was trying to teach.

The world is a very big place, he was saying. All things in context.

I’m still no fan of deadbeat dads or moms.

But my father is a very smart man.

There is no doubt how I feel about deadbeat dads; in fact, I have made that quite clear, and recently, that as a single dad, deadbeat dads make my life more difficult. Even so, as a person that actually pays child support (and more than I’ve been asked, by the way), I admit to a touch of confusion on the subject of punishment for deadbeats.

Don’t be too confused at all. I do believe that men, or now increasingly, women, who don’t pay child support for their children when asked by either their significant other or the legal system, are a low class indeed. Truly, who but the most trifling of society wouldn’t want their children to be taken care of when they aren’t there? I know that I do.

However, I’m torn about the punishment for those neglectful people. In my state, the most popular punishment for failing to pay child support? Revoking their driver’s license.

Now, at first glance this seems ok. After all, driving is a privilege, not a right. Surely this would entice people to pay their child support, so that the state doesn’t have to take up the slack with welfare programs, right?

I say wrong. In this particular case, the punishment doesn’t fit the crime, and I think that it’s easy to see why. A reasonable person can see that the people that most likely to pay their child support are the those that are most able to pay. Therefore, it’s easy to infer that those are least likely to pay their child support are those that are LEAST able to pay, meaning, the poor.

So, you’re a poor person who has been ordered to pay child support. What are your choices?

1. Pay. Unfortunately, you’re poor, and can’t pay. Does this mean get another job in today’s economy?

2. Don’t pay, and lose your driver’s license, which for a lot of people, means either losing their job, or busing or cabbing to work. For many poor, especially in areas without mass transit, this is probably a poor option.

3. Don’t pay, and flee to stay ahead of the legal system, leaving behind at least one poor child without one parent.

There are the options, and that’s exactly why yanking the driver’s license doesn’t work; it leaves an already relatively poor person with an actual incentive to abandon their children. Hence, you get the permanent underclass of a poor child and single parent, and legal scofflaws. Surely that can’t be the intended impact of the law.

It’s a poor policy, especially in our vehicle-centric society.
Let’s look for other options for deadbeats, please. But deadbeat dads still drive me crazy.

Scenario: you are in a bad relationship that you’ve carefully considered and have determined that cannot be saved. Your problem is that you have children that you adore and don’t want to leave. It’s a quandary without a perfect resolution.

Let’s face facts. Long before you accept that you and the soon to be ex are not compatible under any conceivable circumstances, you know deep in your gut that the relationship between the two of you is going nowhere. This is the exact moment that planning should begin. Here’s your template.

Get A Lawyer.

This is the first step, and possibly the most important.  Having a competent attorney can determine the all important issues of alimony, property division, and parenting time.  Attorneys are your advocates in the court that YOU pay; consequently, one of their main jobs is to make you look good.  Not having one is almost undoubtedly something that you will regret.  This is where I personally made my first mistake.  Pay the money and get a lawyer.

Steady Yourself Financially.

Getting a grip on your finances is almost a factor of step 1.  Lawyers cost money, and you need to have it to pay for them.  In addition, all kinds of items are taken into account during a breakup, especially if you have children.  Economics plays its role as well.  Don’t quit your job, don’t stop paying credit card bills, and pay down some loan debt if you can.  You might need that credit later; in fact, the messier your breakup, the more likely you’ll need credit.  If you have shared accounts, you might have a whole new set of problems, but get a grip of the money that you personally earned.

Lose The Bad Habits.

Warren Buffet once said his father told him that you should never do anything in public that you don’t want to read about on the front page of your local newspaper, and by God, the man is right. We’re not talking about habits necessarily as much as things that might embarrass you.  In other words, falling off the barstool in the singles bar trying to pick up your ex-babysitter might not be the best idea.  Try not to do that.  Instead, consider positive activities that would probably be good for you anyway, especially considering the fact that you are soon to be single:

Taking a class with other similarly situated people (meaning single or that share your interests in some way)

Developing a hobby (reading, writing, and exercising are especially good for the brain and body)

Spending time with supportive friends and family is good, since you’ve probably spent a substantial amount of recent time avoiding them.  Reconnect.

Breaking up is hard enough to do; making it harder on yourself than it should be is ridiculous.  Do the above three things first and spare yourself unnecessary suffering down the road.

Today, life gave way to stunning shock for me as Britney Spears managed to somehow completely lose the right and ability to see her children, ages 1 and 2.  Typically this is the kind of story that I could care less about, but for some reason this one hit a chord.  From the AP wire (via Yahoo):

Britney Spears can’t even visit her children now. The troubled pop star may not see 2-year-old Sean Preston and 1-year-old Jayden James who are in the custody of Spears’ ex-husband, Kevin Federline until she complies with a court order, Superior Court Commissioner Scott Gordon ruled.

The order, dated Wednesday, does not spell out what directives Spears defied. A hearing in the matter was scheduled for Oct. 26.

Now, I’m no big fan of Britney Spears (really, I’m not) but I’d sure love to know what she did to warrant that kind of situation.  A male friend who I’ll call Hank long ago told me that the only way in this country for a father to get custody of his children is for the mother to be a

But here’s a shocking admission: I believe that courts have far too much power over private lives anyway.

drug addict.  Hank eventually got custody of his child, but in fact, his child’s mother DID have to be a drug addict for it to happen - it only cost him $50,000 and a declaration of bankruptcy - and sadly nothing that I’ve seen in the last few years would that his declaration was untrue.

But here’s a shocking admission: I believe that courts have far too much power over private lives anyway.  The anarchist in me thinks that hey, we already have enough laws and enough incursions on privacy.  Leave most families alone.

On the other hand, if you are a completely incompetent parent, perhaps you SHOULDN’T be around your kids at all.

But another fact is that I’ve never seen a completely incompetent parent.  Never.  I’m sure that they exist; I just haven’t met one that set the parental bar that low.  Perhaps that’s a factor of the people that I know, but I can’t be certain.  I know some pretty odd people.

So, in the end,  I feel kind of bad for Ms. Federline-Spears; I feel badly for her kids, and I feel badly about the system in general.  The legal system: in matters considering your children, avoid it like some parents avoid giving their children vaccinations.