Single Dads

Culture is an excellent propagator of divorces as well. Let’s prove that in today’s lesson.

Many years ago, I knew a woman that I’ll call Jill. Jill was an attractive woman, more intelligent than most, who was at heart, a nice and relatively well meaning person with an interesting personality and a decent person. She was a good cook, a loyal individual, and a snappy dresser. In short, she was a great catch for just about anyone.

Unfortunately, she had one major flaw.

I’ll call it “The Cosmo Factor”.

Everything that she knew about men she seemed to cull from the pages of women’s magazines. Cosmopolitan, Elle, and others were a continual staple of her reading diet. If she wanted to know how to impress a man? Cosmo had an article with the goods. Why did men leave their girlfriends? The answer was in Allure. Any and all answers to all of the burning questions surrounding the classic, awesome, and continual Battle Of The Sexes could be found in a pop culture magazine geared towards women. Each magazine contained to the gospel to her. None of her male friends had the courage to tell her how wrong those periodicals were, though… much to our detriment.

Eventually, we drifted apart.

Enter 2007. To my horror, I read an Internet article titled 6 Sneaky Ways to a Better-Looking Partner , and God help me, the first person that I thought of was her. Here’s the intro, via Yahoo.

Pride may be one of the Seven Deadly Sins, but your lover’s lack of pride in how he looks can be even deadlier - to your love life, that is.

Sure, dedication, intelligence, and a sense of humor are what really stir the chemistry between you, but that doesn’t mean you don’t want your partner to feel like they’re on top of their game, looks-wise.

After all, a confident partner is a sexually motivated partner, and sometimes an extra dose of sensuality is all a relationship needs to go to the next level. But beware: Goosing your loved one into taking better care of himself can be dicey territory, and even the most polite suggestion that “maybe you need to lose a few pounds” can lead to somebody sleeping on the couch for a week.

As I read this, I stifled a scream. Please, not the return of women again trying to change their men. Aren’t divorce rates high enough in this country and others? Isn’t the level of resentment, among men and women, high enough, finally? Doesn’t anyone believe that men can read?

People, people. If you’re getting involved, and the thing that you want to do is CHANGE your partner, I can promise you you’re not doing it right.

And guys, before you start thinking that you are all clever, “Maxim” is a man’s answer to Cosmo.  Both magazines give false hope to clueless individuals.  I could have called this the “Maxim Factor”quite easily.

So, for this article, I award this comment on the article 6 Sneaky Ways to a Better-Looking Partner:

You have failed.

At no time in recent memory, has an article failed more than this one.

Please, never do this again.

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.

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.

I find it funny how a rut can begin and how quickly familiarity can breed contempt.  Even a person that spends time on the ever-changing Internet (like myself) is not immune from the boredom that everyday life can bring.  So, I have found myself considering that topic, and how I might teach my daughter how to avoid the tedium the everyday world can bring.  As is not particularly unusual, I caught myself learning something new as well.

Perhaps you might have perceived that I’m quite the reader.  Exercise for the brain is really what opening up a book and reading really is.  Not to say, all books are particularly enjoyable - they aren’t.  Some are awful, at least by my estimation.

But not all are.  On occasion, a good book will remind you of something that you can use everyday; there’s a lesson there that can make you a better person, parent, and teacher.  And today, I remembered this some lines from this poem “If” by Rudyard Kipling:

“If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools”

…and so on.

There’s a lesson to be learned here, that I believe is similar to a quote that Joy Behar attributes to Rush Limbaugh in the worthwhile book Got What It Takes? Successful People Reveal How They Made It To The Topby Bill Boggs.  That is, be bold.  BE BOLD.  Mostly I can get behind that theory.  Very few people accomplish things of note without some measure of risk and hard work. 

For my daughter and myself, I will reinterpret that slightly. 

The real lesson is this: in whatever you decide to do, sure, be bold, but don’t let that be an excuse to be stupid.

Yes, I think that’s a good plan for us all.

What bold thing have you done today for your children or yourself?  Perhaps today, more than any day, is the perfect moment to try something radically different.

There was a pretty funny post over at yoga72179 titled Are You A Bitter Baby’s Mama or A Wise Single Mom? Take This Quiz And Find Out.  Naturally, the post was aimed at single moms, but as a single dad, the temptation to read this post was too strong to ignore.  Oh, and what wisdom was posted therein!  An excerpt:

If you’re a single mom who’s been holding it down alone or simply dealing with a hard-to-take ex, it’s easy to get caught up in tit-for-tat dynamics. But theres a price we pay when we allow bitterness to seep in and engage in no-holds-barred power struggles. Even if the anger is justified and we believe the other person had it coming. What begins to happen is that same bitterness spirals into the other facets of our lives causing a domino effect. And sooner than you know it, it starts to dominate your thoughts, consume your conversations and pollute your spirit.

