EVERYTHING can be tolerable until the children are taken from you. I cannot begin to describe the awful, eviscerating pain of being handed a note, sanctioned by your (still) wife with whom you made these little things and felt them grow and kick and tumble and turn. You felt intense manly pride and profound love for them before they were even born. You changed them, taught them to talk, read and add, wrestled and played with them, walked them to school, made tea with them, bathed and dressed them, put them to bed, cuddled and lay with them in your arms and sang them to sleep, felt them and smelt them around you at all times, alert even in sleep to the slightest shift in their breathing. A note that will
allow you
access to these things who are the best of you.
Allow, mark you,
reasonable!!
access?!?!! to those whom two weeks ago you couldn’t wait to walk in the door at home.
What have you done? Why are you being punished (for that’s how it appears)? How can she be allowed to dictate what I can or can’t do with regard to my children? When did she assume control? Why do I have no authority any more? What’s going on? She wants to leave. OK, there’s nothing I can do about that. But what’s that got to do with the kids and me? Were I to issue her a similar note, what would happen? Why are men treated as criminals? Why is the person who has taken the children, or been left with them, suddenly given vast emotional, legal and financial power over the other party? (And I’m being restrained, because it is nearly always the woman, but we’re not meant to say that for fear of being labelled misogynist.) Yes, yes; I know in theory that until certain procedural moves have occurred, one has equal dibs, but in practice you don’t because they’ve gone.
The children have immediately become the weapon and the shield. The weapon: “Do as I say or you won’t see the children.” The shield: “Don’t do that to me or you won’t see the children. Behave well, or I’ll report it.
“Don’t telephone, it’s harassment. I don’t care you that you want to say goodnight. I don’t want you to and neither do the children. Stop now or I’ll call the police.
“Don’t write to them. It upsets them. They think it’s weird. You look a mess. It’s not my fault you’re not sleeping. Obviously you’re incapable of looking after them.
“No, you can’t take them. I know we agreed, but I’m not having them see you like this. Stop pleading, it’s pathetic. Go, or I’ll call the police.”
And so you turn from your own door. Dismissed peremptorily, like a penitent tramp. Inside, inches away, is your family, the key to the door is still in your pocket. It still fits. Your key, your house, your family.
That night you must see them. You must touch and smell them. You drive, fear rising to hysterical levels, near the house. Not too near; she’ll see or hear. You walk to the door. Utter panic rising. Fear of this girl you loved beyond reason. Everything’s weird. Disconnected. Unreal beyond imagination.
There’s the door. In front of it you pause. You raise your hand. You feel like a madman, but you only want to say goodnight to your babies. You lift the knocker and listen hard. Inside, inches away, you hear them laughing. Your family. That you made. You worked for everything they’re sitting on, sleeping in, eating. They’re telling some story or joke that you can’t hear. A joke that two weeks ago you’d have been laughing at too. They’re inside. You’re outside — why? Too scared, you gently lower the knocker and retreat to the car. You park near the house and turn off the lights and the engine.You sit and wait till all the bedroom lights go out. As each one goes you whisper “Goodnight” like a madman. After the last light has gone out you sit and sob, hoping that no one sees you, waiting till you’re able to drive again.
Why is that allowed to happen? This disgusting law that imposes that fear and panic on people must be destroyed. In your loss and grief, how is it supportable? Why should it be so? Who imposes this law and how dare they? Some readers will know better than I the incidence of serious illness in men arising from divorce. It is far higher than in women. Why is this? Everyone knows the effect of divorce in terms of employment and homelessness. Again, far greater for men than for women. Why? Everyone knows the relationship between alcoholism and divorce, again greater for men. Why? Don’t you think this is serious enough to insist on change? Count the economic and social cost if that means more to you than the human, but when you achieve a negative sum, ask “Why?” What more is required to make men the same in the eyes of the law as they are in the eyes of their children? To avoid all the foregoing is relatively simple. Men must be accorded equal status under the law. Currently they are not, and they must be. No bromides or platitudes should be acceptable from now on.
The first way to achieve this is to give men the same status as parent upon separation. There must be an immediate presumption, as there has been in Denmark since January 2002, that the children, where possible, will live with the father 50 per cent of the time; if this is impossible, a mutually acceptable arrangement must be arrived at by both parties. Isn’t that civilised? There is a cultural and, thus, legal bias that men shouldn’t raise their children if they’re toddlers. Why not? Who looked after them when Mum was at work or otherwise out? Who changed their nappies or did the bottles? What period of time do some people live in? And if a man doesn’t know how to do it initially, as it is for most first-time mothers, it is easily learnt.
So what does contact really mean? The implication of any order determining the father’s allotted time with his children is that he was always of secondary importance within the household. Indeed, this would appear to be the unspoken assumption underpinning the whole farrago. The weasel words “gender neutral” and the oft-stated pieties of equality occur so often that you could be forgiven for thinking that, if we say them often enough, we could convince ourselves we are administering a fair system. But these words, like all the other alibi utterances such as reasonable contact, will never disguise the underlying reality of painful discriminatory practice.
Reasonable contact is an oxymoron. The fact that as a father you are forbidden from seeing your children except (like a visit to the dentist) at state-appointed moments is by definition unreasonable. The fact that you must visit your family as opposed to live with them is unreasonable. I suppose contact as an idea works. One does become like a visitor from Mars, infrequent and odd, making contact with strangers in an alien landscape with all the concomitant emotions of excitement, fear, anticipation, suspicion and dislocation. But these are hardly the ideal emotions involved in being with your children, or they with you. In the end there is emptiness, loneliness and an overwhelming sense of failure and loss. This isn’t a dad with his kids; this is an awkward visiting uncle in false, fleeting situations of amity.