How true, how true.  I was talking just the other day to a person similarly situated as I, as a single parent trying to get by.  Fortunately, I’m in a position where my day job is in a skill type position, and I have the ability to work more doing part-time work and freelancing.  For many, this isn’t the case, and this person’s situation with their child isn’t so great at all.  But an interesting thing that they said is that it “simply takes too much effort” to be a bitter parent - and they’re right.  Being a bitter parent is a net loss.  It comes out to family, friends,

Being a bitter parent is a net loss.

acquaintances, the legal system (which is so pleasant to deal with already) and others.  It steals your spirit, when spirit is one of the qualities that you need the most when you are a single parent.

High stress due to infighting with the ex over child-related issues?  Exercise.

Can’t sleep because you’re always thinking about the next move?  Read.

Don’t want to talk to the ex?  Fine, but don’t avoid the issue.  Your kids are at stake.

Being positive is the best, and most effective, form of therapy.  Bitter parents raise bitter kids, which the exact opposite of the result you should be trying to achieve.  Remember that.

On occasion, and sadly, not often enough, I derive enormous amounts of pleasure from snippets that I read on the Internet.  Most articles that you read about kids consist of the doom and gloom about teenagers - how kids are on drugs, or teens are robbing liquor stores and putting it on YouTube, or students are shooting up high schools and colleges, or kids are apathetic general.  You know the familar refrain.

This story is most definitely not about any of those topics.

This is a story about the best of our kids.

The Grade 9 student arrived for the first day of school last Wednesday and was set upon by a group of six to 10 older students who mocked him, called him a homosexual for wearing pink and threatened to beat him up.

The next day, Grade 12 students David Shepherd and Travis Price decided something had to be done about bullying.

“It’s my last year. I’ve stood around too long and I wanted to do something,” said David.

They used the Internet to encourage people to wear pink and bought 75 pink tank tops for male students to wear. They handed out the shirts in the lobby before class last Friday — even the bullied student had one.

Wait.  There’s more.

“The bullies got angry,” said Travis. “One guy was throwing chairs (in the cafeteria). We’re glad we got the response we wanted.”

David said one of the bullies angrily asked him whether he knew pink on a male was a symbol of homosexuality.

He told the bully that didn’t matter to him and shouldn’t to anyone.

This bit of good news comes via Fark from the Chronicle Herald - in Nova Scotia.  The only beef that I have with this is that it didn’t occur in the United States, so I could wave an American flag as I write.

Life imitates John Hughes.  Can real life have mid-80’s new wave music playing in the background?

Today’s Hope For Humanity Award is hereby given to high school students David Shepherd and Travis Price.  The world can learn a lot from you two kids.  I applaud.

I originally completed this yesterday, but it got enough of positive response that I thought that it might be a good idea to post it here.

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Yesterday was the anniversary of 9-11, which some Americans consider to be the most significant event in their lives .

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Six years after the September 11 attacks on the United States, most Americans view the plane hijackings that killed around 3,000 people as the most significant historical event of their lives, according to a poll released Monday.

Eighty-one percent of those surveyed said they see the attacks as the most significant historical even of their lifetimes, with more people on the east coast — 90 percent — choosing this view compared to 75 percent on the west coast.

The Zogby International telephone poll surveyed 938 people between September 6 and 9 and has a three-percentage point margin of error.

Thank Yahoo.

First, I’d like to say that 9-11 is most certainly NOT the most significant event of my life.  Number 1: Birth of my daughter.  Number 2:  Meeting my significant other.  3.  Birth of my nieces.  So.  To me, 9-11 is significant, it just pales in comparison to those events.

What I find notable about 9-11, however, is what events have happened since.  Here’s my list.
- One completely justifiable war (against the Taliban)
- One completely un-justifiable war (against Iraq)
- The wasting of an enormous amount of pro-American sentiment
- The pillaging of Bill of Rights and the Constitution
- The utter decimation of the health care system
- Virtual destruction of the public school system nationwide
- The creation of the Homeland Security Agency

When I think about how much money has been spent on the war on Iraq, I think of how the Taliban could have been completely wiped off the face of the planet, or how Osama could have been found, or how schools could have been improved, or how a national health care system could have been created.

The saddest thing about 9-11 is what has occurred since then.  We have wasted a lot of time, money, and lives.  9-11 is one of America’s greatest catastrophes… and the aftermath is one of our greatest disasters.  We should be ashamed.